An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

Conference on Indigenous Peoples and Their Land in Geneva, Switzerland,
in September 1981. At this meeting was also a Black American named Bob
Brown, who can be seen in a photograph with others, raising their hands in
solidarity. 68 He was a member of the Congress of Racial Equality, a director
of the Midwest office of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,
and a cofounder of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. Brown
has remained active in Pan-African and other struggles worldwide.
So, what would a person who so strongly identified with a Pan-
Africanist group, founded by Kwame Ture, be doing at a meeting among
“Indigenous” peoples? Given his longtime activism for oppressed people,
his affiliations with Kwame Ture and coalition-building with Fred Hampton
in Chicago, it is not surprising. It was not just that he wanted to show
solidarity with Native peoples, though that was part of it. He considered
himself an Indigenous African, and Africa as his true homeland, not the US.
Although the AAPRP’s platform was intended for people of African
descent, it actively created solidarity with other groups, including
Indigenous peoples in the United States. People like Vernon Bellecourt
returned the favor.
In May 1986, Vernon Bellecourt and Larry Anderson (Diné) were
touring the Midwest and eastern United States, appealing to Black
Americans to show support for the US government’s repeal of the Navajo
and Hopi Relocation Act. Designed to clear land for companies to mine Big
Mountain in Arizona, the act had been passed in 1974. Bellecourt and
Anderson were also seeking support of the bill so that Ronald Reagan
would not be able to veto Senate Bill S1396, the White Earth Reservation
Land Settlement Act of 1985, which sought both compensation and the
return of illegally taken land to the White Earth Anishinaabe. 69 Bellecourt,
committed to Black and Indigenous solidarity, remarked, “American-
Indians were being cheated, robbed and removed from their lands as
African-Americans were cheated and robbed of their 40-acres-and-a-mule
agreement with the government after the civil war.” He also demonstrated
his knowledge of ongoing injustices in South Africa, remarking that the
plan to remove Native people from Big Mountain “is every bit as
treacherous as the forced removal of the Black majority population in South
Africa from the best lands into the Bantustans.” 70
In response to his rhetorical act of solidarity, Oliver Reginald Kaizana
Tambo—then president of the African National Congress, operating in exile