Removal, Labor, and Reckoning in the Black Native South

Abstract

This essay grapples with the painful, entwined legacies of chattel slavery and Indian removal in the United States through the theme of inheritance. Black and Indigenous peoples have inherited the broken promises, unfulfilled dreams, and unrealized hopes bequeathed to them by slavery, dispossession, and settler colonialism. This piece argues that in order to tackle contemporary issues of sovereignty, belonging, and anti-Blackness a reckoning with the importance of chattel slavery in Native slaveholding communities, with particular emphasis on how the institution exacerbated the trauma of dispossession and expulsion to the West in the 1830s, is necessary. The process of arriving at this reckoning may elucidate possibilities for healing and cooperation between the descendants of Black and Black Indigenous freedpeople and tribal members in the Five Nations.