The Democracy That Never Was: An Afro-Indigenous History of America

We're taught that American democracy was built on liberty and self-governance. But what if it was actually built on two erasures at once — the enslavement of African peoples and the dispossession of Indigenous nations — happening together, by design?

In this episode of Rethinking Freedom: The Other Side of Freedom, part of our USA at 250 summer series, we sit down with historian Dr. Kyle T. Mays — an Afro-Indigenous (African American and Saginaw Chippewa) scholar at UCLA — to talk about his landmark book, An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States (Beacon Press).

We dig into the arguments that make this book required reading: why enslaved Africans should be understood as Indigenous people in their own right, how antiblackness and settler colonialism worked as a single system rather than two separate histories, the complicated and often painful history of the "Five Tribes" enslaving their own Afro-Indigenous kin, the moments of real solidarity between Black Power and Red Power movements, and what a genuinely honest 250th anniversary of American independence would actually look like.


This is a conversation about the freedom struggles that got written out of the official story — and why putting them back in changes how we understand the whole country.

📖 Get the book: An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States by Kyle T. Mays (Beacon Press)

🎙️ Part of our summer series: Rethinking Freedom — The Other Side of Freedom: The USA at 250

🔔 Subscribe for more episodes in this series, where we explore the histories marginalized or erased from the official American story.

#AfroIndigenous #BlackHistory #NativeAmericanHistory #USAat250 #KyleTMays #AmericanHistory #Decolonization #BlackPower #RedPower #Podcast

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:09

We are taught that American freedom has a simple timeline. 1776, 1863, 1965, dates on a wall, dates in a textbook, dates we light fireworks for. Of course, we just celebrated Juneteenth. But ask who built the wealth that freedom was supposed to protect. And the timeline gets a lot more complicated. Or of course, the land on which this wealth was built. I was recently traveling with my son through Texas, and what I said to him was, this entire region we're driving through is a crime scene. And his 16-year-old self turned and looked at me and said, What do you mean, mom? This year, as the country gears up to celebrate 250 years of independence, we have been doing something different on this show. We're not asking what America has celebrated or thinks it's celebrating. We're asking who is left out of this celebration and why should there even be a celebration? And today we're going back further than 1776, and we're going to bring it back all the way till today. We're going to talk about what it means to be African or Indigenous or African American and how that collided with European colonization, white supremacy, how that keeps impacting us today. So welcome to Rethinking Freedom. As always, I'm your host, Aya Favarinelli, and this is our summer series, The Other Side of Freedom. My guest today is a historian who refuses to let these two stories stay separated. Dr. Carl T. Mays is an Afro-Indigenous scholar. He's going to break that down and tell us what that means. He's African-American in Sagala Chippewa, and he's also a professor at UCLA, where he teaches African American studies, American Indian studies and history. He's the author of several books, one of which is the one I'm really going to be highlighting today, an Afro-Indigenous History of the United States, but also he's written hip hop beats, indigenous rhymes, and he has contributed to many other works. And I understand there's another one coming out, Detroit Against the World, something like that. We'll see. But he writes with the rigor of a historian and the voice of someone telling his own family story, as opposed to, you know, in academia, it's always like objective, like, yeah, we're not part of the story here. But at any rate, Dr. Mays, we welcome you to Rethinking Freedom.

SPEAKER_00 2:47

Glad to be here. I am such a pleasure to be here to talk about uh an important uh for an important moment in time and a very important set of topics today.

SPEAKER_03 2:58

Well, you wrote the book and I was excited. Um, this is one in a series because I have the one by um Paul Ortiz as well. There's another one, and I was like, okay, someone was really thinking through what is the other, what are the other stories that are not told or that are erased? But let's start at the very beginning here, because you title the book Afro Indigenous History. And I think that we may have people who define those terms in different ways. So, what do you mean by Afro Indigenous? Who's Afro-Indigenous?

SPEAKER_00 3:34

So, Afro-Indigenous really has two uh definitions. The first one means uh black and native peoples as separate racial political uh groups that have come to what became the United States, so people of African descent and indigenous peoples, or some people might use Native American or American Indian. My family still uses Indian or Black Indian, to be fair. The other category is someone's individual identity. So you're a descendant of African peoples and indigenous as an indigenous to the United States, or in some cases North America too, um, and a descendant of or a citizen and or a citizen of a tribe within the United States. So there are 575 federally recognized tribes, and there are uh over 400 unrecognized tribes, and or state recognized tribes rather. And then there are some tribes like I live in Los Angeles, the Tonga Gabrielino, who historically have been documented but are not federally recognized by the United States. So it's those combinations of things, and that's way too complicated, but that's really what an Afro-Indigenous uh means here, at least how I use it and understand it.

SPEAKER_03 4:50

Well, because there's certainly a lot on these internet streets, as they would say, where people are making the argument that perhaps the enslavement of Africans being trafficked from Africa didn't really occur because African Americans, those called African Americans today, were always indigenous to the Americas. That's not the argument you're making in this book.

