In Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, widely considered a foundational text of the Indigenous Sovereignty Movement (Temin Reference Temin2017), Vine Deloria, Jr. devoted an entire chapter, as well as several asides, to consideration of “The Red and the Black” or of how to understand the distinct and related circumstances of Indigenous peoples and descendants of enslaved African people in the United States.Footnote 1 He argued against both collapsing understandings of distinct historical situations into a singular analysis and treating them as incomparable (Deloria Reference Deloria1969, 193). At the same time, he stated unequivocally that Indigenous activists, among whom he clearly counted himself, were most sympathetic to Black power movements rather than those that strove for civic inclusion. This was because the former used the language of peoplehood, nationalism, and self-determination and urged “peoples to find their homeland and to channel their psychic energies through their land into social and economic reality” (Deloria Reference Deloria1969, 179). He elaborated: Indians could not believe that Black Americans wanted to be like white ones—something whites would never allow anyway—since white culture depended on the exploitation of land, people, and life itself, manifesting an obsession with the novel and the faddish to mask its basis in destruction rather than creation (Deloria Reference Deloria1969, 180). Deloria concluded that Black people would need time to develop their roots, to create their sacred places, and to understand the mysteries of themselves, their history, and their purpose (Deloria Reference Deloria1969, 188). Processes for doing so might have been accelerated and strengthened had Black U.S.-Americans been placed on reservations. From there, he suggested, they would have interacted directly with a federal government that would have had to recognize their status at the Constitutional level and their own elected leaders would have been recognized by federal agencies (Deloria Reference Deloria1969, 195). Such an arrangement, Deloria concluded, would have allowed Black people, as had been the case with Indians, to withdraw from U.S.-American society without the alluring, but ultimately distracting, façade of integration (Deloria Reference Deloria1969).
In what follows, we highlight a specific historical moment—the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries—of post-Emancipation, New World Black political thought.Footnote 2 We focus on four figures and five texts—Alexander Crummell's “The Destined Superiority of the Negro,” The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, Anna Julia Cooper's A Voice from the South, and Frances Harper's Iola Leroy and “Enlightened Motherhood”—because they reflect a time period when a critical mass of African-American writing about Native Americans emerged and gained resonance (Cantiello Reference Cantiello2011; Page Reference Page2011; Zackodnik Reference Zackodnik2011).
Crummell, Garvey, Cooper, and Harper's work is significant on two additional fronts. On the one hand, their scholarship provides firm evidence that calls for a particular kind of Black-Indigenous relations—one that foregrounds Blacks’ need for and right to exercise self-determination—long predated Deloria's later, twentieth-century argument for the same. On the other hand, Crummell, Garvey, Cooper, and Harper's writings provide a cautionary tale regarding how late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Black political thinkers employed Native political experience to make sense of their own. Put more specifically, these scholars articulated a Lockean-inspired, patriarchally informed, Christian approach to Black self-determination—one which led them to conclude that while Native Americans and African Americans shared an experience of racism, it was only the latter group who were willing and able to determine their own destiny.
Section one of this essay, “Four New World Black Arguments,” details a core theme in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Africana scholarship—that while African Americans and Native Americans both experienced conquest and colonization, the former were superior because they were fully realized moral beings capable of resisting racism in all of its gendered and other complex manifestations. In section two of the essay, “A Gendered Turn: Anna Julia Cooper and Francis Harper,” we illuminate the social and political circumstances in which Crummell, Garvey, Cooper, and Harper asserted this particular conceptualization of relations between African Americans and Native Americans. Our focus includes but is not limited to the expansion of federally funded boarding schools for Indigenous children and the rise of Jim Crow. We move on to highlight what contemporary Africana scholars can learn from the Black intellectuals we examine—that African Americans internalize racist understandings not only of themselves but also of other non-white groups. We cite as evidence their erroneous invocation of Indigenous peoples as “vanishing” and thus incapable of complex political maneuverings. We end the essay by interrogating what the thinkers we analyze reveal about the potential for building progressive coalitions among contemporary African Americans and Native Americans. The answer is that such coalitions are possible when African Americans reject a settler-colonial grammar of erasure and, instead, intertwine their fates with still-present Indigenous struggles for self-determination in the Americas and beyond.
FOUR NEW WORLD BLACK ARGUMENTS
Divine Preparation and Its Absence: Alexander Crummell
Among the most influential members of the global Black intelligentsia in his time, Alexander Crummell (1818–1898) was born free and educated in abolitionist schools. He earned a bachelor's degree from Cambridge University, served as a professor at Liberia College, advocated for a Black Christian republic in West Africa, and founded the American Negro Academy to cultivate Black male intellectual leaders (Gordon Reference Gordon2008). Most important, for the purposes of this essay, was Crummell's conviction that the suffering of Indigenous peoples in the United States had no redemptive power or larger divine purpose.
In conveying this argument, Crummell readily admitted that both African Americans and Indigenous peoples had been made “servile” to Europeans or shared an experience of colonial conquest and colonization. Crummell was most concerned, however, with demonstrating that what distinguished African Americans from their Native American counterparts was their response to European domination. To this end, he explained that unlike the “stolid Indian,” enslaved Africans remained pliant without losing their distinctiveness, yielded to and flowed with circumstances and events rather than being crushed by them, and adopted excellence, including European excellence, wherever they found it, by assimilating its dimensions with their own. The purported result was a new generation of African Americans whose talents included serving as soldiers, preachers, mechanics, and artists. Crummell assumed, in short, that in sharp contrast to the “downward, unprogressive Indian,” “the negro race” had long had an “imitative disposition” that facilitated its upward “aspiration” (Crummell Reference Crummell and Moses1992, 202).
Crummell posited two reasons for this state of affairs. The first was that Native Americans were excluded from the divine history of civilization that linked Africans in the Americas to Greeks and Romans and Saxons before them (Táíwò Reference Táíwò2018). Indeed, for Crummell, Native Americans belonged to the class of people, including but not limited to ancient Egyptians and Assyrians, that God crushes. It is thus unsurprising that when they reached America, Europeans encountered already “decaying population[s]” and constitutions comprised of pagans in a state of moral and physical stagnation—all of whom were destined for inevitable extinction. It was, Crummell concluded, as if a “virus had entered and vitiated” Native Americans’ whole “nature” rendering them like trees with rotten roots, easily felled (Crummell Reference Crummell and Moses1992, 195).
