An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

G. Kelley have called “‘New World’ descendants—the daughters and sons
of Africa.” 19
It might seem controversial to call Africans and their descendants’
Indigenous peoples, but it is not. To reclaim, insofar as we can imagine, the
Indigenous roots of Africans in the diaspora is neither an attempt to replace
Indigenous peoples of the US nor to act as settlers in some real or imagined
return to Africa, as previous generations have done. However, we do have
to account for the fact that, besides some cultural remnants that were able to
survive historical erasure, Africans living in the US, because of
enslavement, were stripped of their heritage. As Cedric Robinson notes in
Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983), “The
cargoes of laborers also contained African cultures, critical mixes of
cosmology, and metaphysics, of habits, beliefs, and morality. These were
the actual terms of their humanity.” 20 Africans did not just lose their
indigenous practices and beliefs, even after enduring the incomprehensible
horrors of the slave trade. Robinson continues, “These cargoes, then, did
not consist of intellectual isolates or deculturated Blacks—men, women,
and children separated from their previous universe. African labor brought
the past with it, a past that had produced it and settled on it the first
elements of consciousness and comprehension.” Even something as simple
as West African techniques for rice cultivation are an example of
indigenous knowledge transferal, and these were a major contribution to the
US colonies and throughout the Americas. 21 So, who exactly was Robinson
referring to? Perhaps we could look to the acclaimed poet Phillis Wheatley,
the first woman of African descent to publish a book of poetry in
prerevolutionary America. Or we can look at Olaudah Equiano, who wrote
the first African-authored narrative describing the horrors of the slave trade.
These were two Indigenous peoples stolen as children from their homeland
and marked as enslaved. It is thus not surprising that the roots of whiteness
have sought to eradicate the African past, and to create a hierarchy of
difference rooted in white supremacy.
To understand how racial hierarchies have contributed to the formation
of US society and how the political structure came to be, we have to go
back to their roots. As legal scholar Cheryl Harris argues in her influential
article “Whiteness as Property,” the foundations of race in the United
States, especially whiteness and property, were developed through both the
enslavement of Africans and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. 22 It is