A Shared Problem

I worked with JC, part Cherokee, in the kitchen of a Ruby Tuesday in Raleigh, North Carolina. To me, JC was black, or African American. I couldn’t see the Native American in him, not through his blackness. In part, this may have been my own whiteness, forged through and in protest of southern “hospitality.”

JC essentially identified himself as African-Native American, but I don’t think he was a card-carrying member. His story, though not personally, is reflected in the INDIVISIBLE exhibit making its way across the country.

Jarratt-like, this exhibit re-examines history through the lens of a marginalized group – in this case marginalized to the second power. It does this through panels/posters exploring topics identified in the accompanying pamphlet: A History of Race and Policy; Creative Resistance: Fighting for Change; Blending Communities, Binding Lives; and A Flourishing Culture: African-Native Lifeways. The intent of this exhibit is to bring visibility to a group severely underrepresented historically and rhetorically.

For this group, membership is not as easy as filling out an application, signing a contract, and paying a monthly fee. Each Native American group decides what constitutes membership into their tribe. At the exhibit, I learned that membership requirements may include “family relationship, proof of descent from someone named on a tribal membership roll, a certain percent of Native ancestry (‘blood quantum’), and residency on tribal land.”

Many African-Native Americans are denied membership into tribal groups because they lack the proof that would gain that membership. Sometimes they are kicked out like the 2007 disenrollment of the Cherokee freedmen.

Part of me feels offended for the JCs seeking membership, and ultimately seeking identity and belonging through this membership. However, for Native tribes, establishing membership isn’t a form of elitism, nor is it racism. Essentially, it’s pragmatism, a way to regain and move towards self-determination, self-sovereignty through concrete requirements after hundreds of years of oppressive policies and practices. In one such early 20th century practice, “the U.S. government used blood quantum to help determine which Indians were ‘competent’ to manage their own property. The less Indian blood a person had (and the more white), the more likely he or she was declared competent.” The right to set membership requirements doesn’t just move towards self-determination and self-sovereignty, it moves towards reclaiming competence and reasserting identity previously stripped by and funneled through whiteness.

African Americans are no strangers to seeking self-determination. In Alain Locke’s The New Negro, the New Negro essentially represents this self-determination after years of enslavement and “reconstruction.” This transformation and self-determination manifested in large part in form of a deliberate migration from the South and the country “northward and city-ward.” This migration, according to Locke, took flight because “of a new vision of opportunity, of social and economic freedom, of a spirit to seize, even in the face of an extortionate and heavy toll, a chance for the improvement of conditions.” Many New Negros migrating north ended up in Harlem. Harlem “attracted the African, the West Indian, the Negro American,” including the Negro from the South and from the North. These Negros came from different communities with different beliefs but bonded as a result of a shared problem to move toward a common goal: “full initiation into American democracy.”

In the exhibit pamphlet, Gabrielle Tayac (Piscataway) acknowledges a shared problem resulting in division: ‘Through centuries of struggle, slavery, and dispossession, then by self-determination and freedom, African American and Native American peoples have become, more often than publicly recognized, indivisible.’

The exhibit sheds light on a blended group of groups already marginalized, a bringing together of their stories as a way to move toward a common goal, and perhaps membership denied: “A place of belonging. A true sense of home.”

Native Americans and African Americans have been pragmatically working toward group identity and belonging for decades, and they have done this by reasserting their wills against marginalizing, discriminatory policies and in response to identities forced upon them. Their work continues as does the work of African-Native Americans who have shared the plight of the two groups while experiencing their own diverse plight. The INDIVISIBLE: African-Native American Lives in the Americas exhibit brings unified voice to all this work in an effort to not only make the stories of African-Native Americans visible, but to break down the barriers that divide.

Ultimately, the problem is shared by all of us, not just by Native American, African American, African-Native American peoples, but by all Americans. Even me in all my whiteness.