SPEAKER_00 5:14

No, and I I thought that that was a fringe uh commentary, just social media base, until I served on this commission for the city of Santa Monica last year, and I realized there are people who believe this. For the audience and for people listening. No, Native peoples are not here, and often people will say they came before Columbus. The argument in by Yvonne Van Seguma is not that they were here first, it's that they came simply before Columbus. The the issue with the argument, there's no genetic evidence, uh, there's no archaeological evidence. Uh, there are indigenous peoples. Now, I will say that people of African descent and Africans uh up to the present aren't indigenous peoples. They're indigenous peoples kidnapped from their homelands and forced to work and be exploited within the Americas. They still have indigenous practices, like spiritual practices, Ibanics or Ave African American macular English, quilambismo in Brazil, Santa Aria, like all these spiritual practices, linguistic practices that show our indigenous ties to the African continent. Patois is another one, but that does not mean we are indigenous to this place, and you can't erase a form of settler colonization, which we can get into native peoples here by just ignoring that they're already here.

SPEAKER_03 6:33

I appreciate you making that distinction because yes, I used to think it was fringe, and then it really just started hearing more of it. And I'm doing the research and I'm going, we need to be careful how we travel down this path. Now, you do define yourself or identify yourself as Afro-Indigenous. Can you tell us a little bit about your personal history?

SPEAKER_00 6:52

Yeah, I mean, um it's not complicated in a in one sense.

SPEAKER_03 6:58

But you look like a black man to me. So there's some folk who are like, well, what is he saying?

SPEAKER_00 7:03

Well, first of all, I love being black. Let me put that out there. And I love looking like a black man, and that's how I'm treating the world racially, et cetera. But I'm also citing our chip always as a tribe in the center of Michigan, where Central Michigan University is at in Mount Pleasant, Michigan.

SPEAKER_03 7:17

It's about an hour my first son was born, yes. He used to work there.

SPEAKER_00 7:22

Shout out to CMB.

SPEAKER_03 7:23

Shout out to, yeah, shout out to CMU.

SPEAKER_00 7:25

They would say go chips, and I'm sorry, my family.

SPEAKER_03 7:28

And we'll get into how you feel about us using go chips, but let's get back to your your answer.

SPEAKER_00 7:35

Yeah, and so um it starts really with my um great-grandmother who came from the reservation to Detroit in 1940, and then she met my great-grandfather who's African-American. They started having these Afro-Indigenous children, and I'm a product of that uh longer history of long-standing Afro-Indigenous communities, and it's not unique in one sense, but often so many people focus on the five tribes as being Afro the main Afro-Indigenous peoples. And I always have to tell people there are many Afro-Indigenous peoples like myself who come from different tribal nations and communities. So we're not all a part of the five tribes, and that is Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw Creek, and Seminole. Some of us are from different nations. So that's just a brief personal history.

SPEAKER_03 8:27

And so I don't forget to ask this question how do you feel about Central Michigan University goats using GO chips? Because that is, they are located in Saginaw, Indian Chippewa Atland. Um, it was interesting when I worked at the university, I was actually in charge of um corporate and foundation relations that it seemed like our relationship was very much about how much could we get from the tribe, as we called it, as opposed to how we really served the needs of the tribe, but that's a whole other story. But how do you feel about the use of monikers, names, you know, the Washington Redskins, the CMU Chippewas? What's your take on that? Just curious.

SPEAKER_00 9:11

Yeah, to be very short and clear, Native American mascots are racist and dehumanizing. There's plenty of studies that show us the relationship between dehumanization and the psychological impact it has on children. Stephanie Freiburg, a scholar, uh Northwestern University, have been documenting this for a long time, and Native people have been protesting this forever. On the other hand, this is called a contradiction. I I've had plenty of family members who've gone to Central Michigan University, and they certainly will say fire up chips all the time. Uh, and so that is to say, Native people are not absolved. I don't put any sort of humans or peoples on a pedestal. They could still engage in the concept, but for them it was mostly the school and a reclamation of the phrase fire up chips. It had really nothing to do with its colonial baggage and usage. Now, we could say still say it has a colonial baggage, but that's not how they're using it at all at all.

SPEAKER_03 10:13

Wonder if the same could be said for everybody else at the institution or whether they even give it a thought at all.

SPEAKER_00 10:20

No, I definitely don't think so.

SPEAKER_03 10:21

Yeah. So one of the things that you argue in this book is that anti-blackness and secular colonialism aren't two separate American sins. That they're a single interlocking system. And you really go into detail in the very beginning as to what even motivated you to write this book. Can you go into a little bit more detail about how you came up with these twin foundations of the republic and why you chose to then write this book?

SPEAKER_00 10:47

Well, I was always frustrated from learning American history from uh primary school all the way to some parts of university education, that you would hear about the uh dispossession of Native peoples as like a separate thing. Then you would hear about the enslavement of African peoples and the development of the United States. But rarely, if ever, and hardly ever, did you hear about those things together? And so I wanted to create a book and a narrative that shows how both of these uh particular social, political, economic, and intellectual histories, that is, the foundations of American democracy, are rooted in what? Slavery and colonialism, the dispossession and genocide against indigenous peoples, and I would say the dispossession of African peoples and the exploitation of their labor and the creation of American democracy and building American capitalism. Um, and if we ignore how both of those things happen simultaneously, we do a disservice to our young people who are trying to understand American identity. We're doing a disservice to the American public who knows very little still about the experiences of Native peoples historically and then today. For example, one exercise I use as students uh or giving talks, I'll ask them first, name me 10 Native Americans. Normally, what they ended up doing, they just mentioned Native peoples from the past. Let's say Coca Anis, Geronimo, Sitting Ball. The second question you can ask, where do most Native people live? You get like Arizona, Utah, Oklahoma, etc. Yeah. New Mexico.

