Top Quotes: “An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States” — Kyle Mays
Introduction
“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.””
“Black Americans have had a strained relationship to Ebonics, too, however. In 1996, when activists and educators from the Oakland Unified School District tried to educate teachers about Ebonics and make it a part of the curriculum as a way for Black students to more effectively learn so-called standard American English, people — African Americans — across the country were mad. Even civil rights icon Jesse Jackson and the late, literary ancestor-genius Maya Angelou stated publicly that the idea of Black English being a separate language was absurd.”
“The history is clear. A popular myth that Black people perpetuate suggests that a large majority of Native people owned their Black ancestors. That is not true.”
“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.”
“In early January 1958, the Klan placed a burning cross in the front yard of a Lumbee family’s home in North Carolina. They, along with other Lumbees, were infuriated. One man named Sanford Locklear, who became a leader of the resistance, sought to meet them head on because, as Lumbee historian Malinda Maynor Lowery puts it, “the Klan not only was insulting Indian people but was infringing on Indian land.” On January 18, 1958, Catfish Cole, a local Klan member, decided to hold a rally at Hayes Pond. In attendance were about fifty Klan members, including women and children. They were soon surrounded by some five hundred Native people, mostly military veterans and some women, all armed with guns and knives. The Native people started firing guns in the air, and the Klan members ran into the swamps and ditches.”
“She was the last born, and because plantation owners at that time would compensate families for providing a future field hand, her parents received fifty dollars after her birth, which assisted the family in buying supplies for the winter.”
“Black and Indigenous people also participated in each other’s struggles for liberation. They showed up to each other’s protests, including the takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1972 and the occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973. In 1972, while in Washington, DC, Pan-Africanist Stokely Carmichael showed up during the third day of the takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, in which Native activists stormed the office, took it over, and retrieved thousands of documents related to tribal issues. Carmichael, speaking as head of the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (AAPRP), offered to “support this movement 100 percent. The question of native Americans is not just a question of civil rights,” he said. “This land is their land ..we have agreed to do whatever we can to provide help . . . there can be no settlement until their land is returned to them.”
“In the months preceding the Poor People’s Campaign, Martin Luther King Jr. and others began to organize a collection of poor and working-class people to meet together in order to think radically about changing the economic order that had kept Black and other people of color economically exploited. Dr. King traveled throughout the country to organize people to be a part of the Poor People’s Campaign. In Atlanta on March 14, 1968, three weeks before he was assassinated, Dr. King, along with other members from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, met with seventy-eight leaders from fifty-three organizations, hailing from seventeen states, to discuss organizing strategies for a demonstration in Washington, DC.
Dr. King met with Indigenous organizations, Mexican American and Puerto Rican organizations, and poor whites from Appalachia to figure out what actions they would take to end the economic oppression. The demonstration was set to begin on April 22. In what they hoped would be a “stay-in,” Dr. King told reporters that they sought “economic security for all Americans. He continued traveling for nineteen days, to California, Mississippi, and Boston, to further understand the unique conditions facing poor people in each place.”
“There were offshoot organizations such as the Black Liberation Army (BLA), that believed in armed revolution. While the Black Panther Party believed in armed self-defense, the BLA believed that the time for revolution was now, and that it had to use a variety of tactics against the US government to further its idea of revolution. While there are at least a few well-known members of the BLA, including Mutulu Shakur, the stepfather of the late rapper Tupac Shakur, perhaps no one garners more emotional responses than Tupac’s godmother, Assata Shakur, who today is still in Cuba. In 2013, the FBI declared that it had added Shakur to the “Top Ten Most Wanted Terrorists” list — the first time they had placed a woman on that list. She remains a cultural icon for Black people throughout the diaspora.
