An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

In the following scene in the documentary, you see pictures from the
Wounded Knee Massacre, which occurred in December 1890, and remains
one of the largest massacres in US history. As you see dead Indigenous
bodies, you can hear Samuel L. Jackson narrate, “It reveals the weakness,
even the panic, of the adversary.”
This sequence of scenes is both disturbing and illuminating. It reveals
the erasure of Native people in the contemporary sense, as well as the fear
that Black people have of their demise—they know what white people have
done and can do. Imagining Black death is cruel indeed, but seeing
Indigenous death with no illustration of people who fought against settler
encroachment is bone-chilling. It perpetuates the settler nation-states’ myth
constructed as a fact, of Indigenous disappearance.
Native people did not disappear. The Native disappearance myth is as
old as the founding of the country. Just as racism is embedded into the
fabric of society, so, too, is Indigenous disappearance. 61 Native people have
fought and continue to fight. Whether it is the Shawnee warrior trying to
carve out land for Indigenous peoples, or the water protectors at Standing
Rock trying to halt the building of the Dakota Access Pipeline, or
Indigenous rappers producing rhymes to assert their presence, Native
people are not disappearing, and will exist in the aftermath of settler
colonialism and white supremacy.
These scenes demonstrate a tension between Black liberation and
Indigenous dispossession. They elucidate how the settler state constructed
the parallel but different treatment of Black and Indigenous peoples and
continues to construct it today, and also how Blacks construct an idea of
liberation.
REMIX AND REFLECTION ON BALDWIN
As you can see, I was critical not just of Baldwin but also of Peck and the
imagery he used. However, I want to explain my new reluctance to be so
critical. First, I think that there are some Native people that used my own
work to readily engage in antiblackness. It’s a hard thing to prove, but the
fact that some were so easily in agreement (even excited?) about my
criticism of a Black civil rights legend and literary giant made me pause. Is
it because Native people want some clout? It’s hard to tell. However, I want
to give Baldwin more context and engage in some of his work as it relates