SPEAKER_02 12:36

They're right next to you.

SPEAKER_00 12:38

And in one sense, it's not necessarily wrong, but the real answer is 87% of Native people live in cities. Chicago, New York, Detroit, Tulsa, Oklahoma, Phoenix, Arizona, Los Angeles. They live and play in cities all over the country, the majority of people, even as we maintain relationships with our fam on the reservation, or the res, as we might say colloquially.

SPEAKER_03 13:08

So as you bring that, you know, getting a little bit more into what you were just sharing, you use the word dispossession. And I really like to have words unpacked because I think sometimes we get so desensitized into what this actually means. So when you said most people don't really know what Native peoples, indigenous peoples, the first Americans depending on what terminology you want to use, what they experience in this so-called country as we are celebrating 250 years, or some people are anyway. What should people know about the experience of the indigenous people of this land? That is not taught in schools. If you could just take this moment to unpack that a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 14:01

So settler colonialism is very simple. It is Europeans coming to the Americas, dispossessing people, renaming the place from its indigenous name, renaming the place, uh, and attempt to commit genocide against those peoples, even though they don't kill them off successfully. That's the goal. And the goal is for them to stay in place and create a new country. Right. Now, again, they don't completely kill off the native peoples, but they are able to erect a new society. Um, and settler colonialism has happened all over the world in South America, on the African continent, Kenya, Zimbabwe, South Africa, right? New Zealand, Australia, Canada. So they built up a yeah.

SPEAKER_03 14:44

What specific strategies did they use here, though?

SPEAKER_00 14:47

In terms of it's it's the same formula. It's it's not uh the United States is not an exception when it comes to settler colonialism. That's why I mentioned the other ones as well. Yeah, but it's the same strategy: warfare, disease, renaming the place, right? Like these places had indigenous names, but when you take the indigenous names, it becomes uh no longer an indigenous place in one sense, at least by name. Um they put off their resources like the buffaloes, yeah, killing off uh hundreds of thousands of buffaloes, taking their water source, they take the land. And I think most importantly, if people could reflect on if you especially if you went to uh high school in the US, and it could actually be really uh anywhere in the world often, when is the last thing you learned about Native peoples? U.S. high school, often probably late 19th century, and then it sort of teeters off. And you learn very little after that. That is colonization uh in a nutshell. And Dr. King actually mentions this in Why We Can't Wait, a book he published in 1964, and he talks about the original racism happening in the United States was really bad against indigenous peoples. That was the foundation of how it impacted uh everyone else who is not racialized and a minority in this country. The goal here is erasure.

SPEAKER_03 16:12

Yes. Absolutely, which is why so many of us still know so very little about the original peoples. Now, your postscript, like you said, deals with the five tribes, the big ones, right? And their history of enslaving black people, although I've looked at what those numbers look like, including Afro-Indigenous kin. Can you talk about the tension between African Americans, whatever iteration names that we've been called, and indigenous people? And then, of course, for those who fit who have both identities, what has that tension been like? And have there been moments of solidarity and what have those looked like?

SPEAKER_00 17:00

Yeah, I mean, so I want to make this clear. I think some black people believe that there are so many Native peoples who enslaved, even within those five tribes. It was the elite of those tribes who enslaved uh Africans. It wasn't a great amount, but it was significant enough. And if you go look at um the WEPA records when they did all the interviews in the 1930s, some people talked about um the difficulties that they had within uh being enslaved within those tribal nations. Some people might even say the enslavement of black people by native uh people in those tribes was more humane. No, it was not, they're still enslaved. And I have to say to that, too, there were forms of captivity that Native people had already uh engaged with prior to Europeans coming and during the early process of colonization. For example, there was the forms of Native slavery where between 1650 and 1715, thousands of Native peoples were sent down to the Caribbean. Uh, they would capture other Native peoples to it wasn't the issue, it wasn't really for profit for a long time. And then they realized Europeans started paying them more for African slaves. So then it became racialized. So initially it wasn't really race basis, it's just a part of this form of captivity to replace someone they lost in war, etc. I'm sure it wasn't fun for the person who is therefore taken from their uh tribe, but then it became racialized. So it made sense that they would then adopt forms of European slavery, that is the enslavement of Africans over time, because then it became a part of their tribal uh heritage, a part of their uh way of life within that tribe. So their attentions there for sure. They're attention that persists well into the present. Although the Muscogee Creek, I think just uh last summer, I believe gave more rights um to uh the freedmen or people of African descent within their communities. And the Cherokee took uh You had to be Cherokee by Blood out of their constitution. I think when I wrote the postscript was shortly thereafter. So this was 2021.

SPEAKER_01 19:08

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 19:09

Now solidarity. I first want to say Audrey Lord told us a long time ago, solidarity is difficult and not easy to achieve. Right? So I think we just assume because we're both oppressed, therefore we should be in solidarity with one another. And that's not how solidarity works. No, neither can solidarity simply be transactional. You do one thing for me, I do things one for the other. You should support human rights just because it's the right thing to do. Um, and so I have a new book that's come out uh in May of this year called When We Are Can The History and Future of Afro Indigenous Solidarity, where I try to uh examine various moments of solidarity. Thank you. I try to show various moments of solidarity. So uh the poor people's campaign in 1968, led by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Importantly, there were many Native peoples involved in the planning. And even when, you know, after Dr. King got murdered on April 4th, 1968, and they proceeded uh a month later, there were still 400 plus native activist peoples who went to the poor people's campaign. Um, that's one example in 1911 when Charles Eastman and W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles Eastman was a Lakota medical doctor.

