An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

nationalist project such as the United States. We should be more visionary
than that. However, US Indigenous peoples should also help think through
the antiblackness that exists in their community and how they might, as
Canadian Indigenous (Mississauga Nishnaabeg) writer and musician
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson suggests, make room for Indigenous people
on their land.
When I have traveled the country to discuss my research, I often get two
versions of a comment or question about identity. First, a person of Black
American ancestry might share that they have Cherokee blood in them,
maybe Blackfeet. Or, someone, usually a young person, will ask me how I
deal with being both Black and Indigenous. I tell them that, for me, it
wasn’t a contradiction being Black and Indigenous. While others questioned
me, my family didn’t question or police my identity.
I did experience an instance of being questioned by others—or identity
policing—when I was a graduate student, attending an academic
conference. I was at the hotel lobby, recognized a peer from my own
graduate institution, and saw that they were with a group of other Native
people. I’m sure I gave everyone some dap (exchanged a fist pound
greeting), and then one of the people, from a Southwestern US tribal nation,
asked, “Why are you wearing those earrings?” I replied, “’Cause I like
them.” They responded, “Where did you get them?” “From a powwow,” I
snapped back, after quickly concluding that they wondered why a Black
person had adorned themselves with “Native” earrings. This antiblack
exchange made me angry, if not insecure.
Still, I never felt comfortable in my intellectual knowledge of Black and
Indigenous relations until graduate school, because it was there that I was
able to delve into the research and really read. I carved out time to think
about my identity and how I wanted to help change the intellectual game of
how we approach Afro-Indigenous history. Graduate school offered me five
years to reflect on myself and learn how to be me—my full Afro-
Indigenous self.
My quest in this book is to recover histories, reorient our understanding
of historical events and peoples, and project what a present and future idea
of Black and Indigenous solidarity might look like. We need a new way of
talkin’ about these relationships.
In documenting encounters between Black and Indigenous peoples, I
have focused the majority of my examples in this book in unexpected ways