[electric NOTES]: An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

AN AFRO-INDIGENOUS HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, Kyle T. Mays

ELECTRIC NOTES:

Explore the stories, theories, and works of scholars thinking about Black and Indigenous American experiences.

Kyle T. Mays’ An Afro-Indigenous History continues Tiffany Lethabo King’s work of rooting Black people to land and history as he argues for Black people’s own indigeneity to be understood. The cultural disruption of the Transatlantic Slave Trade has led to the association of Black people with rootlessness or being born on the water. Yet, as Mays insists, “The ancestry of Black Americans, or the descendants of the enslaved, may not originate in North America, but they are Indigenous” (xix-xx).

In his effort “to recover and acknowledge the Indigenous roots of people of African descent” (x), Mays argues that it should not be “controversial to call Africans and their descendants Indigenous peoples” because “Africans did not just lose their indigenous practices and beliefs, even after enduring the incomprehensible horrors of the slave trade” (xx). An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States constructs new analytics of Afro-diasporic peoples in the U.S by reminding readers that Black people do in fact come from somewhere and that the legacies of institutional slavery and settler colonialism shape the character of Black life historically and contemporarily.

Resituating Black people as Indigenous to elsewhere could be an important step in avoiding the trap of settler nativism in which Black people conceive of themselves to be “from here” in a way that: 1) does not acknowledge the sovereignty and rights of the land’s first peoples; 2) enables a forgetting of the “twin oppressions of antiblackness and settler colonialism” (xxi) which are foundational to the white hegemony of this nation. As Mays rightly argues: “People of African descent have a responsibility to think about their relationship to this Indigenous place” (xxii).

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).

Additionally, he defines Afro-Indigenous history as the intersections/spaces where Black and Indigenous histories touch, correlate, or parallel. He frames both settler colonialism and slavery as foundational to the current wealth and development of the U.S. and insists that they *together* form a joint/dual force of action and subjugation for the U.S. In this way, he frames the foundation of the U.S. as itself AFRO-INDIGENOUS.

He looks at the tensions between Black and Native communities and pinpoint the tensions that characterize Black-Indigenous interrelations and conversations. Mays questions the intersections between belonging, home, movement, and Blackness by asking: “But what is home and how has history disrupted people of African descents’ conception of home? […] [A]re we to tell the descendants of those ripped from their homeland, whose ancestors’ blood exists in the soil, that this isn’t their home?” (xxii).

He bridges conversations from Black and Indigenous Studies by constructing a parallel between the Indigenous concept of SURVIVANCE and Black attempts to BELONG: “As Indigenous peoples have asserted survivance, Black folks have asserted their belonging. […] Black belonging and Indigenous survivance remains central to how they have survived and will continue to do so into the future” (xxiii).

THEMES:

INTERSECTIONS between Blackness, Indigeneity, and settler colonialism as a dual project of African enslavement and Indigenous genocide/land dispossession.

BLACK practices of homemaking / belonging

AFRO-INDIGENEITY in politics, history, literature, and lived experiences