An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

people see Indigenous people as having vanished; that’s why we have
mascots and other forms of racism that are unique to Native people.
Mascots perpetuate the idea that Indigenous peoples are either all dead or
frozen in time. Therefore, they exist only as a caricature. Indeed, as Philip
Deloria reminds us, the US nation-state’s very identity is constructed
through “playing Indian.” 6 However, I would pose this question: What if we
remembered that those Africans forced to come to the British colony of
Virginia were, actually, Indigenous people? How would that help us think
differently about early Atlantic encounters between Indigenous peoples
from the African continent and those in North America, and beyond?
Finally, are we to ignore that other societies, including African ones, may
have had forms of “democracy,” perhaps even better than what we would
consider democracy today? I will leave this question for others to research.
My goal in this chapter is to provide a few examples of these early
indigenous encounters, arguing that enslaved Africans did not lose their
ideas of what it meant to be Indigenous. Instead, I place them within a
world where they maintained their idea of democracy while also being
forced to come to terms with the condition of their blackness. 7 Furthermore,
I argue that we should, as best as we can, take seriously the trauma of what
the transatlantic slave trade did to Africans. How did they cope with their
new condition in a new place? We can only answer this question with the
limited historical data that we have. I don’t mean to suggest that people of
African descent are the First Peoples of this land; that is erasure, and a form
of anti-Indigenous rhetoric that hoteps tend to perpetuate. I am interested in
acknowledging the history of enslaved Africans, and asserting their
humanity in its fullest.
Considering the trauma of enslavement, we uncritically assign the mark
of enslavement to African peoples. We forget or minimize that these people
carried with them their language, cultures, histories, and relationships. In
rethinking how we view Afro-Indigenous history in the United States, we
first need to recall that Africans forced to come to this country did not
racialize themselves as Black in their homelands; they had their own
indigenous roots and tribal beliefs; they were connected to lands, customs,
and cosmologies. They were Indigenous.
To write about an Afro-Indigenous history of the United States is also to
understand that encounters between Indigenous people in what became the
Americas and Indigenous Africans were what amounted to a chance