Opinion | As Juneteenth Goes National, We Must Preserve the Local

Two thousand-plus miles west of Massachusetts, Montanans will also observe a refashioned Juneteenth holiday this year. Perhaps like Nantucket and the Massachusetts Cape and Islands, Montana is largely imagined by the rest of the country as a white place (with only a glancing acknowledgment of the significant Indigenous populations and histories there). But Montana also has a long and complex Black history, which has only recently been reconstructed through a multimedia project of the Montana Historical Society.

A handful of Black fur traders crossed into the Rocky Mountain West in the mid-19th century, but most African Americans migrated to Montana after the Civil War. In the 1870s and 1880s, Buffalo Soldiers of the Ninth and 10th Cavalry Regiments and the 24th and 25th Infantry Regiments moved west to man forts. Black women sometimes accompanied their soldiering husbands and at other times arrived with white officers or white families to work as domestics. As the Black population grew in Montana in the late 19th century and early 20th century, tens of thousands of people formed communities in or near cities such as Havre, Great Falls, Butte and Helena. There they followed the demonstrated pattern of African American priorities, erecting schools and churches and developing practices of mutual aid. Some of these Black newcomers married into Indigenous families, navigating dual and triple allegiances. As the historian Anthony Wood has detailed in his 2021 book “Black Montana,” African American residents in the city of Butte celebrated Emancipation Day with a pilgrimage by train into the snow-peaked mountains, where they enjoyed picnics, fun and frivolities.

In the Great Plains states of Nebraska, Kansas, South Dakota and Wyoming, Black residents gathered to observe Emancipation Day, too. These were people who had moved from the cotton-belt and rice-field South to form rural settlements on acreage opened through the U.S. Homestead Act of 1862 (a law that distributed ill-gotten Native lands). As shown in a research project led by Richard Edwards at the University of Nebraska Center for Great Plains Studies, African Americans in the region ritualized emancipation as a communal act of remembrance.

Celebrations across the Great Plains and in Montana most likely commemorated not the well-known Galveston, Texas, moment, or even the British West Indies moment, but instead a closer, regional history: August of 1865, later formalized in the Treaty of 1866, when African-descended people owned by Native Americans of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation in nearby Indian Territory (present-day eastern Oklahoma) were freed from bondage.

In 2023, for the second year in a row, the Montana Historical Society, in partnership with the Holter Museum of Art and the Myrna Loy theater, will host a free Juneteenth festival, drawing on a local history of diversity and perseverance. Based in Helena, these activities include a trolley ride (reminiscent of those Butte train rides more than a century ago), a tour of Black historic sites, a documentary film about an 1897 cross-country journey by Black soldiers of the 25th Infantry to test whether bikes could replace horses, a dance, food and a teenage art workshop.