Illicit Relations: The Challenges and Possibilities of Black and Indigenous Relations
Structuring Antagonisms and the Problem of Black and Indigenous Comparison
In Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structures of U.S. Antagonisms (2010), Frank B. Wilderson, argues that the ontological triangulation of Blackness, Indigeneity, and Whiteness through libidinal and political economies sets up irreconcilable structuring antagonisms that alienates Black and Native flesh from the privileges and rights of liberal humanism. He writes, “if accumulation and fungibility are the modalities through which embodied Blackness is positioned as incapacity, then genocide is that modality through which Redness is positioned as incapacity” (Wilderson 49). Wilderson asserts the Indigeneity is not immune from the history of slavery, rather from accumulation and fungibility as “positioning modalities”. He writes, “Indians and Whites can be caught in the grip of slavery without transforming and reracializing the institution itself. But Blackness cannot disentangle itself from slaveness” ( Wilderson 52). Put differently, Indigenous claims on sovereignty remain imbricated in Blackness’ incapacity to only be legible, fungible, and commodified through enslavement. Therefore, the structural antagonism or the capacity to articulate interracial solidarity between the “Settler and the “Savage” hinges on “fulcrum called the slave” (Ibid.).
From a similar Afropessimist standpoint, Jared Sexton in “The Vel of Slavery” argues that Indidgenous studies’ reliance on the language of sovereignty, which stems from and intervenes within discourses on decolonization and anti-racism, “draws from and contributes to the discourse of postracialism by diminishing or denying the significance of race in thinking about the relative structural positions of black and non-black people, not in order to assert the colorblind justice of American or Canadian society or to extol the respective virtues and vices of ‘model’ and ‘problem’ minorities, but rather to establish the contrasting injustice of their settler colonial relations with Indigenous people” (Sexton 584). Sexton misdiagnoses Indigenous studies’ reading of the “true horror of slavery” as a loss of culture, resulting in a loss of sovereignty, leading him to misidentify Indigenous claims to sovereignty as a reflection of the fields’ anti-blackness (588). Sexton ultimately asks Indigenous studies relinquish their hold over land and abandon all claims to soverignty in order to radically affirm the conditions and lives of the nonsovereign or the slaves.
Responding to this strain of Afropessimist thinking, Indigenous studies scholars like Iyko Day have pointed out that at the core of this argument lies in Afropessimism’s precept that “no other oppression is reducible to antiblackness” ( Day 215). Furthermore, she points out that Sexton’s invocation for Indigenous studies to give up their rightful claims to land recalls the principle of terra nuillis or empty lands that Europeans proclaimed to have discovered all along. She cautions against assuming that “settler colonial racial capitalism is a zero sum game” (Day 117); instead, she advocates for a more rigorous engagement with Indigenous studies given its belated arrival within discussion of race, coloniality, and empire in American studies, postcolonial studies, and ethnic studies.
In many ways Day’s response can serve as the final word in this debate, yet Jody Byrd in “Not Yet: Indigeneity, AntiBlackness, and Anticolonial Liberation” urges for the interaction between Black and Indigenous Studies to take on a both/and approach to “confront the structural and interwoven histories of oppressions of coloniality, race, and gender that sustains the regimes of dispossession at the heart of U.S. empire. Moreover the Afropessimist resistance towards interrogating the structural intersection of settler colonialism and anti-blackness severely discounts the lives and experiences of Black Indigenous people, who individually negotiate with conceptual frameworks like sovereignty and kinship in order to survive. While the Afropessimist reluctance to acknowledge the potential of Black and Indigenous relationality might secure the structuring antagonism from for a vapid, liberal multiculturalism, Jodi Byrd in The Transit of Empire (2011) grounds her analysis in Indigenous critical theory and postcolonial studies to situate “the Indian” as an ontological prior to sustaining the ideal of a multiculturalist difference within American liberal democracy. The continuing horrors of imperialism, as witnessed in the of the Global War on Terror, the ecological crisis, or the expansionist ambitions of the United States depends on the “language, grammar, and ontological category of Indianess”, which discursively and juridically figures Indigenous life as a “past tense lament” that forecloses futurity (Byrd xxxv). Byrd’s attention to the incommensurability of “internal colonialism”, as experienced by Indigenous people, highlights the untranslatability of Indigenous relations of kinship and sovereignty within the juridico-political vocabulary of western liberalism (xxiv) . Furthermore, the history of enslaved Indigenous people in this framework figures as “impossible internals”, insofar as its alterity stems from the demand to be accommodated within a sovereign, though colonized, nation that treats them as refugees from their own identities and histories ( 144).