Shakur, a Black revolutionary, is best known for fleeing to Cuba after being rescued from prison in New Jersey. She was originally arrested and convicted because of her alleged involvement in the killing of New Jersey state trooper Werner Forster, after he stopped and pulled over two of her BLA comrades, Sundiata Acoli and Zayd Malik Shakur. In 1979, she was liberated from prison, and later escaped to Cuba, which granted her asylum in 1984.”
“In May 1986, Vernon Bellecourt and Larry Anderson (Diné) were touring the Midwest and eastern United States, appealing to Black Americans to show support for the US government’s repeal of the Navajo and Hopi Relocation Act. Designed to clear land for companies to mine Big Mountain in Arizona, the act had been passed in 1974. Bellecourt and Anderson were also seeking support of the bill so that Ronald Reagan would not be able to veto Senate Bill S1396, the White Earth Reservation Land Settlement Act of 1985, which sought both compensation and the return of illegally taken land to the White Earth Anishinaabe.”
“He also demonstrated his knowledge of ongoing injustices in South Africa, remarking that the plan to remove Native people from Big Mountain “is every bit as treacherous as the forced removal of the Black majority population in South Africa from the best lands into the Bantustans.”
In response to his rhetorical act of solidarity, Oliver Reginald Kaizana Tambo — then president of the African National Congress, operating in exile in Lusaka, Zambia — sent a “pledge of firmest solidarity with the people of Big Mountain.” The ANC statement also proclaimed “that what is happening to you is exactly the lot of our people in South Africa.” What connected the two groups was their common experience as Indigenous people whose lands had been taken for capital. Under apartheid, Indigenous Africans “are time and again forcibly removed and resettled against their will, in the interest of capital.” Finally, the pledge remarked, “The struggle against capitalist exploitation and total disregard of human beings is an international struggle.” It was already known that Bellecourt and Kwame Ture had a relationship. However, this act of solidarity demonstrates that Indigenous people on the African continent and in North America had a common struggle, and perhaps had more engagement with one another than we have previously realized.”
“In July 2007, in Detroit, Michigan, at the NAACP’s Ninth Annual Convention, a funeral ceremony was held to actually bury the N-word. A march preceded the funeral; led by NAACP chairman Julian Bond and now-disgraced former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, hip-hop icon Curtis Blow and R&B legend Eddie Levert, it extended from Cobo Hall to Hart Plaza. Addressing the N-word, Kilpatrick proclaimed, “We don’t want to see you around here no more.” Even former Michigan Democratic governor Jennifer Granholm participated in the procession, holding forth with some white-woman liberalism, proclaiming, “We can plant the seed to a new word, the ‘A’ word. All — all our people. We’re all in this together.””
“In November 2019, the city council of Evanston, Illinois, passed a resolution to fund reparations efforts through a cannabis tax.”
“What many people, such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and the founders of ADOS, fail to consider is, how can we justifiably give Black folks reparations without also considering how we offer reparations to Indigenous peoples? We can and should do both.”
“Malcolm X taught us, “Of all our studies, history is best qualified to reward our research.” We need to recover our histories, which were taken away from us by Europeans. Western states that are fundamentally rooted in the enslavement of Africans should provide resources to help people throughout the diaspora find their roots. This is the least that they could do so that people of African descent, as much as possible, learn their African histories. Working in true partnership with African nations, which will also mean the end of predatory International Monetary Fund loans and other neoliberal policies that have kept these nations broke, Western states should also ensure descendants the opportunity to visit Africa and learn about their roots. This is not a call for people of African descent to assert themselves as colonizers of different African nations. We could borrow from Ghana’s “Year of Return” and figure out other ways to offer citizenship to people of African descent in the diaspora. While the traumas of the slave trade have erased the unique Indigenous African roots of people in the diaspora, we can still create new meanings of what it means to be an African today.”
“The Cherokee Nation did the right thing. On February 22, 2021, the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court ruled that the tribe’s constitution remove the phrase “by blood” so that the Freedmen could be enrolled as citizens. I hope the other Four Tribes do the same.”
