For nearly five hundred years, African Americans and Native Americans have journeyed through oppression from slavery to freedom, from dispossession to sovereignty, traveling the Underground Railroad, keeping to the Good Red Road.

At times they worked in solidarity, at other times against each other, and more times than can be told, they became one another.

Racist policies structured their lives, yet communities emerged to creatively resist assimilation and violence.

Extraordinary lifeways persist; the stories must be heard. At the heart of each story survives the basic human desire for being and belonging. Out of many nations, African-Native American people are indivisible.

Photographs by Kevin Cartwright and Roger Whiteside