A Provocation of The Modes of Black Indigeneity

Abstract

This essay explores the meaning of the term Black Indigeneity (BI). Afro-Indigenous Studies scholar Kyle T. Mays asks, what is Black Indigeneity? How do scholars talk about it? What are its possibilities? Relying on a survey of recent scholarship, Mays argues that BI is largely understood as a form of Black Americans participating in settler colonial processes meant to erase and displace Indigenous peoples. He argues that we should look at BI as an analytic that African Americans have used to create belonging and continue to express cultures practiced throughout the African diaspora, adapted and transformed into a modern iteration of cultural expression. In this way, we should rethink how we view blackness and indigeneity as two separate entities, and explore how people of African descent create belonging on dispossessed Indigenous land.