SPEAKER_03 20:25

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 20:26

When they went to London for the Universal Racing Congress, which was held in July of 1911, they shared the same platform. Now, history doesn't tell if they shared a beer at a pub or what the conversation, but we do know they were on the same exact agenda. And we do have a record.

SPEAKER_02 20:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:58

But there are like all these, and then the writer uh Rebecca Hall in the uh her graphic novel The Wake, Black Women Led Slave Revolts, shows I think it was 1707 that a native man and a black woman burned down this plantation in New York. Right? So, in other words, I've gave you like three examples across time to show often solidarity is fleeting and it can be momentary. Now, one final example is uh Stokely Carmichael, who has changed his name to Kwame Chore. He consistently showed up in native events, mentioning them in his speeches, writings, saying that what became the United States is indigenous land, and we have to deal with them and center them when it comes to land, property, and remember that history.

SPEAKER_03 21:57

Um, even when you look at the Bacon Rebellion. In the roles that different groups played and how history even looks at the motivations behind those roles. I don't know if that's something you want to unpack for our audience.

SPEAKER_00 22:09

Yeah, I mean, so Bacon's Rebellion happening in uh the 1740s, Nathaniel Bacon, he was a planter in Virginia, um, and he wanted more authority and more land because there are poor whites and dentist servants, both black and white during the time. And historians typically treat this as a moment of great solidarity. And to some extent it was. However, the Susquehanna peoples in Virginia were slaughtered for that solidarity to happen. And I tend to think, and maybe it's ideal perhaps, that there were uh African peoples who just wanted some form of freedom and did not necessarily want to engage in the process of colonization. Because I haven't found like a really solid record to say this was their motivation. But we do know the motivation of Nathaniel Bacon. Uh he wanted more access to land and participated in the slaughtering for sure.

SPEAKER_03 23:06

And so these are some moments where it just seems like can we come together? Like you said, if we are oppressed people, is that enough to make us come together to work collectively against what we could see as maybe a common enemy? But then again, white supremacy and the capitalism always seems to have a way of conscripting people. Um so you devoted real attention to the rise of black power and red power in the 1960s and 70s. What do you what is your take in terms of what each m movement learned from the other? And did their visions of freedom and sub sovereignty converge, diverge? What what how would you evaluate that whole that whole time period?

SPEAKER_00 23:53

So uh I'll start with black power and then I'll bring together. Black power is a moment of black people um trying to express a great sense of self, reclaim racial pride, uh critique American capitalism, and engage and create this sense of a nationalist uh approach to what it means to be black. Uh, and and to be clear, there are also different iterations of black power, and there are many definitions of this as well. Like you might think of the iconic Angela Davis, Afro, like I'm sure many black household people had that black power fist uh pick from back in the day. Um I remember my grandma had I was like, what is this? This is fantastic. Um now red pop. So and you you think of you know Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, um Stoke Carmichael, and so forth. Now, on the other hand, you have Native peoples who began with the formation of the American Indian Movement in Minneapolis in 1968, and they began to model themselves after the Black Panther Party. Remember, the Black Panther Party started simply to protest the brutalization of black people by the police. Similarly, in Minneapolis, you had Native uh people whose many men had been incarcerated, the women who were also involved initially witnessed that. And on Friday, they would go to a band called Indian Bars, and the police would round them up. And so they were tired of the brutality of not doing anything wrong. So they looked at the Panthers and saw, oh, we should do something similar. The key difference here, though, is that Native peoples simply wanted the United States to honor the treaties that they had made. And for the listeners, the United States has violated all 330 plus treaties they've ever made with Native peoples. And there are many that they have not made, that they I should say ratified. They made them wrote them up, but didn't ratify them. So, and I think there was more of a one-way approach to black active for black activists influencing um Native approaches, but not necessarily the other way because indigenous peoples, the unique difference that they have with other uh racialized, minoritized, uh oppressed people in the United States is they have treaty relationships. They're sovereign nations, which is fundamentally different from other communities. It's a both racialized and political class, if you will.

SPEAKER_03 26:19

Which is why you essentially, or I guess one of the reasons you essentially have, at least to some degree, second-class citizenship within um some of the Native American tribes. When you were you were just talking earlier, yeah. Something that we yeah, yeah, please go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 26:38

Native uh Native Americans in general did not become citizens of the United States until um in the fall or summer of 1924. Like my great-grandmother was born in May of 1924, so she was not a U.S. citizen. Um she was not born into US citizenship. So it's in the realm of history still very new. And even black people being citizens is still very new, yes, um uh newish, if you will, within this country.

SPEAKER_03 27:10

That's interesting though, thinking about the fact that people who were trafficked here and uh, you know, and white folk who might maybe migrated here on their own gained citizenship before the actual owners of the land. That is that that is that is absolutely wild at this point. Um, one of the other um things that you bring up in your book is this notion of radical transformation. What do you mean by that and how do you envision that working out? Again, in this time with everything that's happening politically, and even with this celebration of the United States of America at 250. Like, how do you define it? How do you see that playing out today, if at all?

