An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

peoples. Native people were very much aware about the necessities of
diplomacy for survival, even if, in retrospect, it did not work well for them.
Obadele continues, “[Indians] would have been suspicious of their
ingratiating manner, but they could not have had any basis for suspicions
since in all their experience they had never met any men like those in basic
dishonesty.” This scenario paints Indigenous people as victims, and ignores
actual history of Native agency in responding to the colonial demands of
Europeans. He then moves into a specific analysis of the Cherokee Nation’s
relationship with the US government, which I will quote at length:
Almost contemporaneous with the smiling and the smoking of the
peace pipes, came elaborate, wordy documents for the Indians to sign,
drafted by the whites to define the conditions under which the two
peoples would occupy the Cherokee land. That such documents were
sought by the whites and made necessary for the joint occupation of
the land by the whites should have alerted the Indians to the inherent
dishonesty of the newcomers. But only after the signing of 18 such
documents, more properly, “treaties,” that the Cherokee began to
understand the nature of the trouble they were in for. 28
This ignores the political astuteness of Cherokee people (and other
southeastern tribal nations) in terms of negotiating land rights. 29 While they
found themselves in a position of swiftly changing power dynamics, they
were not completely without agency. In fact, the Cherokee were arguably
one of the most astute tribal groups. Native people knew what were in those
documents, and did their best to thwart Euro-American expansion; some
community members were divided about the negotiation. Regardless, this
rhetoric presents Native people as without agency, the implication being
that if Blacks did not organize and demand that the United States give them
land in the South, the same thing could happen to them.
Obadele demanded that the US pay Black Americans $400 billion, what
he considered “chump change.” In addition to the financial settlement, he
also demanded “the transfer of five states to our sovereignty”: Alabama,
Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. 30 While this never
happened, it is important to engage in the historical art of speculation so
that we can determine who they might have bumped up against. Surely, the
Catawba, Creek, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Chicora, Choctaw, and other tribes