Reparations Daily (ish) Vol. 91

Land Back & Reparations: The Inherent Connection Between Black Liberation & Indigenous Sovereignty

Oct 13, 2022

Happy Thursday!

I’m back after my first real vacation in two years.

I flew back on Indigenous Peoples Day and was met with a flurry of thoughtful arguments, articles, and tweets, across my social media platforms, many of which touched on a subject I’ve been exploring more thoughtfully over the past three years; the Indigenous-led Land Back movement.

Today’s Opinion section explores the intersection of the push to return land to Indigenous populations and the inspiration for reparations for Black Americans.

But first, here is some reparations-related news…

An Alabama Senator racistly linked the call for reparations to “people who do the crime, at a Trump rally. The fight for reparations will turn into the new boogeyman for the right, similar to critical race theory. And it will result in increased violence aimed at Black people.

Acyn @Acyn

Tuberville: They want reparation because they think the people that do the crime are owed that! Bullshit!

A group of Black faith leaders, business owners, and activists are raising $1 million from “white people to help start and fund Black businesses, mortgages, and education.” (oy vey)

Jamelle Bouie on the economic roots of white supremacy.

Some lawyers are fighting to keep a monument of Confederate traitor Robert E. Lee up.

Northwestern has launched a research collaborative to study the impact of Evanston’s restorative housing program.

Students at the University of Pennsylvania are holding the university accountable to acknowledge its role in slavery.

The city of Portland is requesting proposals to oversee a truth and reconciliation commission that would address the Portland Police’s abuse of power.

My friends at the NDN Collective launched a limited edition ‘LANDBACK Magazine.’ They’ve already sold out.

The University of Cambridge joins the list of universities reckoning with its history of slavery.

A new poll shows half of Americans don’t know what is taught in schools.

Indigenous people are reclaiming land back from the city of Oakland.

An Inter-Tribal Council is fighting back against Oklahoma’s anti-history law.

The Urban Institute released a financial health and wealth dashboard to help policymakers narrow the racial wealth gap at the local level.

The MacArthur Foundation released its annual MacArthur ‘Genius’ grants. Congrats to Dr. Gabrielle Foreman, who was one of the recipients of the award this year and who we interviewed back in February.

With radical love,
Trevor

Opinion

The Inherit Connection Between Black Liberation & Indigenous Sovereignty

Over the past six months, alongside a good friend from graduate school, I’ve been dreaming up a project I hope to bring to life next year that seeks to build stronger connections between Black and Indigenous storytellers. As such, I’ve been reading much more from Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous writers and thinkers.

I’m reading ‘As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance’ by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and ‘An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States’ by Kyle Mays.

In the early pages of As We Have Always Done, Simpson discusses a process called Biiskabiyang — “the process of returning to ourselves, a re-engagement with the things we have left behind an unfolding from the inside out — is a concept, an individual and collective process of decolonization and resurgence.” It is, according to Simpson, “freedom as world making, freedom as a practice.”

In the conclusion of An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States, Mays writes that “Black and Indigenous survival after centuries of violence has been about creating a future. Survival has never been passive. It has been a sustained creation of living in a white supremacist world. Caring for one another is the only way we can imagine and envision the society we want to live in.”

Both authors touch on two narratives that I believe are deeply important in the struggle for Black reparations, Land Back, liberation, and sovereignty; transformation and futurism.

You can essentially boil down the equation for how we arrived at the settler project that is the United States like this:

Indigenous dispossession + African enslavement + modern forms of capital development = The United States.

As such, I’ve been coming to the conclusion far more often that both reparations are as much a decolonial process as Land Back, which as both Mays and Simpson note, should seek to uproot our capitalist base.

So, while the intersection of Black Liberation and Indigenous Sovereignty is clear (at least to me), the larger question that I believe we must grapple with is the conversation about land.

How Are You in Solidarity?

Yesterday, I spoke on a panel for the Grantmakers in the Arts Conference titled “Arts Funders Supporting Reparations in Practice,” where I was asked a question I’ve now been asked dozens of times. ‘How are you in solidarity with Indigenous communities in the fight for reparations?’

I knew the person that asked the question, and I know that it was asked in good faith. But, too often, particularly when a white person asks the question, I don’t particularly think it is asked in good faith. Underneath that question, I believe, is the urge to try and poke holes in the argument for reparations to Black people for slavery, Jim Crow, and other race-based discrimination. I believe that too often, that question is asked to point to hypocrisy within the Black community.

But, as I stated, in this instance, I know it was asked in good faith. I am trying to get better at answering this question by being more intentional about being in relationships with Indigenous advocates.

When answering this question, I am clear that in my conversations with Indigenous advocates, they all vehemently support reparations for Black Americans.

There is a long and storied history of enslaved and formerly enslaved Africans working in coordination with Indigenous communities. And there is also a history of Indigenous people enslaving Black people and Black people engaging in Westward expansion (Buffalo soldiers).

History is complex, and one of the many insidious characteristics of white supremacy is that it has always allowed for its adoption by the people it seeks to oppress (see the latest saga in the Kanye West drama). As such, our solutions will also have to be creative and complex.

We must find a way to support and advocate for reparations for Black people without engaging in Indigenous erasure. We must find a way to support and advocate for the return of land to Indigenous peoples without engaging in anti-Blackness. We must also constantly remind ourselves that Blackness and Indigeneity are not mutually exclusive (as the great mind Amber Starks tweeted a few weeks ago.)

melanin mvskoke @MelaninMvskoke

A friendly reminder that Blackness and Indigeneity are not mutually exclusive!

It is the only way either of these movements will ever fully succeed.

What to Do About the Land?

Mays states that “in order to have the right conversation about reparations, we have to include Indigenous peoples, and we have to center a discussion of land.” Currently, there are efforts to center the conversation around Black land theft being led by leaders like Kavon Ward, Co-founder of Where is My Land, which helps Black families reclaim stolen land. There is also, of course, the Indigenous-led Land Back movement that stretches far beyond the United States.

“We have to rethink the concept of land,” according to Mays. Engaging in this re-conceptualization will also lead us to answer another important question, “what does Indigenous and Black sovereignty and self-determination look like on the other side of a Land Back and reparations process?

After all, most Black people in this country were brought here unwillingly. What does a cooperative sharing of land look like when it’s not rooted in settler colonialism?

According to Mays, the relationship between African-descended people and Indigenous people in the United States can be understood in three words “collaboration, conflict, and controversy.”

We sit at a crucial moment where I believe we can add two important words to this list and alter the history, and therefore future, of Black and Indigenous people in the United States; radical solidarity.

With radical love,
Trevor