An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

there is much more beyond that particular history. Others might mention the
Buffalo Soldiers; yes, that did happen. 4 But again, there are histories
beyond the nineteenth century.
The second myth is that there are very few reasons to compare Black and
Indigenous peoples’ experiences in the United States. The saying goes
something like this: Blacks fight for civil rights and natives struggle for
tribal sovereignty, nothing more, nothing less. For instance, in the late
Patrick Wolfe’s book Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race
(2016), the Australian anthropologist and ethnographer traces how white
settlers reproduced different forms of colonialism and hierarchies in settler
societies such as Australia and the United States. He sees the African
(American) and the Indigenous experience in the United States as
inherently different. Wolfe wrote, “A relationship premised on the
exploitation of enslaved labour requires the continual reproduction of its
human providers. By contrast, a relationship premised on the evacuation of
Native peoples’ territory requires that the peoples who originally occupied
it should never be allowed back.” 5 According to this logic, Black
Americans were exploited for their labor and Indigenous people were
exploited for their land, and these two distinctions define their unique
political struggles. As a result, there is no need to compare their
experiences. By extension, one might surmise from this that there is no
need to find alliances in the fight for social justice to end antiblackness and
Indigenous erasure. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Finally, I hope to unpack that, for people like me, there is little
representation with respect to Black and Indigenous peoples. We often have
to choose between one identity or the other, depending on the circumstance.
That is unfair, even tragic. Our histories are important, and deserve to be
told, in a parallel and systematic way. The Standing Rock Sioux resistance
against the Dakota Access Pipeline, the Black Lives Matter Movement, the
poisoned water in Flint and water shutoffs in Detroit, and the murders of
Breonna Taylor and George Floyd have created a renewed sense of urgency
to understand how these different histories and peoples have related to each
other, and how they will continue to relate in the future. These movements
did not emerge out of nowhere, which suggests that there is a longer history
of solidarity that I hope to recover.