The second reason was that Africans belonged to a very different group of people—those whom God offers divine schooling because they possessed spiritual virtues that could be cultivated through certain correctives. Crummell argued, more specifically, that God had long concluded that enslaved Africans’ vitality, plasticity, receptivity, capacity for imitation, devotion, fondness for family life, and devotion made them worth “saving.” Was sharing these attributes sufficient evidence of how to interpret African enslavement? Crummell's answer was a definitive “yes.” Negro enslavement, on his account, did not inaugurate a process of extinction but instead initiated a divine schooling aimed at a larger destiny. After all, even though repeated tempests had struck African people, they had remained peculiarly vital. Indeed, in some places, Crummell argued, Black people were physically and intellectually superior to their ancestors of three hundred years before. In short, the trans-Atlantic slave trade and “thralldom since 1620” were neither retribution nor vengeance but, instead, evidence of both Africans’ flexibility and capacity for imitation and of God's consequent interest in cultivating an already distinctive and worthy form of Black spirit (Crummell Reference Crummell and Moses1992, 203).
To be sure, Crummell's earlier writings were anything but complimentary of Africans. Indeed, he argued, in what could be taken directly from John Locke's Second Treatise of Government, that “if the white man, with a keen eye, a cunning hand, and a wise practicalness, is enabled to appropriate [the earth] with skill and effect, it is his; God gives it to him, and he has a right to seek and to search for a multiplication of it” (Crummell Reference Crummell1862, 231). Crummell, however, did not reject Africans’ human worth. He instead suggested that a particular historical contingency had denied them the opportunity to change their situation by borrowing, on their own terms, what was excellent in others. He wrote:
I know, indeed, that the fact [of the universal prevalence of benightedness through all Africa] is often contrasted with the advance of both Europe and Asia in enlightenment; and the inference drawn, that is, of negro inferiority… But you will remember that the civilization of all races has been conditioned on contact. It is the remark of a great German historian… “There is not in history the record of a single indigenous civilization; there is nowhere, in any reliable document, the report of any people lifting themselves up out of barbarism” (Crummell Reference Crummell1862, 107).
The two-fold message here is evident. There was a larger purpose to Africans’ transformation via the trans-Atlantic slave trade—namely, that their coerced movement away from a place to which they were indigenous and consequent creolization ultimately rendered them a higher iteration of human being. Furthermore, unlike their Native American counterparts, enslaved Africans became modernized and civilized not because they became like Europeans but because they shared with Europe a historical disposition to adoption and adaptation the conditions for which were provided through historical experiences of forced contact.
Extinction as a Real Possibility: Marcus Mosiah Garvey
Jamaican Marcus Garvey's (1877–1940) early overseas travels led him to conclude that the exploitation of African-descended people was global, that Britons’ readily embraced democracy at home but autocratic, colonial rule abroad, and that this contradictory reality underscored a rising Black nationalism in the “mother-country.” By the mid-1920s, Garvey had established the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which framed Black people as a dispersed but sizable nation with real political power, the newspaper The Negro World, various UNIA-owned businesses, and a Black shipping line to transport goods and people throughout the African diaspora (Gordon Reference Gordon2008).
Under the auspices of the UNIA, Garvey argued that continued and widespread Black suffering was proof that founding, aspirational documents like the U.S. Constitution were not written for Black subjects. Instead, it was “sheer accident” that Black people were now “fellow citizens” with descendants of whites who legally encoded rights solely for themselves (Garvey Reference Garvey2009, 31). The same was true of Black prosperity—to the extent that it existed, it was purely accidental to a situation designed by non-Blacks preoccupied with their own economic well-being. A key example, Garvey explains, was World War I “when colored men were employed in different occupations, not because they were wanted, but because they were filling the places of men of other races who were not available at that time” (Garvey Reference Garvey2009, 31). For Garvey, these realities meant that Black people could not depend on whites for their continued existence.
We are most interested in Garvey's related presumption that Native Americans represented a cautionary tale of settler-colonial extraction and extinction that Blacks, including Black leaders, should heed. Garvey's argument, plainly put, was that if he and his Black contemporaries took no interest in the higher development of Africa, future historians would reveal “that the black man once inhabited Africa, just as the North American Indian once inhabited America” (Garvey Reference Garvey2009, 37). For Garvey then the dominant narrative about Indigenous people is a simple and sad one—that “When the Colonists of America desired possession of the land they saw that a weak aboriginal race was in their way. What did they do? They got hold of them, killed them, and buried them underground” (Garvey Reference Garvey2009, 40).
Garvey consequently implored Blacks to recognize two realities. The first reality was that the history of the colonization of the Americas, even if not pursued as purposeful slaughter, was a useful indication of what was possible—that Europeans could and would turn to Africa in an ever expanding pursuit of limited natural resources. This was so, Garvey emphasized, because when a strong race sees a weaker one as remotely endangering their happiness, comfort, or potential pleasure and profit, the former will do what is necessary to remove the interference. In Garvey's own words:
The strong will always live at the expense of the weak. This rush for territory, this encroachment on lands, is only a desire of the strong races, especially the white race, to get hold of those portions and bits of land necessary for their economic existence, knowing well, that, in another two hundred years, there will not be enough supplies in the world for all of its inhabitants. The weaker peoples must die. At present Negroes are the weakest people and if we do not get power and strength now we shall be doomed to extermination (Garvey Reference Garvey2009, 34).
In sum, since imperialism is a core feature of the Euromodern world, the treatment of peoples indigenous to the Americas offered a guide for what to expect anywhere coveted resources existed.
