An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

local autonomy—Reconstruction challenged these deeply rooted elements
of nineteenth-century political culture.” 5 The story of the nineteenth century
was rooted in rapid changes, but the story is not as triumphant as we might
picture.
During my undergraduate and graduate school training, I was excited
and mortified to read about how the US was constructed systematically
through dispossession, enslavement, class warfare, and gender inequality.
However, I also enjoyed reading the everyday forms of resistance, or the
“weapons of the weak” that Black and Indigenous peoples used. 6 While
there were moments of great disruption—including various forms of Native
peoples’ armed resistance against settler encroachment as well as a whole
civil war—it was often through individual everyday acts of resistance such
as writing, speeches, and other forms of literary production through which
Black and Indigenous peoples waged resistance.
This chapter argues that Black and Native people found everyday forms
of resistance to challenge their conditions of dispossession and
enslavement. They used polemical writing, literature, and protest on the
ground. We often don’t remember but it is important to recall: Black and
Indigenous peoples never stopped believing in freedom, and struggled to
attain their liberation. The long nineteenth century was fundamentally about
a radical struggle against the abolition of enslavement and dispossession.
As historian Manisha Sinha writes, the abolitionist struggle to end
enslavement “from its inception was an interracial one and tied to the
development of democracy.” These abolitionists were “united in their
devotion to the slave’s cause.” 7
Afro-Indigenous history during the long nineteenth century is
characterized, one the one hand, by the simultaneous resistance to slavery
and dispossession, and on the other, by the various modes of resistance that
Black and Indigenous peoples used to belong within and alongside the
rapidly developing nation-state. The ways they variously belonged to
democracy and existed alongside it differed depending on their historical
circumstance. However, the political ideologies undergirding their freedom
dreams were fundamentally rooted in defining what liberation would look
like in the present circumstance and for the future generations.
What were they resisting? The answer simple: oppression. However,
those oppressions varied depending on tribe and the question of being free
or unfree. Black and Indigenous people used a variety of modes of