SPEAKER_00 27:56

Yeah, I mean, I think radical uh transformation begins with community and kinship. You don't do anything without a community and being related to kin. Uh in my personal life, I always tell people that how many friends? I don't really have friends. You either become kin or you're just someone I know and talk to randomly. Um but kin, so in my tribe, we had what's called the uh clan system. And my family are bear clan, which historically was the medicine and protection of the people, although I know very little about how plants work. I'm like one of the probably top-tier worst bear clan members or mockwash, we call it people uh around. Um, but it gave you a role within that community. Um and for me, if we were to enact a tribal sovereignty, what would it look like, for example, for tribes wherever black people are at, but they, whatever their clan system or kinship uh system works, what would it look like for them to adopt en masse so we can all live on the land together, learn about the land, and share community? Um transformations against our community. So just last weekend, I was in New York City for this uh Bliss Reclamation Day. So it's on June 20th. So uh shout out to my friend Trevor Smith and Savannah Romero and the Bliss Collective. And Bliss stands for Black Liberation and Indigenous Sovereignty. So it was a moment to challenge the narrative of the 250th anniversary of the United States by bringing all of these uh black and native people together. So we had exhibits, we had uh like a concert, we shared food. It was just a fantastic moment and the possibilities, and again, remember earlier I said solidarity can be momentarily fleeting. This was a moment of black and indigenous solidarity and just having fun. I often think we think, you know, we have to go out protests, which I do think we all need to go protest. You also need to have joyous moments of solidarity, it shouldn't always come about because there's a tragedy. You have to have joy in the same manner and fun, just as much as you're engaging in protests to get better rights to be treated like a human within this uh remaining settler colonial democratic society.

SPEAKER_03 30:20

Well, you keep bringing up democratic society, but by your very definition, has the United States of America ever been a democratic society?

SPEAKER_00 30:28

No, that's why I um reference it with settler democratic society.

SPEAKER_01 30:33

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:33

I mean, the the the question though is legitimate, and I have seed in this. Is the United States a legitimate nation state? And I think we don't deal with that question enough. Because if it's a settler colonial nation state, fundamentally rooted in anti-blackness, anti-indigenous, what makes it legitimate?

SPEAKER_03 31:00

Yeah, I was gonna say, yeah, how do you answer that? Because supposedly supposedly this is the country that um is the greatest democracy in the history of the world and is the one that teaches the rest of the world how to be democratic.

SPEAKER_00 31:14

And the contradictions just you can't uh yeah, I mean, well, no, it's not. You can't have a democracy with the largest military footprint in the world, spreading democracy, military inventions, funding wars all around the world, uh, installing dictatorships in other countries when they have leftist democratically elected governments. You can't kidnap uh heads of state like they did in Venezuela, Maduro, like uh illegally creating a war in the like they're doing to Cuba. Cuba as well. Like you can't, these things are illegal under international law, by the way.

SPEAKER_03 31:52

You can't blow up boats in the middle of the in the ocean with no no due process, nothing. Yeah. Well, you can.

SPEAKER_00 32:01

Right. And to be fair, this isn't not um this is not necessarily exceptional under this particular administration either. And I think people ignore that.

SPEAKER_02 32:12

This is true.

SPEAKER_00 32:13

They do this often. That is how the United States has existed um from at least the 8th 20th century, right? And and um, you know, whatever they do to Native people. Yes, whatever they do to Native people and black people, they replicate it and do to other nations. That's it, that's the history of the United States and American democracy. Whatever they do to us over here, they replicate and do the same exact things elsewhere.

SPEAKER_03 32:44

In fact, when you were saying that the United States has broken every single treaty um with the Native peoples, I'm thinking, I haven't done the research, but I'm going to bet some good money on America has the United States of America has broken every single agreement it's made with any non-white group. And now we see even with NATO, with their so-called kin. Um so that's that's that's really interesting. Um, something else that you cover in the book, and by the way, everyone go out and get your copy and then of course get his latest book. I think these are just issues that we don't talk enough about, even though I have a master's degree from Ohio State, the Ohio the Ohio State University in um African American Studies, we don't really delve into certain aspects of our history in this country. Um so reading your book, reading Gerald Horn, you know, Black and Brown, and there's so many other texts as well, and and you referenced um Martin Luther King, but you also see um even within the black activist tradition, some of us making comments that reflect that we also have been indoctrinated by the system that we're in. Um but one of the things that you talk about here is I would call it again the tension between Indigenous peoples fighting for sovereignty, whereas maybe we are fighting for civil rights. How can you break that down for our audience? And then are there times when it converges and how do we create more opportunities for convergence? Because right now, like we are all catching hell, including poor white folk who keep voting against their own interests.

SPEAKER_00 34:32

Yeah, I mean, so this formula of Native people fighting, I said often Native people simply want the United States to honor the treaties that they made, which they have violated. Black people often just want basic civil rights, which are promised in the aftermath of the Civil War, uh, which they fought for those rights and reconstruction. Now, the issue with sometimes both of them actually, and I want to quickly say that there are some black people who tried to imagine themselves as free to gain freedom outside of the U.S. nation state, outside of the US structure as well. From the Black Panther Party to the African Blood Brotherhood in the 1910s, Cyril Briggs and all those people. They tried to imagine freedom outside of that.

