An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

“Indian,” and some Native people on the rez do, Indigenous artists,
intellectuals, and millennials and Generation Zers are less likely to use it. In
this way, the use of the term “NdN” is a reclaiming of sorts, semantically
inverting the meaning of a term to something that Indigenous millennials
and Generation Zers identify with. So, my non-NdN peers, outside of a
context in which they are quoting something, don’t get used to using it
without expecting some form of critique.
Before defining NdN popular culture, I want to define popular culture.
Popular culture is the culture created by marginalized groups. They make
meaning of and produce ideas about their everyday lives through popular
cultural mediums such as music, visual art, and other forms of artistic,
humanist expression. Although everyday people produce popular culture, it
is not divorced from the larger structures of oppression and systems of
power that subjugate them. 9 Popular culture for Indigenous people is
produced within settler capitalist society. Therefore, whatever they produce
has to be understood in that real-world context. Native people produce
popular culture out of their experience and relationship to the larger white
settler population, and within a society that values Black popular culture for
consumption but not Black lives.
So, what is NdN popular culture? It is the use and remix of Indigenous
cultures and languages, often blending with other cultures, especially Black
American culture and language, and making it one’s own. These remixes
show up in the form of Indigenous aesthetics and art, writing, social media
and memes, and other cultural expressions that attempt to challenge,
critique, and disrupt settler ideas of how Indigenous peoples are supposed
to act, think, and be in the world.
NdN popular culture is not the idea that some have in their head as to
how Indigenous people are supposed to be in the white imagination. It
consists of Indigenous people asserting their presence in the world in
recognizable and subtle ways. NdN popular culture is similarly not just a
response to whiteness. Michael Eric Dyson’s thoughts on Black culture
reflect a phenomenon parallel to NdN popular culture. As Dyson notes in
his book Reflecting Black,
Black culture is not simply formed in the response to forces of
oppression. Its purposes do not easily reduce to resisting racism.
Although black cultural creativity and agency are profoundly