An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

CHAPTER ONE
INDIGENOUS AFRICANS AND NATIVE
AMERICANS IN PREREVOLUTIONARY
AMERICA
TYPICALLY, WHEN WE THINK OF Africans arriving on the shores of what would
become the United States, we see them through the lens of their condition
of bondage in 1619. We see them as Black. As a result, we tend to assume
that whatever identity they had, because of the Middle Passage, was ripped
away, never to exist again. They were no longer Indigenous. We also fold
them into the project of US democracy.
For instance, some Indigenous people on my social media accounts took
issue with “The 1619 Project,” published by the New York Times Magazine
and headed by investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones. The project’s
aim is to observe the “400th anniversary of the beginning of American
slavery.” It seeks to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as
our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the
contributions of Black Americans—as patriots—at the very center of the
story we tell ourselves about who we are. 1 A variety of writers and artists
also document the foundational role that African enslavement played in the
development of the US nation-state. Moreover, they make the case that
Africans and their descendants remain the exemplar of US democracy and
patriotic ideals. That is, if the founders could not follow the democratic
principles they laid out, surely Africans could. In the introduction, Hannah-
Jones writes, “Without the idealistic, strenuous and patriotic efforts of black
Americans, our democracy today would most likely look very different—it
might not be a democracy at all.” 2 Such a statement is obviously needed.