An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

affirmation of Black folks’ humanity, our contributions to this society, and
our resilience in the face of deadly oppression.” 9 They were also concerned
with dealing with the invisible, vulnerable population of Black queer, trans,
and non-conforming folks. They wanted to make all Black lives matter. 10
BLM is a decentralized movement that continues to be involved in a variety
of tactics and struggles, from Black immigrant rights and prison abolition to
strategic forms of getting Black people to vote. They desire to bring light to
the invisibility of what Black public intellectual Marc Lamont Hill calls
“nobodies.” 11
The phrase “Black Lives Matter” has a clear herstory and ideological
foundation. There is a genealogy. Similarly, Native Americans began to use
the phrases “Native Lives Matter” to highlight that, they, too, were
murdered by the police and continued to suffer all sorts of violence related
not just to racism but the ongoing forms of dispossession they experience
every day. Indeed, Native Americans have died disproportionately more
from police violence than any other group. According to a CNN review of
CDC data, between 1999 and 2015, for every 1 million people, an average
2.9 Native people died as a result of a “legal intervention,” and the majority
of those deaths were police shootings; Black Americans during that period
were killed at a rate of 2.6 people per million, which means the mortality
rate was 12 percent higher for Native people than for Black folks. 12 I do not
highlight this to create division between Black and Indigenous peoples, and
it should be obvious at this point that is not my intention. However, we have
to come to terms with the fact that Native Americans cannot be forgotten
when it comes to police brutality. Still, it is difficult to trace the genealogy
of Native Lives Matter, and it is difficult to distinguish between the ways
this sociolinguistic and social media construction is useful and the ways it
merely coopts the movement that inspired its name. 13 If Black Lives Matter
was created by queer Black women to assert the humanity of Black people
in a country where their lives don’t actually matter, is it cool that non-Black
people apply it to their own movement? It’s just like the hashtag
#SayHerName, created by Black women in response to the murder of Black
women, in particular the tragedy of Sandra Bland’s death. 14 Should, for
instance, Indigenous or Latinx women use it? I will leave the question
there, but if cultural appropriation has taught us anything, it is that as soon
as you take something out of its original context, it becomes something
different, and might even become a caricature.