An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

Attucks almost certainly interacted closely with all three groups, and
his life experience . . . allowed him to see the best and worst of
eighteenth-century America: the economic and social vitality of
growing and prospering colonies, the oppression of racial slavery, the
intermingling of diverse peoples and languages in bustling Atlantic
seaports, the opportunities and dangers of life at sea, the fluidity of
identity in America’s formative era, and the new language of liberty
and natural rights that came to define the idealistic new nation’s sense
of self. 38
Attucks has a much more complicated history, and some historians
question how much he was actually invested in the colonists’ goals for
revolution; some even refer to him as a thug. 39 According to Samuel
Adams, the cousin of John Adams, who defended one of the British
soldiers, Attucks’s “very looks was enough to terrify any person, what had
not the soldiers then to fear?” He also described him as demonstrating “mad
behavior.” 40
The colonists immediately began to memorialize Attucks’s death for
their cause. Paul Revere created an engraving three weeks after the attack
titled, “Bloody Massacre Perpetrated in Kings Street in Boston.” 41 There is
no denying that Attucks is a central part of our collective memory regarding
martyrdom and American Revolution, and children will continue to be
taught about his sacrifice for the revolution. If we continue to identify him
as an Afro-Indigenous person, even if he was a “thug,” perhaps we should
reclaim him as an Afro-Indigenous fighter who wasn’t so much invested in
US democracy; rather, he was a person seeking basic human rights not for
settler-colonial enslavers, but for African and Indigenous peoples.
What can we learn from these early encounters and examples of Afro-
Indigenous peoples? First, we should remind ourselves that Native US
people should also include Indigenous Africans in their understanding of
who is Indigenous. Second, we should reorient our understanding of
Indigenous encounters in prerevolutionary America. This has the potential
of helping Black youth see themselves not outside of modernity, but
squarely in it, with Indigenous roots, even if they can’t necessarily go back
to Africa and trace them. We also see the experiences of people mixed with
African and US Indigenous roots who were considered Indigenous by some,
but strongly identified with their African roots because of the rampant