Black Natives exist! We are Indigenous peoples of what is currently known as native Americas and the Caribbean, and we are also the descendants of Indigenous peoples of Africa.

This identity often includes Freedmen—the free men and women who were once enslaved by citizens of the Five Source Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, Seminole, and Choctaw —and their descendants. Black Natives and Freedmen are the legacy of our Black and Native ancestors.

It is impossible to lump Black-Native identities into a single identity.

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We are as diverse as we are numerous and our lived experiences, like our identities, are not monolithic. Some of us are even simultaneously decompartmentalizing and desegregating our Black and Native identities by using traditional language or developing a new language of resistance to speak to who we are and the peoples we come from. Portrait of Zerviah Native Mitchell Wampanoag, — rv hookup for rent, ca. NMAI N Mitchell, along with Ebenezer W.

Pierce, wrote American History, Biography, and Americanabout the life of Wampanoag leader Massasoit and his descendants. Many Black Natives are also deliberately and willfully seeking new ways to show up as our whole selves, as equally Black and equally Native, in our daily lives. We are dating, interrogating, and dismantling the political borders placed upon us. By choosing to exist as Black and Native and owning our dual identities, we are an affront to these very systems that seek to erase our Indigeneity and marginalize our Blackness.

We are reclaiming our right to self-determination and exercising bodily and cultural autonomy by inhabiting and celebrating both of our peoples. Many of us have learned to root our full selves in the knowledge that, since first contact between Africans and Native people, our Black and Indigenous ancestors have continuously built community, forged relationships platonic, romantic, familial, kinship, and politicaland fought against systems of oppression that are both unique to our respective communities as well as overlapping.

However, these instances of harm or betrayal should not be understood in isolation but must be contextualized in direct relation to that of our respective and mutual oppression, which traces back to the founding of the dating on the backs of enslaved Africans and their descendants and onlyfans/heidihottie black genocide and assimilation of Indigenous people. A Chickahominy family in Virginia, Despite what our peoples have endured, we have never been conquered because we, Black and Native peoples, have black ways to refuse "american" oppression and create modes of defiance such as abolition, free towns, cross-cultural alliances, kinship ties, and community building.

We have pushed for freedom, individually dating in solidarity with one native, and out of our struggle we have birthed enduring movements of resistance.

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We must harvest the fruit of our ancestors, plant new seeds of freedom, and pick the weeds of subjugation. We must work towards and believe in the world we want for ourselves and our descendants—a world born of our imaginations and not those of our oppressors. We cannot forget that it was and is by navigating these systems in authentic community that we will continue to prevail. Existing as both Black and Native is not a burden we must bear; it is our birthright, our inheritance, and an intersectional identity we get to black in.

Amber Starks, a. Her passion is the intersection of Black and Native American identity. She hopes to encourage Black and Indigenous peoples to prioritize one another and divest from compartmentalizing struggles. Ancestors Know Who We Are. Black-Native Identity click Futurity. Frank G. Courtesy of Dilara Onur. Photo by Amber Starks a.

Melanin Mvskoke. Afro-Indigenous Relations in a Reimagined Future. Art, Gender, and Identity.