The second reality was that if African Americans did not want to duplicate Native Americans’ supposed story of decimation and concomitant status as creatures of the past, they had to develop forms of political power that would enable them to become full-fledged members of the present who could reckon with the future. Black political power, in other words, necessarily involved obtaining exactly what Indigenous people purportedly lacked. To this end, Garvey encouraged Blacks, in words that resonate with Deloria's later ones, to concentrate their political energies on forging “a closer kinship, to a closer love of self, because it is only through this appreciation of self will we be able to rise to that higher life that will make us not an extinct race in the future, but a race of men fit to survive” (Garvey Reference Garvey2009, 40).
What this “closer kinship” meant, in practice, was working to establish a cohesive base nation with a government that commanded respect or Blacks “building up for themselves a great nation in Africa” (Garvey Reference Garvey2009, 40). Garvey's argument here was that without a powerful Africa redeemed from the hands of colonists and functioning as an actual sovereign nation or set of sovereign nations, no individual successes or small group political advances (such as obtaining the right to vote or generating some capital) would in fact protect global Black people from mob violence and mob rule. Garvey assumed, too, that Blacks would escape the fate of Native American peers if and when they demonstrated, to themselves and others, that they were not anything like the “savage” Indian of the white imaginary. On this point, Garvey called upon fellow Blacks to reject racist “propaganda about Africa” which cast the continent as “a despised place, inhabited by savages, and cannibals, where no civilized human being should go” and to recognize, instead, that: (1) Africa had cities and civilizations when Europeans were still nomads and cannibals and (2) that any assertion to the contrary only legitimized “colonial expansion for the white nations of the world” (Garvey Reference Garvey2009, 34).
It is important to note that while Garvey described Indigenous peoples as weak, there was no political or moral condemnation in this assessment. The conclusion simply followed from what he thought had transpired. We should, however, stop to consider a basic historical point: While it is true that efforts to dispossess Native people were well underway in Garvey's lifetime (sometimes through use of Black soldiers), Indigenous people were far from vanquished or gone, weak or made primitive. Indeed, they were fighting bravely as Garvey wrote, offering living examples of anticolonial resistance. Put another way, even as he explicitly suggested otherwise, Garvey appeared, much like Crummell, to position Black people as global actors through framing them as better than Indigenous people who occupied the bottom of the racial order. Garvey ultimately did this by thinking Native Americans into the past in order to frame New World Black people as the present and future.
A GENDERED TURN: ANNA JULIA COOPER AND FRANCIS HARPER
We now turn to Anna Julia Cooper's A Voice from the South (Reference Cooper1892) which is widely regarded as one of the earliest Black feminist texts and to Francis Harper's Iola Leroy (Harper Reference Harper1893b) one of the first novels penned by a Black woman. Born free, Frances Harper (1825–1911), who published her first poem at age twenty, was a prominent public speaker, suffragist, abolitionist, novelist, and co-founder of the National Association of Colored Women. Harper's Iola Leroy is the story of a young woman who, upon discovering that she is not white but multi-racial, embraces her African heritage and strives to improve Blacks’ well-being. Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964) was born the enslaved daughter of a white landowner. She later became a prominent feminist, anti-racist activist, pan-Africanist, high school educator, and the fourth African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. Cooper uses A Voice from the South to argue that a unique cadre of Black women possessed the qualities necessary to uplift the race and the U.S.-American nation as a whole.
As is the case with Crummell and Garvey, Harper and Cooper assumed that Native Americans and Blacks shared an experience of racism and that the former were racially inferior to the latter. There is, however, an important distinction between the Africana male theorists we have discussed so far and Harper and Cooper. Unlike their male peers, Harper and Cooper presume that Native Americans are inferior because they lack what “civilized” Black ladies purportedly possess—the skills needed to help victims of racism recognize and challenge their oppression.
Envisioning Black Ladyship
Let us begin by deciphering Cooper's and Harper's understanding of who qualified as a lady. For Cooper, such a person was “quiet and unobtrusive in her manner,” “simple and inconspicuous in her dress,” and someone who would not be “signaled out for any marked consideration” in a “gathering of ordinarily well-bred and dignified individuals” (Cooper Reference Cooper1892, 40). A lady, moreover, could be Black. Hence, Cooper's insistence on rejecting “that supercilious caste spirit in America which cynically assumes ‘A Negro woman cannot be a lady’” (Cooper Reference Cooper1892, 12). Harper concurred. Her reference point was Iola whose male suitor described her as “one of the most refined and lady-like women I ever saw…self-respecting without being supercilious; quiet, without being dull… a Southern lady, whose education and manners stamp her as a woman of fine culture and good breeding” (Harper Reference Harper1893b, 53).
Cooper and Harper argued, more explicitly, that Black ladies were well-positioned to resist racism because they, unlike Native Americans, possessed certain qualities that made them socially refined and morally upstanding and therefore capable of elevating others. These purported qualities were an expression of their Christian faith that enabled them to “whisper just the needed suggestion or the almost forgotten truth” regarding “changes on those deeper interests which make for permanent good” (Cooper Reference Cooper1892, 64). Harper similarly linked Iola's Christianity to her ability to foster righteousness in others: “When the dens of vice are spreading their snares for the feet of the tempted and inexperienced [Iola's] doors are freely opened… She thinks it is better to have stains on her carpet than stains on their souls through any neglect of hers” (Harper Reference Harper1893b, 216).
Equally important, Cooper contended, was that Black ladies were educated, or otherwise socially refined, in ways that made them “trained” and “efficient” in exercising their moral authority over others (Cooper Reference Cooper1892, 35). Harper likewise emphasized that Iola used her education to teach other Black women about how to succeed in caregiving and other traditionally respectable feminine pursuits. The glee with which Harper described Iola's married life is thus unsurprising:
Soon after Iola had settled in C—she quietly took her place in the Sunday-school as a teacher, and in the church as a helper. She was welcomed by the young pastor, who found in her a strong and faithful ally. Together they planned meetings for the especial benefit of mothers and children… In lowly homes and windowless cabins her visits are always welcome. Little children love her. Old age turns to her for comfort, young girls for guidance, and mothers for counsel. Her life is full of blessedness (Harper Reference Harper1893b, 215).
