An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

government’s boarding schools and its regimented programs for bringing
Indians to ‘civilization.’” 7 While for their times they might be considered
conservative, and even anti-Black at times, they tried to create sovereignty,
in micro and macro forms.
The SAI came to fruition in 1911. Fayette McKenzie, a white sociologist
and president of the all-Black college Fisk University, had also long been a
sympathizer with Black and Indigenous causes. McKenzie invited some of
the most prominent Native peoples to meet to discuss the best steps going
forward to help Native people advance in US society, including medical
doctors Charles Eastman (Dakota) and Carlos Montezuma (Yavapai),
activist and writer Laura Cornelius Kellogg (Oneida), and anthropologist
Arthur Parker (Seneca).
McKenzie invited Indigenous professionals, especially those who were
products of the boarding school era. Boarding schools have been described
by some scholars as vehicles of genocide, though others see them as sites of
Indigenous agency and as an avenue through which to earn money through
programs that allowed students to work outside the schools during the
summer and upon graduation. 8 The boarding school era, however, was a
moment of great terror. Army officials and missionaries, empowered by the
US government, would go into tribal nations and kidnap their children and
force them into boarding schools so they would be assimilated into US
culture. They wanted to eradicate from the children the meaning of what it
meant to be Indigenous so that the US government could fulfill its plans of
taking more land.
The leaders met and discussed ideas of how to better organize
themselves to protect land and affirm their humanity. After the meeting,
they decided to call themselves the American Indian Association. In 1912,
at a subsequent meeting, they changed their name to the Society of
American Indians. They separated membership in two categories.
Recognizing that they had Indigenous sympathizers, they assigned full,
active membership to “full” Native people and associate membership to
non-Native people. While there were many white sympathizers, perhaps the
most important person to become an associate member was the Black
intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois.
During its second meeting, the SAI drafted the organization’s
constitution, which featured a seven-point platform. The rhetoric of the
platform contains racial purity language, as was common at the time.