Guide to Black and Indigenous American Lit

Maroon Choreography can be placed in the tradition I’ve been identifying as [Ancestral Recovery Work] as evident in her prefatory note in which she identifies her passed grandmother as her “primary interlocutor” and “unseen collaborator”: “My practice in Maroon Choreography is an attempt to collaborate with my grandmother’s spirit, to shape knowledge, to practice developing a theory informed by the knowledges she could not express while she was here, as flesh, among the living” (xii).

Mays, as an afro-indigenous person himself, reframes what afro-indigeneity means by, firstly, discussing Black people as indeed indigenous peoples with their own heritages, cosmologies, and customs—however far removed and untraceable those may be. Mays reminds us that Black/blackness is a modern invention as Africans were “forced to change their identities from whatever Indigenous ethnic group they identified with to that of being a Black/African person” (14).