Finally, Harper and Cooper argued that Black ladies elevated other Blacks in ways that enhanced the entire race's ability to resist racism. Take, for example, Cooper's assertion that “every attempt to elevate the Negro, whether undertaken by himself or through the philanthropy of others, cannot but prove abortive unless so directed as to utilize the indispensable agency of an elevated and trained womanhood” (Cooper Reference Cooper1892, 10). Harper struck a similar note when she praised a fellow Black lady for using her tertiary-level education, “suavity and dignity” to train Black women for domestic service. Such training, Harper explained, expanded Black women's job opportunities, ensured that they were good mothers, and, in so doing, positioned them to advance the “race” in the face of white supremacy (Harper Reference Harper1893b, 156). Again, the assumption here was that the “the re-training of the race, as well as the ground work and starting point of its progress upward, must be the Black woman” (Cooper Reference Cooper1892, 206).
From Black Ladyship to Inter-Racial Hierarchy
Of greatest importance, for the purposes of our argument, is unearthing how and why constructing Black women as ladies was central to Cooper's and Harper's understanding of relations between Native Americans and African Americans. Part of the answer is that both authors, especially Cooper, drew on their status as Black ladies to make the case that African Americans and Native Americans were victims of racism. Consider Cooper's assertion that she and other Black ladies’ supposedly elevated social, moral, and intellectual capacities imbued them with the ability to impart valuable lessons or “material” including the reality that Native Americans and Blacks shared an experience of white supremacy.
Cooper attempted to impart this very lesson when she linked her status as a “teacher of morals and manners” and her ability to see what many others did not—namely, that white women's quest for voting rights was fundamentally premised on the notion that they were racially superior to African American and Native American men—some of whom had acquired voting rights by the end of the nineteenth century. Hence, her mimicry of what she regarded as white suffragettes’ racist rationale for voting rights: “The great burly Black man, ignorant and gross and depraved, is allowed to vote… Even the untamed and untamable Indian… is thought by some worthy to wield the ballot… while the franchise is withheld from… the intelligent and refined, the pure-minded and lofty souled white woman” (Cooper Reference Cooper1892, 57). Cooper, in short, castigated racist white women's willingness to become plaintiffs in a discriminatory “Eye vs. Foot” battle against “the Indian, or the Negro or any other race or class who have been crushed under the iron heel of Anglo-Saxon power and selfishness” (Cooper Reference Cooper1892, 56–57).
This sentiment was part of Cooper's broader contention that African Americans and Native Americans shared an experience of racial oppression. Cooper's specific argument was that “the Indian has been wronged and cheated by the puissance of this American government” while “the Negro has been deceitfully cajoled or inhumanly cuffed according to selfish expediency or capricious antipathy” by racist whites (Cooper Reference Cooper1892, 57). According to this reasoning, white supremacy rested on two, equally flawed, presumptions—that of “Indian inferiority” and “Negro depravity.” Or, put otherwise, both groups were victims of a systemically oppressive socio-economic and political order which was yet to recognize “race, color, sex, condition” as “the accidents, not the substance of life, and consequently as not obscuring or modifying the inalienable title to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” (Cooper Reference Cooper1892, 57).
Harper agreed—albeit, from a less explicitly ladylike perspective—that racism ensnared both Native Americans and Blacks. This is evident when the character Captain Sybil, takes it upon himself to educate Robert Johnson, a once enslaved “near white” lieutenant in a Black unit of the Union army and Iola's long-lost uncle, about the history of Europe's colonialism. Sybil explains that “in dealing with the negro we wanted his labor; in dealing with the Indian we wanted his lands. For one we had weapons of war for the other we had real and invisible chains, the coercion of force, and the terror of the unseen world” (Harper Reference Harper1893b, 109–110). In other words, in an analysis that foreshadows Deloria's, Harper guides us to consider that whites racially oppress African Americans and Native Americans for different reasons (labor exploitation versus land dispossession) and by different means (racialized enslavement versus colonizing warfare).
It would be inadequate, however, simply to conclude that Cooper's and Harper's self-described status as Black ladies motivated their presumption that Blacks and Indigenous people shared an experience of racism. The more complicated reality is that embracing Black ladyship also informed both women's contention that Blacks were better than Native Americans. A case in point was Cooper's suggestion that, unlike Native Americans, Black women had the “good manners” associated with “true” womanhood. This assertion is part of Cooper's broader claim that: “Courtesy increases as we travel eastward round the world… the entire Land of the West is a mannerless continent, I have [thus] determined to plead with our women, the mannerless sex on this mannerless continent, to institute a reform by placing immediately in our national curricula a department for teaching GOOD MANNERS” (Cooper Reference Cooper1892, 45).
When Cooper characterized the inhabitants of the “West” as wild and lacking in manners she was referring to whites in North America whom she regarded as less civilized than their European and Asian peers to the “east.” Hence, her declaration that: “Asia is more courteous than Europe, Europe than America” (Cooper Reference Cooper1892, 44). Yet, Cooper's repeated references to “Indians” as “untamable” residents of a “prairie” characterized by the “dangers of wild beasts and of wilder men,” leave little doubt that she also understood the “west” as the purview of Native Americans whose relative racial inferiority to Black women was manifested in their mannerlessness (Cooper Reference Cooper1892, 57, 59). Furthermore, when Cooper implored “our” women to uplift the nation's moral well-being, she was not referring primarily to white women, whom she repeatedly cast as racist apologists but to Black ladies. Indeed, on Cooper's reading, it was “the Black Woman” who was the torchbearer of racial superiority because she held firm to “her femininity” or to that which rendered her the “touchstone of American courtesy exceptionally pure and singularly free from extraneous modifiers” (Cooper Reference Cooper1892, 40, 42).
Harper's understanding of Blacks’ supposed racial superiority over Native Americans also rested on a gendered, hyper-feminine worldview. In “Enlightened Motherhood,” a speech published in the same year as Iola Leroy, Harper posited childrearing as a key means by which Black women, but not their Native peers, elevated their entire race's well-being. Harper's specific claim was that unlike “[s]ome races” who “have been overthrown, dashed in pieces, and destroyed” by racist whites’ “arrogance, aggressiveness, and indomitable power,” Blacks, especially Black mothers, were well-situated “to build above the wreck and ruin of the past” (Harper Reference Harper1893b, 292). Harper's departure point was Native Americans who, by the turn of the century, had been militarily defeated by the federal government.
