An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

NOTES
AUTHOR’S NOTE
1. For a history of Medicine Bear American Academy, see Kyle T. Mays, City of Dispossessions:
African Americans, Indigenous People, and the Creation of Modern Detroit (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming).
INTRODUCTION
1. Jack D. Forbes, Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of
Red-Black Peoples (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 1. It is fitting to begin with a quote
from Jack Forbes. He, in addition to being a pioneer in Native studies, was also an important
contributor to Afro-Indigenous studies.
2. For a discussion on labels, see Robert Keith Collins, “What Is a Black Indian? Misplaced
Expectations and Lived Realities,” in IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas,
ed. Gabrielle Tayac (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of the American
Indian, 2009), 183–95.
3. There are a host of books on Afro-Indigenous history, especially covering the nineteenth
century. This is not an exhaustive list but just a handful that have influenced me: Kendra Taira Field,
Growing Up with Country: Family, Race, and Nation After the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2018); Tiya Miles, The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Arica L. Coleman, That the Blood Stay
Pure: African Americans, Native Americans, and the Predicament of Race and Identity in Virginia
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); David Chang, The Color of the Land: Race, Nation,
and the Politics of Land Ownership in Oklahoma, 1832–1929 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2010); James F. Brooks, ed., Confounding the Color Line: The (American) Indian-Black
Experience in North America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002); Sharon P. Holland and
Tiya Miles, eds., Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Sharon P. Holland and Tiya Miles, “Afro-Native
Realities,” in The World of Indigenous North America, ed. Robert Warrior (New York: Routledge,
2015), 524–48; Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: The Story of An Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and
Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Celia E. Naylor, African Cherokees in
Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
4. John Nankivell, Buffalo Soldier Regiment: History of the Twenty-Fifth United States Infantry
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001); William Leckie and Shirley A. Leckie, The Buffalo
Soldiers: A Narrative of the Black Calvary in the West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
2003).