An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

Native people’s use of tropes, slogans, and sayings taken from Black
protest language is not new. For instance, we didn’t see the emergence of
“Red Power” until after Stokely Carmichael proclaimed “Black Power.” We
saw Native men and women use the Black Power fist as a signal of
solidarity, and that they had power. To be clear, there was nothing wrong
with adopting slogans and modes of protest. Many young Native people felt
empowered by the more radical elements of the Black Freedom Movement.
As I demonstrated in the previous chapters, they often worked together. The
American Indian Movement was founded in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in
order to stop police violence. The Red Power movement has its ideological
roots in Black Power and further developed with the Native people’s
protest, for the purposes of asserting their sovereignty. In fact, the use of
Red Power in this context is not at all radical—and that includes the call for
the US government to honor the treaties. Native people wanted the US to
simply do what it said it was going to do.
Native Lives Matter is rooted in the ideological genealogy of Black
Power language, Red Power protest, and an assertion of Native sovereignty.
I would further define it as an attempt to sociolinguistically construct an
Indigenous reality that highlights the fact that Native people, too, suffer
from police violence, even disproportionately, and their voices should be
heard. Some Black folks might see Native people using “Lives Matter” as a
form of cooptation that decenters the unique issues facing Black people,
and, depending on whether those Indigenous people respect Black struggle,
that might be correct. Black folks can’t continue to erase Native people on
whose land they now exist. Even using the chant “Whose streets? Our
streets!” and not thinking about how that might contribute to Indigenous
erasure is a problem. Black folks shouldn’t uncritically except the narrative
that the US can be reformed, that we can effect change by simply holding
our leaders’ feet to the fire. Where do Native people fit into this discussion?
We need to foster forms of connection and move beyond the narrowness of
“focusing on ourselves” first. As Black feminist prison abolitionist Angela
Davis notes,
I think we need to be more reflective, more critical and more explicit
about our concepts of community. There is often as much
heterogeneity within a black community, or more heterogeneity, than
in cross-racial communities. . . . What is problematic is the degree to