Just as significant was Harper's suggestion that Black women were racially superior to Native Americans not just because they survived slavery without being physically “destroyed,” but also because they had done so in traditionally feminine ways. Harper, on this note, proudly declared that “the work of the mothers of our race is grandly constructive” (Harper Reference Harper and Foster1893a, 292). By this, she meant that Black mothers were better not just because they established their own community-based schools or “stately temples of thought and action” but also because these schools were premised on patriarchal tenets. These tenets included the notion that true women were “virtuous,” in charge of “good homes,” and “bless their homes by the purity of their lives, the tenderness of their hearts, and the strength of their intellects” (Harper Reference Harper and Foster1893a, 292).
CONTEXTUALIZING “BLACK” ON “RED”
As and Against Settler ColonialismFootnote 3
Our analysis thus far affirms Patrick Wolfe's (Reference Wolfe2016, 3) central insights: (1) that colonizers managed subject populations in distinctive ways and (2) that the resulting differences must be mediated when considering how colonial subjects understood and engaged in anti-colonial resistance. Specifically, if Euro-American private property in the New World emerged through applying Black people's labor to Red people's land, this required the juridical exclusion and continual reproduction of laborers designated Black and the perpetual evacuation and/or elimination of occupants who had to be recognized as Indigenous.Footnote 4 What Wolfe describes as the “antithetical but complementary value” (Wolfe Reference Wolfe2016, 3) of each group to Euro-American society is clearly reflected not only in the seemingly contradictory viewpoints of the four figures who animate our analysis but also, more broadly, in two ideas—forcible Native American assimilation and violent African American exclusion—both of which gained increasing currency as the nineteenth century became the twentieth.
Central to the first of these ideas was the notion that Indigenous people could and had in fact been literally engulfed by a Euro-American frontier that had been transformed into a territory that reached from shore to shore (Wolfe Reference Wolfe2016). To this end, an 1871 Congressional resolution decreed that no Indian nation within the territory of the United States would be recognized as an independent power, which excluded Indian nations from the protections of international law (Wolfe Reference Wolfe2016, 183–184). This decree accompanied efforts to discontinue treaty-making, undercut the legal jurisdiction of tribal governmental power, and divide tribal territory into alienable private lots. This last move, pursued through the Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887, was developed as an assimilation policy by the self-styled “friends of the Indians.” The Act divided up the “socialist” reservation system on the grounds that it had failed to encourage the “selfishness…at the bottom of civilization.” The assumption here was that unless “each own[ed] the land he cultivates,” none would “make much more progress” (Dunbar-Ortiz Reference Dunbar-Ortiz2014, 158).Footnote 5 These policies had the effect of demonizing Native land practices as inefficient and in need of Europeanization, and reducing the Indigenous land base by half (from 155 million acres in 1881 to under 80 million by 1900) (Wolfe Reference Wolfe2016). During the same period, Indigenous-U.S.-American population numbers also reached their nadir.
It is important to note that these developments were met with fierce resistance. Cherokee Redbirth Smith and his revived Keetoowah secret society engaged in direct action against white settler-colonialists. The Hopi Nation argued, with partial success, that theirs was a matriarchal communal society that could not be divided up for private ownership. Not only that, the Muskogee Creeks, led by Chitto Harjo/Crazy Snake, founded an alternative government of five thousand that carried on fighting until 1912.
This late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century period was also marked by whites’ dismantling of Blacks’ Reconstruction era gains through literacy tests and other poll-taxes, state sanctioned lynching campaigns that Ida B. Wells considered a regime of domestic terrorism (Wells Reference Wells and Bay1895/2014), and through Jim Crow legislation designed to stifle any Black social and occupational mobility. On the one hand, Crummell, Garvey, Harper, and Cooper's presumption that African Americans and Native Americans were unjust victims of racism was a critique of the specific, white supremacist politics of this portion of the settler-colonial period. A prime example was Garvey's conclusion that “the ballot” or newly-won voting rights provided Blacks with scant “protection” or “hope” given that “the hidden spirit of America” was to ensure that they would never “become law makers for the white race” (Garvey Reference Garvey2009, 36). Cooper, meanwhile, cited the nation's then expanding railways to illuminate the systemic oppression of both “the Indian” and “the negro”—the former via state sanctioned racial segregation on trains and the latter by the 1861 Railroad Enabling Act which authorized the federal government to dispossess Native American land.Footnote 6
On the other hand, any attempt to read Black intellectuals’ depiction of Native Americans and African Americans as victims of unjust racism as a rejection of racist, settler-colonial era policies is fraught with difficulty. This is so because many of these same thinkers also embraced flawed, settler-colonial era understandings of Native Americans as racially inferior beings. Consider the parallels between the aforementioned, widespread myth of the “vanishing red men” and Garvey's claim that “North American Indians” were “exterminated” because they impeded Euro-Americans’ endless quest for land. Harper similarly declared, via a character in Iola Leroy—that Blacks “possess[ed] greater breadth of physical organization and stronger power of endurance” that allowed them, unlike “the Indians,” to physically survive plantation slavery (Reference Harper1893b, 109).Footnote 7
Why did the Africana thinkers we examine simultaneously reject and embrace dominant understandings of Indigenous peoples as racially inferior? More specifically, why—despite ample evidence of Native Americans’ complex political adaptations and agendas at the turn of the century—did Black intellectuals writing during this period remain wedded, even in part, to settler-colonial understandings of Indigenous peoples as racially subordinate, politically unsophisticated, and near extinction? Examples of the latter include Crummell's contention that Native American people were uncivilized and, consequently, incapable of experiencing, as did African Americans, the redemptive power of suffering. What is especially perplexing is that the “Five Civilized Tribes”—named so by white settlers because they embraced Christianity, a written language, an English-style colonial government structure, and the practice of enslaving Africans—were very much a reality during the very period in which Crummell advanced this view.Footnote 8 Garvey, meanwhile, constructed Native Americans as already extinct during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, when changing alliances of Indigenous nations and constant demands to renegotiate treaties, in response to revisions in federal policies, were tangible evidence of their continued social and political presence.
