American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Racial analytics in the field, particularly those associated with theories of sovereignty and settler colonialism, have tended to obscure the common ground of Afro-descendant and Indigenous experience, such as land dispossession, political marginalization, and a shared desire for sovereignty and self-determination. In the wake of this analytic divide, even less attention is given to how blackness specifically structures or delimits Indigenous life, as blackness and indigeneity are often taken to be competing identities that cannot exist within the same individuals and communities without friction. This volume seeks to take the next step in pushing forward our theoretical conversations about blackness and indigeneity. Rather than assuming that anti-Black racism, as well as that directed against Indigenous people, are problems of the past or irrelevant to contemporary Indigenous political status, this volume engages with both critical race theory and settler colonial theory to explore how blackness intersects with Indigenous sovereignty, authority, identity, and lived experience.

This essay troubles the theoretical impasses wrought by overdetermined framings of settler colonial theory in order to understand the relationship between blackness and indigeneity. While the framework disrupts Native erasure, the language of “incommensurability” that is increasingly deployed to make sense of the particularity of blackness and indigeneity extends settler logics, or what I refer to as “settler unfreedoms.” Drawing on Black and Indigenous feminist praxis of embodied truth telling, this essay examines how the unknowable and illegible terrains of Black political subjectivities constitutes a space that disrupts settler paradigms of freedom and moves forward to an alternate conceptualization of mutual liberation and decolonization.

In the late nineteenth century, Northern social reformers turned to the cultivation of self-governing Black and Native subjects as a method of racial and colonial governance that simultaneously sought to suspend state violence and preclude resistance to racial subordination and territorial occupation. This articles examines records from the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (Virginia) and the Haskell Indian Industrial Institute (Kansas) to reveal “character building” as pedagogical mode to make both labor and land available for capitalist exploitation without recourse to violence. Bridging scholarship on racialization and colonization, this article theorizes the concept of racial-settler capitalism as an intervention into prevailing approaches to racial capitalism and settler capitalism.

This article examines texts by Prince Alexander Liholiho, Samuel Kamakau, King Kalākaua, and Queen Lili‘uokalani to trace a strand of nineteenth-century Kanaka Maoli literary nationalism which embraced figurative blackness as a means to combat settler colonial notions of physical, racial blackness as a trait that made Kānaka Maoli unfit for sovereignty. This essay intervenes in contemporary discussions of Black and Indigenous intersections, asking us to move beyond comparative understandings of the two and instead contemplate what we might gain by examining a particular context in which blackness is a constitutive, foundational element of Indigeneity.

In this article, I unearth the dehumanizing racial violence of the destruction of Saugeen Anishinaabe and Black community burial places in Grey County, Ontario by settler whites. I trace how the fate of particular sites might represent a wider pattern of necrogeographical violence on the part of whites. I also explore the importance of such sites to Indigenous and Black communities, their reclamation by communities, and white backlash to such actions. In Grey County, the making of a white landscape has gone hand in hand with the destruction of the hallowed places of Indigenous and Black communities.

In Almanac of the Dead, Leslie Marmon Silko asks, who has spiritual possession of the Americas? This question cannot be answered outside of Silko’s premises: it is impossible for outsiders to know where Africa ends and America begins; and the truth resides in the web of differing versions. In this essay, I maintain that Silko’s novel is written as a vévé—a crossroads where Gods and ancestors are subjects capable of narration. Using Silko’s language philosophy and a through close reading of Clinton’s notebooks and radio broadcasts, I argue that slavery/colonization and black/Indian must always be thought together.

It is an increasingly common trope in anti-gentrification activism to claim that gentrification of Black neighborhoods is a form of settler colonialism. Although Native critics have pushed back against these metaphors as abstractions of, and false equivalencies to, the concrete conditions of settler colonialism, gentrifying discourse frequently draws on the language and logic of settler colonialism in narratives about the city of Detroit. In this article, I ask what it means that terms and logic that are being applied to a predominantly Black city were, and are, also used to rationalize and structure theft of land from Native Americans. Proposing that shifting white interests in Black land have led to “borrowing” of longstanding logics used to dispossess Native peoples, I argue that the reiteration of settler-colonial logics in Detroit to explain and justify gentrification manifestly both validates land grabs in the city and further erases the claims of both Black and Indigenous peoples to Detroit.

This essay collages theories (settler colonialism, transnational feminism, Black and Indigenous feminist thought, and critical theory) for the purpose of dialoguing together through land-based Black and Indigenous solidarities. In our dialogue, we invite readers to think about how choosing theories and identifying intentions is a methodology of coalition. We demonstrate how this might materialize in three coalition possibilities: faith communities, neoslavery for dispossession and erasure, and reimagining borders.