On September 24, our group met at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center to walk through an exhibition of photographs and textual comment entitled “INDIVISIBLE: African-Native American Lives in the Americas.” The presentation was a joint effort of the National Museum of the American Indian, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service.

The room that held the exhibit was small - almost intimate - and round with an overhead skylight. The effect was appropriately evocative of a pueblo hogan melded with a planes’ Indian teepee. The afternoon sun spilt down from the glassed hole in the domed ceiling lighting a resonant meld of cultures. Large sepia-toned photographs of folks whose faces held familiar, yet somehow indistinct, features hung on the room’s gently curving walls. Accompanying the photos were narratives telling the stories of the nuanced, complicated, and intriguing faces; narratives of discrimination against multi-racial, mixed-heritage peoples who descended from two groups that have suffered, arguably, the most heinous of America’s national crimes: genocide and ostracism of Native Americans and the enslavement of African Americans.

The exhibition roughly followed a chronological design that began with a history of race and policy in the world with roots in thirteenth century in Spain that spread into the Americas with Columbus. It sampled the Native and African rights movements from the 1700s through the Civil Rights activism of the 1960s, and outlined the historical, social and economic factors that wove these two peoples into “blended tribes” defying racial, cultural and political boundaries. It profiled well known African-Native Americans like Jimi Hendrix and the less renowned Miss Navajo Nation 1997, Radmilla Cody, and ended with a focus on the flourishing African-Native American culture - its richness, its strength and its teaching in true indivisibility.

The variety of responses the exhibit elicited from our group and from me was surprisingly diverse. We talked about how oppressed groups who might be expected to bond against a common enemy were often driven apart by laws, such as blood quantum requirements, that pitted them against each other. We speculated about what it means to lose your land – whether by kidnapping or by conquering. We pondered how it feels to be marginalized, to wonder where in history one truly belongs and then we compared the “Heinz 57 Irish mongrel” who has no real heritage, no ethnic uniqueness or cultural authority with those who do have it and are oppressed for it - by the mongrels, no less. We were sad, we were educated, we were thoughtful.

For me, the provocation is ongoing. At one time in my life I provided legal representation to some of the Pueblos here in New Mexico, and during that time I became aware of the African-Native Americans in our midst, and of their rich ancestral lines. I did and do feel very much an outsider in this company. It is a welcome (if disquieting) otherness because it offers the opportunity to actually engage in pluralism. It removes from me the ability to operate out of the privilege I enjoy as a white “Heinz 57er.” It makes me believe that I am at the table by invitation not by right. And, the table is round – there is no panel in charge of the discussion. It is a conversation, and one in which I raise my hand, not call on others. Because I do not know what it is like to be, to see, to live the lives of the others at the table, it is a listening experience. I am as awed today as I was at my first San Juan Pueblo Tribal Council meeting by the hope, the gentleness, the integrity of those I have had the privilege of hearing.

The exhibit, thus, gave me a new and remembered context in which to consider pluralism and pragmatism and the conundrum created when the majority will not hear, when conversation is forbidden, when the power suppresses all but the powerful voice. What are the avenues, then, for pragmatic problem solving? The exhibit makes one possible answer, which is captured in its rhetorically masterful title. “INDIVISIBILE” not only embraces the intertwining of two cultures in resistance to oppression and in celebration of plaited traditions, it resounds with traditional American nationalism. It both emblemizes and demonstrates the achievability of pragmatic solutions to problems in a pluralistic society. It makes hope realistic.