An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

and what a civilization that purported to promote democracy could learn
from Indians. Eastman began with a general geographic and physical
description of the American Indian. He then described the virtues of
American Indian political philosophy and institutions. After explaining the
structure of tribes and clans and the roles of chiefs, he switched gears,
telling the world that “American historians have constantly fallen into error
by reason of their ignorance of our democratic system.” Because of their
belief in a superior white civilization, Eastman reasoned, historians failed to
learn from a true “government of the people, one of personal liberty,” one
that gave “equal rights to all its members.” 51 For Eastman, a true
democracy did not exist only in political terms, but also in terms of
economics. He began the “Economic” section of his paper by pointing out
the contradictions of the settler nation-state: “It appears that not freedom or
democracy or spiritual development, but material progress alone, is the
evidence of ‘civilization.’” However, the “American Indian failed to meet
this test,” Eastman wrote, “being convinced that accumulation of property
breeds dishonesty and greed.” The American Indian “was unwilling to pay
the price of civilization.” 52
As with the life paths of Du Bois and Eastman, at first glance their
essays appear to have little in common. Du Bois’s subject experienced
slavery and exclusion through social and political law. Eastman’s subject
suffered dispossession of resources and culture because of warfare and
white greed for land. Beneath the explicit content of their essays, however,
lies an important, previously unnoted link: their similar belief in the virtues
of “the souls of Black folk” and “the soul of the Indian.” As Kiara Vigil
notes, “Eastman’s argument centered on an American contradiction, the
same dilemma that drove Du Bois: How could Indian people participate in a
democracy that was itself so undemocratic with particular regards to
them?” 53 In spite of slavery and colonialism, they believed their people
could usher in a new, democratic society, one based upon social, political,
and economic inclusion, not white supremacy.
Du Bois located the roots of Black disenfranchisement not with the
passing of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Rather, he began in 1890—the year
of the US cavalry’s slaughter of Dakotas, mostly women and children, at
Wounded Knee. If 1890 marked the beginning processes of Jim Crow
segregation, for American Indians it marked an end to using war as a means
for securing sovereignty. It also required a new generation of Native women