Christianity, Land, and Labor
We argue that while they rejected the white supremacist assumption that Blacks were inherently inferior to whites, some of the Black intellectuals we study nevertheless remained wedded to exclusionary, Eurocentric standards of acceptable land use and religious practice. The end result was that Crummell, Garvey, Harper, and Cooper were often highly aware of events in Europe and even Africa yet unaware of Native Americans’ status as neither extinct nor uncivilized.
Note the similarity, for instance, between John Locke's assertion that an Englishman makes land his property if by “the labour of his body and the work of his hands…he removes out the state that nature has provided” (Locke Reference Locke, Hammond, Hardwick and Lubert1689, 55) and Crummell's contention the while earth was the Lord's and given to “Man, irrespective of race or color,” “if the white man, with a keen eye, a cunning hand, and a wise practicalness, is enabled to appropriate with skill and effect, it is his; God gives it to him, and he has a right to seek and to search for a multiplication of it” (Crummell Reference Crummell1862, 231). It is not difficult to see the link between this particular orientation toward land and the presumption that Native Americans—many of whom have traditionally favored small scale, companion planting and plot rotation over the large scale, repetitive planting of a single crop on the same land—are racially inferior because they make supposedly inappropriate, even harmful, agricultural choices.
Several of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Black intellectuals we examine remained equally wedded to Eurocentric standards regarding appropriate religious practice. Although they recognized that Europeans had long used Christian tenets wrongfully to justify anti-Black racism, these intellectuals also embraced Christianity not only as a source of individual and community strength but also as important evidence that they were the equals of their European oppressors. Cooper's writing is instructive in this regard. To be clear, Cooper forcefully rejected presumptions of a “white Christ” and other attempts by racist whites to use Christianity to advance their agenda (Cooper Reference Cooper1892, 93). It is also true, however, that she depicted African Americans as civilized because they, unlike “savage” Indigenous peoples, embrace “His” or Jesus’ ideals. Cooper's specific argument was that while Native Americans’ physical defiance of white racists was understandable, such defiance was also self-defeating because it was expressed without the control and discretion that supposedly comes with Christian morality:
It may be nobler to perish redhanded, to kill as many as your battle axe holds out to hack and then fall with an exultant yell and savage grin of fiendish delight on the huge pile of bloody corpses, expiring with the solace and unction of having ten thousand wounds all in front. I don't know. I sometimes think it depends on where you plant your standard and who wears the white plume which your eye inadvertently seeks…. But somehow it seems to me that those nations and races who choose the Nazarene for their plumed knight would find some little jarring and variance between such notions and His ideals (Cooper Reference Cooper1892, 94).
A similar assumption that Blacks were racially superior because they were more inclined to embrace Christianity animates Harper's work. When Robert, the Black Union Army lieutenant in Iola Leroy, admiringly notes that he has “never heard” of “Indians” willingly “give away all their lands on earth, and quietly wait for a home in heaven,” Harper quickly asserts that espousing Christianity is what allowed Blacks, and presumably not Native Americans, to break free from the yolk of racist oppression (Harper Reference Harper and Foster1893b, 110). In fact, on Harper's account, Emancipation was Black people's reward for embracing Christianity. Her concomitant conclusion was that “when ‘General Lee surrendered to General Grant,’ the result was not only that the South's ‘lost cause went down in blood and tears’.” It was also that “on the brows of a ransomed people God poured the chrism of a new era and they stood a race newly anointed with freedom” (Harper Reference Harper1893b, 112).Footnote 9
REREADING THE THEORETICAL IMPLICATIONS “BLACK” ON “RED”
Deliberate Misrepresentation and/or Historical–Political Lacunae?
Even if we accept that many late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Black intellectuals’ depictions of Native Americans—as fellow victims of racism and as racially inferior beings—are best understood as a simultaneous critique and embrace of settler-colonial ideals and orientations, an important question remains unanswered. What new light, if any, do these intellectuals’ understandings of Indigenous peoples shed on more recent Africana and Native American scholarship?
First, Crummell, Garvey, Cooper, and Harper are evidence not only of Wolfe's earlier observation, that colonizers have historically had different means of managing subject populations, but also of the reality that these different means shaped how colonized groups resisted their oppression. As an example, misrepresenting Native Americans could be understood as a calculated means by which turn-of-the-century African Americans strove to claim the benefits of social and political belonging in the face of Jim Crow or whites’ radical and violent exclusion of them from mainstream society. This exact strategy was arguably at work when Cooper urged her readers to recognize that Blacks have a greater capacity for and interest in participating in mainstream socio-economic and political life relative to their Native American counterparts.
Cooper's specific point of reference was the federal government's inclination to fund the education of Native American children rather than those of the Black man whose purported status as “a faithful son” of the nation's core ideals made him the “indefeasible heir” to America's bounty:
Now the tardy conscience of the nation wakes up one bright morning and is overwhelmed with blushes and stammering confusion because convicted of dishonorable and unkind treatment of the Indian; and there is a wonderful scurrying around among the keepers of the keys to get out more blankets and send out a few primers for the “wards.” While the black man, a faithful son and indefeasible heir … is snubbed and chilled and made unwelcome at every merry-making of the family. And when appropriations for education are talked of, the section for which he has wrought and suffered most, actually defeats the needed and desired assistance for fear they may not be able to prevent his getting a fair and equitable share in the distribution. Oh, the shame of it! (Cooper Reference Cooper1892, 95).
Cooper regards this racial gap in funding as unacceptable because while Native Americans have, “during the entire occupancy of this country by white men…. stood proudly aloof from all their efforts at development and presented an unbroken front of hostility to the introduction and spread of civilization” productive and adaptable African Americans have lent their “brawn and sturdy sinews to promote [the nation's] material growth and prosperity… with perfect amiability of temper and adaptability of mental structure” (Cooper Reference Cooper1892, 93).