Put differently, it is imperative to interrogate the enmeshment of Blackness and Indigeneity within one another — as ontologies and epistemes — without taking a recourse to liberal multiculturalism, in order to articulate a more complex understanding of relationality that acknowledges the intersubjective power of anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity in defining Black and Indigenous relationships. Instead of characterizing the history of African enslavement and settler colonialism as distinct colonial encounters, it is important to read the mass dispossession and exploitation of Black slaves in the middle passage as a settler colonial agenda that fundamentally disrupted ties of kinship or lateral association. Best described in this canonical excerpt from Hortense Spillers’s 1987 essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”, Spillers provokes us to conceptualize the ontological reworking of blackness as abjection in the New World as a form of Indigenous dispossession:
Even though Daughters have their own agenda with reference to the role of the Fathers (imagining for the moment that Moynihan’s fiction — and others like it — does not represent an adequate one and that there is, and once we dis-cover him, a Father here), my contention that these social and cultural subjects make doubles, unstable in their respective identities, in effect transports us to a common historical ground, the socio-political order of the New World. That order, with its human sequence written in blood, represents for its African and indigenous peoples a scene of actual mutilation, dismemberment, and exile. First of all, their New-World, diasporic plight marked a theft of the body — a willful and violence (and unimaginable) from this distance severing the captive body from its motive will, its active desire (Spillers 67).
Responding to the critique of the absence of the father in Black family as published in the Moynihan report, Spillers returns to the middle passage as a crucial moment in which kinship ties are rendered “vestibular” under a “patronymic, patrifocal, patrilineal, and patriarchal order” of the New World, replacing Black familial ties with the arbitrary value of property relations ( Spillers 72). Later in the essay, she notes that “captive persons were forced into patterns of dispersal” through enslavement, which resulted in the “loss of horizontal relatedness of language groups, language groups, discourse formations, bloodlines, names, and properties by the legal arrangements of enslavement” (Spillers 75). In other words, Spillers suggests that the effects of the material violence of slavery exceeds the scope of the body and radically restructures the organization of Black familial and social life in the new world. As a moment of unmeasurable historical loss of Indigenous cultures and value systems, the middle passage consolidates the ongoing violence of settler colonialism within the regimes of property and accumulation that sustained slavery as an institution.
In other words, the structural antagonisms between Indigeneity and Blackness theorized by Afropessimism becomes undone in Spillers’ insistence on reading the crisis of gender in contemporary Black sociality as a consequence of gruesome violence of enslavement and settler colonialism that reduced Black bodies to flesh. The effects of this moment of “ungendering”, as Spillers notes, exceeds the formation of Black social life, and ontologically severs blackness from acquiring the rights and privileges — which includes identifiable social institutions like the family — of liberal humanism (Spillers 67).
I argue that the threat of being subsumed within a liberal, multiculturalist fantasies of empire can be averted by reading Black and Indigenous displacement as constitutive of each other, revealing the regulatory power of race in rearticulating trans-Indigenous epistemologies and social relations through colonial conceptions of race. Undoing the historical harm of these conception, therefore, demands focussing on Black and Indigenous relation as a site of contestation and potentiality, by forefronting the minor histories and individual negotiations visible in the survivance of Black Indigenous people
At a more disciplinary level, Justin Leroy in “Black History in Occupied Territory: On the Entanglement of Slavery and Settler Colonialism” warns us against exceptionalizing the fields of Native studies or Black studies, as this impasse prevents us from noticing the structural reliance of settler colonialism over slavery in sustaining colonial hegemony. On noticing archival slippages, such as Chickasaw and Cherokee nations owning Black slaves, Leroy writes: “These complexities should, instead, emphasize the fact that freedom articulated through colonialism is not robust freedom, or that sovereignty expressed through racial slavery is not a useful model of sovereignty…The projects of slavery and colonialism have never been concerned with which came first, or which is more elemental—they have in fact thrived on the ambiguities of their relationship to one another” (Leroy 2016). Similarly, in The Intimacy of Four Continents, Lisa Lowe takes up affect theory’s invitation to interrogate the intimate relations of major histories by studying the archive of settler colonialism, enslavement, and indenturement in close proximity to one another. The disciplinary distance imposed on these respective archives ultimately reifies the the formation of the liberal humanist subject, by disallowing us from reading the lateral forces of colonial and white supremacist power that have enforced these modes of social differentiation in the first place. She writes,
