An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

est to acknowledge the importance of Black and Indigenous relations, and
she even offered some perspective on changing the narrative on Black and
Native relations—a future, perhaps. She also offered a way to think about
these connections outside of enslavement—even as that remains an
important priority. We can learn a lot from her perspective when thinking
about the future of Black and Indigenous relationships. Chief Mankiller’s
example should be a message to all of us: that Indigenous peoples exist
throughout the world, and we can learn a great deal from others, including
from the African continent.
“WHO’LL PAY REPARATIONS FOR OUR SOULS?” BLACK
REPARATIONS ON INDIGENOUS LAND
In the great Gil Scott-Heron’s “Who’ll Pay Reparations on My Soul?,” he
asks: Do we really even want any reparations or compensation from this
government? Do we really want to be associated with this government and
so-called democracy? Will it heal our souls? We have to ask, what would it
look like to prepare for and then actually implement reparations? Law
professor Alfred L. Brophy notes in Reparations: Pro and Con (2006) that
implementing reparations could happen in a four-step plan for correcting
past injustice for a better future. The first step “involves truth commissions
and apologies.” This, he argues, is “inexpensive, and its low costs are
spread across a wide group.” The second step “involves Civil Rights
legislation that gives additional rights of action to victims of race
discrimination.” The third step would involve “community-based reparation
payments for slavery.” And the final step would require “direct cash
payments to individuals.” 17 Do we even want to accept an apology for a
settler-colonial, white supremacist state? It might be possible, but, as
Anishinaabe legal scholar Sheryl Lightfoot argues regarding state apologies
to Indigenous peoples, “official apologies to Indigenous peoples have the
potential to play a meaningful role within a larger program of Indigenousstate
reconciliation only if such apologies are employed in a way that
moves beyond rhetoric and helps reset the relationship between the state
and Indigenous peoples away from hierarchical and colonial power
relations and toward one grounded in mutual respect.” 18 In other words, the
settler state has to be sincere. Lightfoot further contends that a state apology
“must, first, fully and comprehensively acknowledge the wrongs of the past