To be clear, while the federal government was eager to fund boarding schools for Native American children during the late 1800s, what these schools aimed to accomplish—the normalization of Euro-American religious, linguistic, and cultural practices and norms—was hardly emancipatory for Native peoples. In Wolfe's account, this forced assimilation aimed at nothing short of final Indigenous annihilation. Cooper recognized something of this reality when she broadly condemned the myriad ways that “the Indian has been wronged and cheated by the puissance of this American government” (Cooper Reference Cooper1892, 57). How then are we to understand Cooper's seemingly contradictory claim that Blacks were deserving and Indigenous people underserving of these same schools?
An important part of the answer is that by the 1870s schools operated and funded by the Bureau of Indian Affairs were in place on every reservation in the nation (Cantiello Reference Cantiello2011). Not only that, during this same period federal funding for schools for African American children declined precipitously. While the number of Black children in the South grew by 25% between 1875 and 1900, the ratio of these children who attended an educational institution actually decreased. The “gap in expenditures” between children of European versus African ancestry also expanded in the years after Reconstruction (Cantiello Reference Cantiello2011). When read against this backdrop, Cooper's rhetoric about Native Americans’ racial inferiority to Blacks was, quite possibly, deliberately designed to help hinder the rapid decrease in federal school funding for the children of the latter.
What better way to draw the attention of lawmakers and citizens alike to Black children's unequal access to state-sponsored educational resources, than her final, abovementioned exhortation on the matter—“Oh, the shame of it!” Put otherwise, while Cooper's words are further evidence of how Black and whites mistakenly render Indigenous peoples “aloof” or otherwise absent from mainstream American life, her utterings also tell a more nuanced story—that casting Indigenous peoples as an “inferior” or “third group” against whom Blacks could construct themselves as a “superior minority” was a key means by which Black intellectuals attempted prove that they were worthy of the same rights as whites (Page Reference Page2011, 210).
At the same time, this seemingly politically expedient approach failed to grasp the distinct nature and legacies of Black and Red oppression. Indigenous peoples fought to be left alone, to remain outside of the orbit of U.S. institutions, to retain a separation through which they could make counterclaims to sovereignty. Expenditure on their schooling was part of a protracted strategy of war that sought final Indigenous elimination through their total assimilation. By contrast, African Americans, who faced radical, tenacious social, political, and economic exclusion, sought access to the benefits of a society that they had labored to construct. Grasping these fundamental differences is key to understanding the absence of strong Black-Red solidarities in this period.
“Colonial Governmentality” at the Intersection of Race and Gender
We direct our focus, finally, to what present-day scholars can learn from the four intellectuals we examine. The answer, plainly put, is that African Americans internalized Eurocentric understandings not only of themselves but also of other non-white groups, including Native Americans. To be clear, contemporary scholars of Black-Indigenous relations are attentive to the harms of white supremacy. Consider, for instance, what Glen Coulthard's (Reference Coulthard2014) examination of Canadian settler colonialism reveals—that even though it sounds progressive some Indigenous people's efforts to resist their oppression by demanding the “delegation of land, capital, and political power from the state to Indigenous communities” is anything but liberatory (Coulthard Reference Coulthard2014, 3). Coulthard's particular argument, which draws on Frantz Fanon's critique of the Hegelian master/slave dialectic, is that in contexts of domination the hegemonic partner overdetermines the terms of recognition in ways that negatively impact the “structural” as well as the individual, “psycho-affective” reality of the dominated.
Paramount among these adverse “psycho-affective” impacts, Coulthard explains, is colonized people's, including people of African descent and Indigenous people's, propensity to become attached, rather than averse, to protracted colonial relationships. What this means in the context of contemporary Canadian politics is that Indigenous people's espousal of a supposedly progressive politics of “cultural” recognition is actually indicative of a new “mode of colonial governmentality”—one in which they embrace “modes of colonial thought, desire, and behavior that implicitly or explicitly commit [them] to the types of practices and subject positions that are required for their continued domination” (Coulthard Reference Coulthard2014, 17). Coulthard cites as an example Indigenous people's mistaken assumption that their calls for “justice” are achieved not when the Canadian government eradicates inequalities of power in the criminal justice system, labor market, and classroom but when it embraces liberal, “diversity-affirming forms of state recognition and accommodation” premised on issuing “statements of regret and apology for harms narrowly conceived of as occurring in the past” (Coulthard Reference Coulthard2014, 17, 155).
Crummell, Garvey, Harper, and Cooper invite us to expand upon Coulthard's important insights. To begin with, these thinkers suggest an even more complicated “mode of colonial governmentality”—one in which victims of racism espouse political views and modes of being that are crucial for the continued racial subordination of other groups. Crummell's assertion that Native Americans were racially inferior to African Americans because they lacked the latter's physical stamina and capacity for cultural adaption is a key example. So, too, is Garvey's conclusion that these supposed deficiencies have rendered Indigenous peoples “extinct” artifacts of the past whose experiences of injustice need not be remedied but are, instead, important lessons of how to challenge present and future oppression.
Second, the writers we examine reveal how racist and gender-biased understandings of the “other” by the “other” intersect or are mutually constructing. Put more explicitly, when late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Black intellectuals articulated white supremacist conceptualizations of Native Americans, they sometimes did so through a decidedly patriarchal lens. In the process, they revealed their status, at least in part, as persons who reproduced and helped legitimate not only their own but also the subordination of others.Footnote 10 A typical example is Cooper's conclusion that unlike Black men who “prefer the judicial awards of peace” or who strove to end racism by petitioning the relevant authorities for equal political rights, Native American men reveled in the impulsive and “savage grin of fiendish delight” that came when they “kill[ed] as many [whites as their] battle axe holds out to hack” (Cooper Reference Cooper1892, 94–95). In making this intersectionally-informed claim, Cooper did more than presume that Native American men were racially inferior to their Black male peers. She also assumed that this was the case because these men were unwilling and unable to act like “real” men or to fulfill the role of patriarchs who led their respective races in an emotionally detached fashion.
