Just saying tho. Honor your Black/Brown or Eumelanated ancestors

Black-Native Idenтιтy and Futurity

Black Natives exist! We are Indigenous peoples of (what is currently known as) the Americas and the Caribbean, and we are also the descendants of Indigenous peoples of Africa. This idenтιтy often includes Freedmen—the free men and women who were once enslaved by citizens of the Five Tribes (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, Seminole, and Choctaw)—and their descendants. Black Natives and Freedmen are the legacy of our Black and Native ancestors. We are the personification of their joy, pain, resistance, and endurance, and it is because of our Black and Native ancestors’ hope and resilience that we are still here.

It is impossible to lump Black-Native idenтιтies into a single idenтιтy. We are as diverse as we are numerous and our lived experiences, like our idenтιтies, are not monolithic. We therefore refer to ourselves in a number of ways, such as “Afro-Indigenous,” “Black Native,” “Indigenous and Black,” “Black and Native,” “Black and a tribal idenтιтy.” Many of us, by choosing to honor both our peoples through our idenтιтies, are intentionally pushing back against America’s tradition of classifying people into distinct racial categories. We are pushing back against society’s pressure to choose between our idenтιтies because we may look more like one than the other, or not enough of both. Some of us are even simultaneously decompartmentalizing and desegregating our Black and Native idenтιтies by using traditional language or developing a new language of resistance to speak to who we are and the peoples we come from.

Black and white portrait of a woman with hair pulled back, in a light dress with dark ʙuттons and high collar

Portrait of Zerviah Gould Mitchell (Wampanoag, 1807–1898), ca. 1850–1860. NMAI N15198. Mitchell, along with Ebenezer W. Pierce, wrote Indian History, Biography, and Genealogy, about the life of Wampanoag leader Mᴀssasoit and his descendants.

Many Black Natives are also deliberately and willfully seeking new ways to show up as our whole selves, as equally Black and equally Native, in our daily lives. We are challenging, interrogating, and dismantling the political borders placed upon us. By choosing to exist as Black and Native and owning our dual idenтιтies, we are an affront to these very systems that seek to erase our Indigeneity and marginalize our Blackness. We are reclaiming our right to self-determination and exercising bodily and cultural autonomy by inhabiting and celebrating both of our peoples.

Many of us have learned to root our full selves in the knowledge that, since first contact between Africans and Native people, our Black and Indigenous ancestors have continuously built community, forged relationships (platonic, romantic, familial, kinship, and political), and fought against systems of oppression that are both unique to our respective communities as well as overlapping. But we are not disillusioned and do recognize that there have been times, even today, when our peoples have been at odds or even in opposition to one another, forfeiting alliances and even participating in one another’s oppression as a means of survival and, in some cases, out of self-interest. However, these instances of harm or betrayal should not be understood in isolation but must be contextualized in direct relation to that of our respective and mutual oppression, which traces back to the founding of the nation on the backs of enslaved Africans and their descendants and the attempted genocide and ᴀssimilation of Indigenous people.

Black and white of a man, two women, and a baby seated outdoors

Frank G. Speck

A Chickahominy family in Virginia, 1918. NMAI N12600

Despite what our peoples have endured, we have never been conquered because we, Black and Native peoples, have found ways to refuse our oppression and create modes of defiance such as abolition, free towns, cross-cultural alliances, kinship ties, and community building. We have pushed for freedom, individually and in solidarity with one another, and out of our struggle we have birthed enduring movements of resistance. Those of us who are today advancing Black liberation and Indigenous sovereignty through movements such as Black Lives Matter and Land Back understand that it’s our duty to continue the work of those who came before us. We must harvest the fruit of our ancestors, plant new seeds of freedom, and pick the weeds of subjugation. We must work towards and believe in the world we want for ourselves and our descendants—a world born of our imaginations and not those of our oppressors. We cannot forget that it was and is by navigating these systems in authentic community that we will continue to prevail. Existing as both Black and Native is not a burden we must bear; it is our birthright, our inheritance, and an intersectional idenтιтy we get to bask in.