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 Massasoit 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 identities, 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 assimilation of Indigenous people.
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 identity we get to bask in.
Photo by Amber Starks (a.k.a. Melanin Mvskoke)
Amber Starks, a.k.a. Melanin Mvskoke, (Black/Muscogee Creek) is
an Afro-Indigenous activist, organizer, cultural critic, decolonial theorist,
and budding abolitionist. She is an enrolled citizen of the Muscogee (Creek)
Nation and is of Shawnee, Yuchi, and Quapaw descent. Her passion is the intersection
of Black and Native American identity. Starks’s activism seeks to normalize,
affirm, and uplift the multidimensional identities of Black and Native peoples
through discourse and advocacy around Black liberation, Indigenous sovereignty,
anti-Blackness, and abolishing blood quantum. She hopes to encourage Black and
Indigenous peoples to prioritize one another and divest from compartmentalizing
struggles.
