An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

the land, isn’t four hundred years enough? At least three wars? The
American soil is full of the corpses of my ancestors. Why is my freedom or
my citizenship, or my right to live there, how is it conceivably a question
now?” Baldwin asked. While he can be critiqued for erasing, or not
including, Native claims to land, what do we do with his comment about
American soil having the corpses of his ancestors? We should sit with this
question, and reflect deeply on it. It is not just a claim to land because one’s
ancestors worked it, and therefore they should own a piece of the American
Dream. I would argue that Baldwin, and others as well, engaged in
something deeper. If the history and effects of enslavement are real, then
those bones could never really rest. Their spirits may continue to wander
because this was not their home, even as they attempted to make home as
best as they could. Having to engage in this sense of loss is important.
In addition, Baldwin also commented on the lack of history that Black
children came to understand as their own. “When I was growing up, I was
taught in American history books, that Africa had no history, and neither
did I. That I was a savage about whom the less said, the better, who had
been saved by Europe and brought to America. And, of course, I believed it.
I didn’t have much choice.” Baldwin was not the first person to make such
an observation, but his point remains: it’s difficult to construct a sense of
place outside of antiblackness when you don’t know your own history.
Finally, Baldwin commented on the deep significance African Americans
drew from decolonization during the postwar era: “This gave an American
Negro for the first time a sense of himself beyond the savage or a clown.”
For Baldwin, focusing on Black belonging and Native genocide was a way
to analyze the importance of coming to terms with the problems of white
supremacy—the root cause of the Black situation and why they could not
obtain the American Dream, a dream premised on Black inequality.
Baldwin had a particular way of writing about Black people that served
as a mirror for white Americans, illustrating how they think about
themselves. One of Baldwin’s most important nonfiction works was Notes
of a Native Son (1955), his first collection of essays, the majority of which
he wrote living in Paris. Let’s first unpack his title. The use of “native” in
the title is not to suggest that he is an Indigenous person in the United
States. However, within the white-constructed image of Black people in US
society, it suggests that he and other Black people are a creation of white
America. That is, their ancestors did not desire to come to the US, but