SPEAKER_03 35:15

Even those who migrated back to Africa. Yeah, those who along with the you know, the colonization, the American colonization colonization society.

SPEAKER_00 35:23

To Liberia, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 35:24

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 35:24

Uh Malcolm X being a great uh archetype of that, uh exemplifying, like trying to think beyond the United States and the um the nation state. I have to say though, um even notion of the tribal sovereignty though can just be very liberal and neoliberal. For example, in uh July 1970, President Richard Nixon, tricky dick as they called him, he was very tricky. He uh has issued this proclamation of ushering what we call the red power movement from the government's perspective. And remember, his notion of black power was just black capitalism. That getting more representation, getting more black people, businesses, etc. That doesn't work. No, it's never worked. We we had a black president, uh, we had Claire Thomas, etc. etc.

SPEAKER_03 36:14

You mean we're not better off? We are not sacrilegious.

SPEAKER_00 36:18

I know, I know. Um, so people like reading misremembering uh even Obama's sermon office, uh, he can be cool, but that doesn't mean he didn't engage in practice, and nor did he necessarily benefit black people. That's a whole nother conversation. Um, so even notion of tribal sovereignty can just be neoliberal, focus on private enterprise. That's why uh when someone says honor the treaties, when they say we need more tribal sovereignty, my next question is what kind are you talking about? I think even that we need more traction and conversation around that as well.

SPEAKER_03 36:55

All right, so I'm gonna ask you this question because anti-blackness like runs the thread that runs through this entire book. How do you see that playing out in terms of relationships between Indigenous people, African, African Americans, Afro-Indigenous people who are I hate to use intersectionality because it's like you can't section me out? I mean, like I'm I'm a black woman, I'm a mother, I'm everything. Like, what part is black and what part is woman? So I I that term doesn't necessarily work for me, but I understand. Um, so how do you see anti-blackness running through that relationship? And while you're unpacking that, I'm gonna come back and ask you how do you see that running through African Americans? Because like everybody got Indian in them, and yet we don't.

SPEAKER_00 37:38

Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah, so uh there's I'll just say this there's anti-blacks in many Native communities, nations, etc. I've experienced it personally. I know plenty of Afro-Indigenous peoples, people who just black could have experiences, whether that's in uh the academy, the workplace, uh working in nonprofits. Like it's still random. The one caveat is simply that Native peoples are not immune to the anti-blackness that is foundational to the United States either. Right? Like they're just not. Um they see the same images and they're taught the same thing. You do not want to be black in this country. Um, so anti-blackness, it's everywhere, and native people are not immune to that. At the same time, uh, indigenous erasure, which I would consider a form of anti-native sentiment, uh, even perhaps native racism, is for example, you scan the crowd of uh the Washington football team formerly, the Cleveland Indians, there's a lot of brothers and sisters in there too. We gotta keep it a buck there, like dressed in you know with a head gear, etc. And that's to say black people can be oppressed and racialized and discriminated against, but that's a product of a settler colonial society where you don't even, it doesn't even come to your mind, wait a minute, I feel experienced racism. Why would I do the same thing? Because they're not taught about Native people and Native issues, and often perhaps don't hang out or know any Native peoples.

SPEAKER_03 39:21

And so when you look at anti-blackness within our, within, when I say our within the African American population, so you know, one of the things that I'm thinking of is how it's not a generality, but it seems like people are some people are more comfortable claiming their Native American ness, if you will, but discounting their Africanness. So when you started off with we are indigenous or African Americans are indigenous to Africa, there are some people who look like you and I who will fight you on that, but will very quickly embrace but I am indigenous to the Americas.

SPEAKER_00 40:04

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a simple explanation uh of a complicated history. It's that some people were raised their entire lives being uh Native, and they understand what it means to experience anti-blackness because they certainly feel and experience it, but they're taught that they're only NATO. Um a good example of this is the case loving versus Virginia. Uh Mildred Loving was actually native, and she identified as that and did not like the portrayals of herself as being a black woman. She identified as uh native actually or indigenous. Uh but the Hollywood portrayal, like the one with Layla Roshan, and then I think the subsequent one, I forgot who the uh actor was. But on the one hand, it could just be simply internalized hate, and I think for some people it is, because they understand you get different rights if you're treated as a tribal nation. You know, you might hear an N-word here or there, but you get different rights treated as a tribal nation than you do if you're treated as an African American, even though you might still have experienced racism. Like for uh a good example of that is uh the Lumbee tribe in North Carolina. Now, I love my Lumbies that have met, they're all really dope humans. Uh, but historically, um, and Melinda Mainalowry, a lumby historian, has written about this uh years ago now, that some they would adapt sometimes white supremacist stances to try to protect this notion of we are native and not black to for protection. It is a strange way to garner protection, but that is the context of it. Like just like native peoples engaging in the practice of slavery, but trying to protect their land, quickly eroding land and race within a quickly developing United States, but at what cost is that? And who benefits and who does not benefit from that.

