An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

with hardly any people of color will ask an activist or scholar of color to
teach them how to be antiracist. They might pay you, but they don’t want
the truth. Anti-racism is not something that can be taught once; it requires a
sustained relationship and a dedication to systematically ending racism.
For Deloria, the discourse of civil rights was a road to nowhere, and
designed to make white liberals feel good. He realized that the state did not
want Black self-determination, writing:
Civil rights as a movement for legal equality ended when the blacks
dug beneath the equality of fictions which white liberals had used to
justify their great crusade. Black power, as a communications
phenomenon, was a godsend to other groups. It clarified the
intellectual concepts which had kept Indians and Mexicans confused
and allowed the concept of self-determination suddenly to become
valid. 12
Deloria understood the power of Black rhetoric for others. He believed
that Stokely Carmichael’s declaration of Black Power made more sense to
Indigenous peoples because it was based upon the language of power and
sovereignty. Deloria advocated for Black folks to find a home. “To survive,
blacks must have a homeland where they can withdraw, drop the façade of
integration, and be themselves,” he wrote. 13 Finally, Deloria left open the
possibility of Black and Indigenous solidarity and, perhaps, even a shared
space: “Hopefully black militancy will return to nationalist philosophies
which relate to the ongoing conception of the tribe as a nation extending in
time and occupying space. If such is possible within the black community,
it may be possible to bring the problems of minority groups into a more
realistic focus and possible solution in the years ahead.” 14 I understand
Deloria to being open to forming a new society, where Black and
Indigenous peoples share a common space, where we all live and work
together—imagining the aftermath of ongoing dispossession. 15
Black and Indigenous people also participated in each other’s struggles
for liberation. They showed up to each other’s protests, including the
takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1972 and the occupation of
Wounded Knee in 1973. In 1972, while in Washington, DC, Pan-Africanist
Stokely Carmichael showed up during the third day of the takeover of the
Bureau of Indian Affairs, in which Native activists stormed the office, took