“Nuanced and illuminating, this book is a worthy addition to a remarkable series.”
—Booklist
“This book reveals uncomfortable truths about the dehumanizing legacies of both capitalism and colonialism while forging a path of reconciliation between the Black and Native communities. Mays offers a solid entry point for further study. An enlightening reexamination of American history.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Accessible and informative . . . Mays’s colloquial voice enlivens the often-distressing history . . . This immersive revisionist history sheds light on an overlooked aspect of the American past.”
—Publishers Weekly
“This book underscores the importance of the bold truth-telling of American history. We all benefit when historians like Mays focus on dismantling misconceptions about Black and Indigenous struggles for liberation, justice, and unity.”
—City Book Review
“Dr. Mays reminds us that both the ‘Indian problem’ and the ‘Negro problem’ are, in fact, a white supremacist problem.”
—Melanin Mvskoke, Afro-Indigenous (Mvskoke Creek) activist
“Reading An Afro-Indigenous History of the US in addition to Beacon Press’s ReVisioning American History series more generally—are one among the many actions available to us for opening our hearts and minds into widening our circles of compassion and deeper solidarity across our differences.”
—The Rev. Dr. Carl Gregg, minister of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Frederick, Maryland
“Framed as an answer to questions in Mays’s life as well as in his scholarship, this is a startlingly ambitious and deeply engaging study. . . . Mays changes also the whole story of US whiteness as a system of thought and power. A perfect book to be read . . . to understand the mess we are in and the resources of those who resist.”
—David Roediger, author of How Race Survived US History
“Required reading to comprehend the deep historical relationship between the Indigenous peoples who were transported from Africa into chattel slavery and the Indigenous peoples who were displaced by European settler colonialism to profit from the land and resources, two parallel realities in search of self-determination and justice.”
—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
“While we know that slavery and settler colonialism are intricately linked, Kyle Mays uniquely demonstrates that the afterlives of these two institutions are also linked. They provide the land, bodies, and capital for ‘newer’ systems of bondage to flourish, such as mass incarceration. You will never think of the peoples’ history the same way after reading An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States.”
—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
“Only twenty years ago, Kyle Mays’s voice wouldn’t even have passed through academia’s and media’s gatekeepers. The fact that a voice like this can be heard today and tell his own story is unexpected great news for America . . . and it’s just the beginning.”
—Raoul Peck, director of I Am Not Your Negro and Exterminate All the Brutes
Author’s Note
INTRODUCTION
Afro-Indigenous History
CHAPTER ONE
Indigenous Africans and Native Americans in Prerevolutionary America
CHAPTER TWO
Antiblackness, Settler Colonialism, and the US Democratic Project
CHAPTER THREE
Enslavement, Dispossession, Resistance
CHAPTER FOUR
Black and Indigenous (Inter)Nationalisms During the Progressive Era
CHAPTER FIVE
Black Americans and Native Americans in the Civil Rights Imagination
CHAPTER SIX
Black Power and Red Power, Freedom and Sovereignty
CHAPTER SEVEN
Black and Indigenous Popular Cultures in the Public Sphere
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Matter of Black and Indigenous Lives, Policing, and Justice
CONCLUSION
The Possibilities for Afro-Indigenous Futures
POSTSCRIPT
Sovereignty and Citizenship: The Case of the Five Tribes and the Freedmen
Acknowledgments
Notes
Photo Credits
Index