CONCLUSION
What are the conditions under which progressive Black-Red coalitions can be realized? Answering this question is important if we want to understand why, for instance, New World Black intellectuals, especially during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, denied any significant possibility of collective struggle with Native American people but, in sharp contrast, embraced this very possibility during the Red Power-Black Power coalitional efforts of the late-1960–1970s.
On the one hand, all four of the figures we examined sought to increase Black self-determination, with Crummell and Garvey explicitly aiming to cultivate political power in and through relationships with people and territory on the continent of Africa. Their approach was nevertheless a fundamentally Euromodern one that valorized Euro-Christianity and privileged a Lockean understanding of what constitute legitimate land claims. Such an approach arguably stifled their ability to envision and cultivate New World Black-Indigenous solidarity. Indeed, Deloria, whom we cite at the beginning of this essay, would likely have considered this evidence of his perhaps ironic lamentation that Blacks who did not experience reservation-life and the autonomy that accompanied it were unable either to divorce themselves from Eurocentric thought or to do so in ways that made coalition building between Blacks and Indigenous peoples possible.
On the other hand, some of the strongest, least Eurocentric analysis and actions of Black-Indigenous solidarity actually pre-dated the federal government's creation of the category “Native American.” Ottobah Quobna Cugoano (Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (Reference Cugoano1787)) connected the orientations at work in the conquest and subsequent treatment of Indigenous people to the practices of African enslavement that followed. Jean-Jacques Dessalines (“Liberty or Death, Proclamation” of 1804) cautioned that “Blacks and Yellows” of the newly renamed Haiti, itself a Taíno word, needed to maintain their united front against shared enemies. Dessalines emphasized that what would ultimately seal the two groups’ indivisible harmony was recalling the “catalogue of atrocities committed against our species,” beginning with the massacre of the Indigenous population of the island (Dessalines Reference Dessalines and Kamugisha2003, 21).
Cugoano and Dessalines’ laudable appreciation of these Black-Red connections was no accident. We say this because while both authors experienced the racialization of the trans-Atlantic slave trade to the Caribbean first-hand, they were also African-born and thus more rather than less predisposed to perceiving the situation of the Indigenous peoples of what became the Americas through an indigenous African, rather than a Eurocentric, lens. Cugoano, in this vein, rooted his analysis in his formative understanding as a member of the house of a Fanti king in his original home of Ajumako on the coast of contemporary Ghana. Far from the purportedly primitive continent described by European philosophers, Cugoano reported on daily life in eighteenth-century West Africa, documenting polities with free subjects and norms of voluntary (rather than mercenary) military service.Footnote 11 Similarly, in the Haitian Revolution, Dessalines fought beside a thoroughly transnational army of revolutionaries, half of whom were African-born and the majority of which sought to build an abolitionist “nation” that fundamentally broke with the Euromodern models.
Such a move—toward a kind of Red-Black coalition building that decenters Europe—also appeared in the 1960s and 1970s when Red, Black, Brown, and Yellow power movements of historically colonized, enslaved, and otherwise politically marginalized groups in the United States and beyond encountered each other's mobilizations unmediated by the lens and self-serving rationalizations of Euro-American settler-colonial society. For instance, Shuswap political theorist and activist George Manuel (Manual and Posluns Reference Manuel and Posluns1974) argued that there was an “unwritten alliance” between Indigenous, Black, and Chicano youth across North America and explained his concept of an emergent Indigenous fourth world—one comprised of formerly colonized nations refusing to imitate and compete with European empires—through direct observations of his visit to the newly independent Tanzania of Julius Nyerere. Lee Maracle (Reference Maracle1975/1990) similarly acknowledged U.S. and Canadian Black Panthers for the most effective models for and partnerships with Red activism in Toronto in this period. She also credited Black writers, especially Malcolm X, Fanon, and Stokely Carmichael/Kwame Ture, and comrades, as well as Mao and the emergent model of communist China, for enabling her to move beyond a settler-colonial induced anti-intellectualism to become an articulate and humanistic political rebel.Footnote 12 While the results of encountering movements’ distinct needs and aspirations were not always or intrinsically progressive, as with the historical figures under consideration here, even the failures offered important lessons for surmounting obstacles to decolonial antiracist coalitions.
Where does this leave us? How are we to understand the articulation of a more rather than less progressive Black-Red politics? The answer is that such coalitions would first require abandoning the uncritical subscription to a settler-colonial narrative of the United States that places Indigenous people and their struggles in the country's past. It would also involve understanding that rejecting both reconciliatory approaches to U.S. Christianity and assimilationist schooling may, as was evident in the Red and Black power activism of the late-1960s and early-1970s, in fact, constitute exemplary values.Footnote 13 As Bruyneel puts it, while settler colonialism and white supremacy:
represent distinct forms of domination and relations … the production of the meaning of white standing, status, and authority in the United States is shaped by the relationship to land and bodies, territory and labor, authority and superiority… In the white settler imaginary, it makes no difference whether enslavement prefaced/premised colonialism or vice versa, as they both materially, institutionally, socio-economically, and discursively constitute and embolden white settler standing vis a vis Indigenous and Black (Bruyneel Reference Bruyneel2017, 36).Footnote 14
In the end, we need to be aware, as Bruyneel insists, of the contemporary quality of white settler violence against Black and Indigenous peoples (Bruyneel Reference Bruyneel2017, 50)—be it in the language of Stand Your Ground, which “evoke[s] the settler notion of defending territorial claims” in order to “fuel anti-Black sentiment and permit anti-Black violence with impunity” (Bruyneel Reference Bruyneel2017, 37), or via the prized place of “law and order” television shows where “figures of iconic white settler masculinity are inner city police seeking to assert the authority… of the white settler society against unruly, uncivilized Black and Brown people in the urban context” (Bruyneel Reference Bruyneel2017, 50). We must also recognize that anti-Indigenous and anti-Black trajectories are not distinct, with one predating the other. Instead, they “co-animate [each other such] that to leave white settler identity and Indigeneity out of the contemporary racial story is to surrender a fuller grasp U.S. race politics and discourse more generally” (Reference Bruyneel2017, 51).
