An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

to US democracy. Finally, I don’t believe that treaties are the only
thing that define tribal nations; that is shortsighted. If we want radical
transformation, we should not be wedded to the idea that the US will
continue business as usual; it can’t.
4. The Five Tribes, formerly the Five Civilized Tribes, or Five-Former-
Slave-Owning Tribes need to carefully affirm that Black Lives Matter.
We know the history of many of those tribes and that only a few
mixed blood elites enslaved Africans. That remains a sore spot, and a
foundational reason as to why antiblackness, including Black removal
of citizens continues to happen. For many Black folks, they may not
know the intricate details of Indigenous dispossession and
enslavement in Indian Country, but they know it happened, and that it
was the Five Tribes who did it.
5. If we create these new arrangements, we also need to think about the
question of land. How do we all relate to this land? This will require
that we are honest about history, and the conflicts between different
tribal nations, before, during, and especially after colonization. This
work is painful. We need to think about how we all live and relate to
particular places, and this can’t just include people, but plants, water,
the air—we really have to rethink Indigenous conceptions of place. 38
6. An immediate and practical action we can take is to write a history
about Indigenous and African enslavement. For analytical purposes, I
focused in this book on Indigenous dispossession and African
enslavement and their aftermaths. However, Andrés Reséndez’s book
The Other Slavery (2016) challenges us to think through the histories
of enslavement for both groups, how they ran parallel and how they
diverged, and how uncovering and comparing these histories can help
us move forward in our collective liberation.
7. Decentering white Indians. We really need to deal with whiteness in
our Indigenous communities. When I bring this up, I hear many
positive things, and I appreciate those. But there is always a troubling
tendency for white-looking Native people to say something like, “I
carry the trauma of my ancestors within me.” My response to that is,
“That’s cool, see a therapist.” While there are perhaps a few scenarios
in which such people could be physically harmed, antiblackness has
its own issues. I am treated like a Black person in the world—how are