SPEAKER_03 42:14

And and and this policing of who really is considered a member of the tribe and who isn't and how that ties into benefits, you know, in the citizenship within the tribes. Now, you do have, I'm not gonna go into the chapter on pop culture, but I do encourage people to go read it because you know what? I will be one of those old heads on that N-word conversation. I would also push back big time against um your commentary on the hot tap folk. Uh, there's a way that you you you uh phrase that. Um but but I I understand where you're coming from, so we don't have to unpack that today. But for people who are curious, yeah, go go go get the book. But I do want to talk about your chapter on policing and justice. Um, how do you see the cultural um state functioning as a continuation of both of these histories of anti-blackness and um slavery and dispossession? How do you see that being a continuation right now?

SPEAKER_00 43:18

Well, I think the police as an institution are foundationally anti-people within the United States, and it is roots begin with slave catching and patrolling and forms of incarceration, native peoples. That's really the roots of policing in the United States, and all the data shows policing doesn't prevent crime, it doesn't reform anything that's related to doesn't it does not know.

SPEAKER_03 43:49

So you mean when when talking about our brother, um Barack Obama, you mean when he allowed so the militarization of the police force to help? Provide more security for us that what that one is?

SPEAKER_00 44:03

No, no. And people like to ignore that Black Lives Matter and many of the issues did happen under the Obama presidency.

unknown 44:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 44:13

Like these things did happen. So policing doesn't prevent crime. It doesn't really benefit communities. I mean, we've seen a reduction even now in the city of Chicago under Mayor Brent, uh, Mayor Brendan Johnson. Um, even a reduction in crime and violent crimes, especially in New York City under Mayor Lodan Mamdani as well.

SPEAKER_03 44:37

The socialists.

SPEAKER_00 44:39

The socialists, yes. He's a democratic socialist, um, engaging in form of reform, but he's very popular in social media savvy. And I, you know, I like it for the most part. Um, and all New York has been winning so much since he's been there. But policing, too.

SPEAKER_03 44:55

He's making them he's making New York great again.

SPEAKER_00 44:58

He is, he is. Uh he's so charming as well.

SPEAKER_03 45:02

He is, he is.

SPEAKER_00 45:02

Um, but shout out to Brandon Johnson in Chicago too. Yes. Um and the brother in Baltimore as well. But so policing, like everyone's like, well, what are we gonna do for safety? There are alternatives to that, but you first have to dismantle in our minds why policing is important in matters in the first place. Communities can deal with uh such things, like even mental health crises, they're not trained to deal with the mental health crises. Uh so like we have to figure out different ways of policing. And I think one of the things in that chapter I talked about is the relationship between martial arts schools and them training the police. Um they have never held any responsibility for like if you're choking out Eric Garner, where did you learn the chokehold? You're learning jujitsu, you're learning Filipino martial arts, Fakali, uh stick and knife fighting. So they have some responsibility to stop engaging in the practice of training um police officers. I mean, even something like much martial arts, it's just a cesspool of white supremacy, uh homophobia, and all sorts of nasty things. However, as Malcolm X said a long time ago, if you're gonna get some freedom, I'm paraphrasing here, you need some judo, some karate, today some Brazilian jiu-jitsu, some cali, some Mui Chai, you need all those things for your fitness, your mental health, and in case you gotta defend yourself against a white supremacist, which is very likely to happen given how violence things have escalated over the last uh several years.

SPEAKER_03 46:55

Yes. Well, again, I'm really grateful that you're taking the time to have this extensive conversation with us. And for those of you watching, um I know many of you listen on the radio. Thank you so much for your support. Those of you watching, you know what to do. Like, subscribe, share, all of that stuff for the algorithm. Leave your questions because who knows, Dr. Mays might just come back and um answer some of your questions. Um, as this country is getting ready to celebrate 250 years of independence, and from your comments, I take it you didn't go to the major UFC celebration for the president's birthday. Um, I didn't think so. But what do you think the official commemorations are most likely to get wrong, leave out, or sanitize about Afro Indigenous history?

SPEAKER_00 47:44

Well, I don't well, they're definitely not going to include Afro Indigenous history at all.

SPEAKER_02 47:48

At all. That's not happening.

SPEAKER_00 47:51

No women's history, no queer history. They're not they're including none of these histories, no Asian American history, none of that. Um what I do think that they'll miss is that this is they'll say something like, This is the greatest democracy in the world. Um, this was like one of the most important democracies, the first one. So what will they miss in the West? They'll miss Haiti. Now, Haiti happened after, but there were plenty of forms of revolution happening in Haiti around the same exact time, and it terrified uh many of those uh Euro-American founders.

SPEAKER_01 48:25

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 48:26

Um, they're going to miss Alexei de Tocqueville, uh, who's a French aristocrat who came over several months in the United States and published in uh 1835, Democracy in America. Now, what he says in that he has a chapter called on the three races, and he basically concludes based on how white people treat uh Native peoples, based on how they treat uh African peoples, he did not see how they're going to live on this developing notion of democracy, this political system on this land together. He concluded, I don't see how that's going to happen. And so, you know, who knows if they even mention democracy in America? And often uh when people read, I just kind of ignore that whole chapter and talk about the other political factions he talks about. But they'll ignore all those. They'll mention the Declaration of Independence and how it says merciless Indian savages.

SPEAKER_03 49:18

I was gonna say, I don't think that most Americans have you have actually read the Declaration of Independence. Because I was going through it with some students that I met who are not going, is this like it's the contradictions are insane. Like you everything you're accusing the King of England of doing, you are doing simultaneously. Like make it make sense, as the folk will say. Please carry on.

