An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

CHAPTER 8. THE MATTER OF BLACK AND INDIGENOUS LIVES,
POLICING, AND JUSTICE
1. Carolyn Smith-Morris, “Addressing the Epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women
and Girls,” Cultural Survival, March 6, 2020, https://www.culturalsurvival.org/news/addressingepidemic-missing-murdered-indigenous-women-and-girls.
2. Eliza Racine, “Native Lives Matter: The Overlooked Police Brutality Against Native
Americans,” Lakota Law Project, November 21, 2017, https://www.lakotalaw.org/news/2017-11-
21/native-lives-matter-the-overlooked-police-brutality-against-native-american.
3. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 31. The important
point here is that violence encompasses the entire existence of Black and Indigenous peoples.
4. Rishma Dhaliwal, “Knowledge Session: Democracy Is Hypocrisy,” Iamhiphopmagazine, March
21, 2015, https://www.iamhiphopmagazine.com/knowledge-session-democracy-is-hypocrisy-bymalcolm-x.
5. “The People’s Budget LA: Los Angeles 2020–2021,”
https://peoplesbudgetla.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/peoplesbudgetreport_may26.pdf.
6. Sam Levin, “What Does ‘Defund the Police’ Mean? The Rallying Cry Sweeping the US—
Explained,” The Guardian, June 6, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/usnews/2020/jun/05/defunding-the-police-us-what-does-it-mean.
This article documents several
organizations who try other methods of public safety intervention instead of using the police.
7. “The Peoples Budget LA,” 2.
8. Metropolitan Urban Indian Directors, “MUID Statement Regarding the Police Killing of George
Floyd,” May 27, 2020, https://muidmn.org/georgefloyd.
9. “Herstory,” Black Lives Matter website, https://blacklivesmatter.com/herstory, accessed June 6,
2020. See also Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Asha bandele, and Angela Davis, When They Call You a
Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018).
10. Barbara Ransby, Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First
Century (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 3–4. As Ransby points out, this movement
is decidedly different from those of the past. It centers intersectionality and highlights the voices of
Black queer, trans, and women as central to the movement.
11. Marc Lamont Hill, Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to
Flint and Beyond (New York: Atria Books, 2016). Hill argues that “to be Nobody is to be vulnerable”
(xvii) and “abandoned by the state” (xix).
12. Elise Hansen, “The Forgotten Minority in Police Shootings,” CNN, November 13, 2017,
https://www.cnn.com/2017/11/10/us/native-lives-matter/index.html.
13. For a report on Native Americans and police brutality see the Lakota People’s Law Project,
https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/lakota-peoples-law/uploads/Native-Lives-Matter-PDF.pdf.
Although they don’t offer a genealogy of the phrase, they detail the police violence experienced by
Native people and offer some recommendations for change.
14. African American Policy Forum, “#SayHerName,” https://aapf.org/sayhername (accessed July
22, 2020).
15. Angela Y. Davis and Elizabeth Martinez, “Coalition Building Among People of Color,” in The
Angela Y. Davis Reader, ed. Joy James (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), 299.
16. Lightfoot, Global Indigenous Politics, 200.
17. See Mehrsa Baradaran, “The Decoy of Black Capitalism,” in The Color of Money: Black
Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 187–214.
CONCLUSION: THE POSSIBILITIES FOR AFRO-INDIGENOUS
FUTURES