“Thus, the project of specifying the “intimacy of four continents” is one of examining the dynamic relationship among the always present but differently manifested and available histories and social forces. It includes, on the one hand, identifying the residual process of settler colonialism that appropriated lands from indigenous people, and the colonial logics through which men and women from Africa and Asia were forcibly transported to in the Americas, who with native, mixed, and creole peoples constituted colonial societies that produced the assets for the bourgeois republics in Europe and North America out of which intimacy, as liberal possessive individualism, became the hallmark. Even before the British began transporting captive African slaves to work on West Indian plantations, European settler colonialism dispossessed but did not destroy indigenous peoples in the so-called new world during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The destructive subjugation of native people to confiscate their land created the conditions in which European mercantile powers imported African slaves to establish plantation economies in the Americas.Yet while the Europeans displaced the native peoples in the Caribbean, and converted their resistance as “threat,” to understand these settler practices as having totally eliminated indigenous peoples to the point of extinction, as some modern histories have suggested, or to ignore the ongoing nature of settler colonialism by consigning native people exclusively to the past, is to continue to erase indigenous people and history in a manner that echoes and reproduces earlier dispossessions. What we might identify as residual within the histories of settler or colonial capitalism does not disappear. To the contrary it persists and endures… ( Lowe 20)"
Lowe’s methodology sheds light on the ways in which knowledge production surrounding colonial violence deliberately catalyzes non-relational modes of thinking to secure the advent of modernity as a universal temporal marker of progress. Yet, Lowe does not use intimacy to arrive at a new social subject, but invokes this framing to gesture towards “emergent social and cultural formations” that are comprised of residual elements of ongoing conditions like colonialism, colonial slavery and trade, as they gets rearticulated in contemporary configurations of power (Lowe 19). Put differently, an intimate methodology of studying Black and Indigenous relations should not aspire for a statis in a hybridized Black Indigenous identity, rather identity itself can be problematized as the locus within which the taxonomic functions of race, sex/gender, and coloniality come to bear upon each other to affirm the rights and privileges of the liberal humanist subject.
Returning to Leroy’s signaling of the undefined, amorphous nature of Black and Indigenous relations, we can find resonances with Tiffany Lethabo King’s metaphor of the Black Shoals — a place where water is of little depth (n), or of water etc. (adj) — that signifies Black and Native studies abilities to create ruptures and “open up analytical possibilities for thinking Blackness as exceeding the metaphors and analytics of water, and for thinking of Indigeneity as exceeding the symbol and analytic of land” ( King 4). Tending to the material valences of the using a geographic, geological, and oceanic metaphor, the shoals exceed the scope of mappability, as its shape, expanse, and density changes over time. “The shoal,” King notes, “is as much a dynamic and moving set of processes and ecological relations as it is a longitudinal and latitudinal coordinate that cartographers attempt to fix in time and space” (King 3). King’s explicit embrace of the ambiguity of Black Indigenous relations serves as a model for thinking about the simultaneity of Black and Indigenous life, even when it does not come into view in moments of anti-Black and anti-Indigenous violence. The porosity and momentum of Black and Indigenous relations, thus, carve an insurgent methodology of reading, feeling, and witnessing that brings together the seemingly contradictory abolitionist desire of Blackness alongside the decolonial approach towards care and protection for the land and the politics “place-making” inherent to Indigenous epistemologies (Brooks xxiii). We can thus engage with Black and Indigenous forms of worlding by attending to literary and the aesthetic qualities of texts that center Black and Indigenous relation.
Drawing on King, Leroy, and Lowe, I turn to a constellation of primary texts that detail Black and Indigenous relations as both emerging from and embedded within a social emergency of anti-blackness and settler colonialism: 1) Captain Shoeboots letter to the Cherokee National Council pleading for the full membership of his enslaved wife, Doll, and their three children (1824); 2)Rodslen Brown’s basket titled, Lace Moxie’s Purse (2014); and 3) Storme Webber’s audio poem, “I Consider the Waterfront” (2021). In tracing the formation of a Black Indigenous identity within these works, I argue that Blackness and Indigeneity intentionally entangle, slide, and chafe against each other to refuse the hold of “Native” and/or “Black” as taxonomic categories by orienting themselves towards a shared futurity.