SPEAKER_00 49:44

Yes. I mean, even the proclamation of 1763, when King George says you can't move, you know, west any further, they were so upset about that because they wanted to colonize more land.

unknown 49:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 49:55

Even though the king was already engaged in colonial practices. Um, you know, they'll miss all those very important things, they'll miss the history of resistance, Matt Turner's rebellion in 1830. Um, they'll miss you know, they'll quote Dr. King's the content of our character. When he's talking about reparationally getting our check, they'll miss all that. His critiques on the war in Vietnam. Um, they'll miss Harriet Tubman, even though the CIA tried to, I forgot what they tried to do with her a couple years ago. I'm like, why is the CIA celebrating Harriet Tubman? Uh she was a spy, but for black freedom, not for whatever white supremacy projects the CIA is engaging in.

SPEAKER_03 50:34

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 50:35

Um, so they're gonna miss all these important things of resistance, um, and the ongoing resistance that black and native people continue to have, which you know, they have criminalized. There were even, I think, in Texas, some activists who just got like several sentences, but you know, some got like a hundred years. This is the state of activism, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 50:58

70 years for having a pamphlet, I think, in his a book in his car because his wife was at a protest and he's part of a book club or something of that nature. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 51:12

So, you know, even the World Cup, which I'm uh watching, even right before I got on here, I was watching a match, right? You know, they made Haiti take off with a celebration of the Haitian Revolution, but they allow the United States can to continue to wear stars and stripes.

SPEAKER_02 51:30

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 51:31

This is a global issue of um celebration that ignores resistance of minority peoples who continue to exist because of that resistance to settler colonialism uh and slavery in its aftermath.

SPEAKER_03 51:50

So your conclusion is titled The Possibilities for Afro-Indigenous Futures. So after everything that this book documents, what gives you hope? What does the shared future of black and indigenous liberation look like look like to you practically, given what you shared from Sister Audrey Lorde?

SPEAKER_00 52:12

I mean, practically, hope uh as uh Huey Riley, as Healy would say, Huey Freeman and the Buddha, I guess hope is irrational. But I think it needs to be irrational in a sense. Because given the violence and major forms of anti-resistance methods that this uh country has used and continues to use, you have to have hope. And my hope is rooted in history. All the people who came before me, big and small, um, every thing, every farming tool that slave people is broke, every every sense of cattle that uh Geronimo and his people slaughtered and and uh I won't say stole but reclaimed, scaring off settlers off of the land. All those forms of resistance to me give me hope that there are ways that we can continue to fight to build community, kinship for our futures. But it takes small moments of time and meeting with each other on the land. We can have do it bliss did in New York City at those moments. We can all go camping together, we could go watch a movie together, we can read books together, but they all start on community before we move into practical guide for our collective Afro-Indigenous futures.

SPEAKER_03 53:35

I think that's really powerful what you just said, the importance of building community. Because, of course, the other major propaganda I would say about this nation is if we can call it that, the settler state, is this idea of individualism, you know, individuality and everybody is, you know, like the Lone Ranger. And I'm not sure that we're building community in the same ways that we used to.

SPEAKER_00 53:57

No, we, you know, individualism is just a uh capitalist approach to ignoring collective solidarity and efforts. Um, you know, last summer, I'll give an example. I went camping with um all these amazing people of color, and I do not go camping, I'm just a city boy all the way. But I was like, I'll go, why not? Like, I'll do it. It's only a couple of days. Um they gave me my tent sleeping bag, and shout out to Alice, a dope black woman. I was I have no idea what I'm doing. And she put up my tent for me. Now, I try to work on my you know, masculinity and patriarchy and be positive about it. Yeah, but it it hurts your ego, but then you realize you have to rely on the entire community. So when we're going hiking, you know, as people are teaching teaching you about plants, what are raspberries you can pick, they're telling you to watch out for this. And I was like, oh, look at raspberry. And just 10 minutes earlier, someone had told me, this brown woman, that oh, those are poisonous as I was about to pick it, right? Yes. In other words, keep PhDs out of leading revolution and keep them out of out of nature as well. We're not quick learners, but it it it just reminded me that when you are living on the land in a community with people, you're forced to rely on one each other one another's expertise. Yes, yes, and that is important, and you have to do it as a community.

SPEAKER_03 55:24

Yes. And I think to the point you were making earlier about representation, one of the reasons I feel that we can have representatives and yet not see progress is when those representatives are caught off from the community. Like you have to still be intricately engaged with those that you claim to represent so that you really understand what their concerns and issues are. But there's just so much that you have shared. So, any final words for any of our listeners on this book? Maybe the one major thing you would like everybody to get from this book, if you can think of one, because there are so many that we haven't covered.

SPEAKER_00 56:04

For me, go to your local library and whether you get my book or not, it's completely up to you. But go to local library and pick out and read books on black and native history. It's so important, and stop using AI.

SPEAKER_03 56:19

Stop using AI. Get back in touch with the land. That is one of the things that will free us. Thank you so much for your time for um the effort that you're putting into sharing these, doing this research and sharing this work and at least getting us to think critically. We don't always have to agree, but to engage and to think critically about these things. And the next time you guys are going camping, call me. I'm I'm pretty good with plants. Um can't set up my tent. I'm I'm good on the plant part. I can kill some stuff for you, but I can't set up my tent yet. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us here at Rethinking Freedom.