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Showing posts from April, 2022

Blackness, Indigeneity, and 5$ Indian?

It's also why they erase the ugly parts of their own histories--like 5$ Indians. In Fall 2020 (right before THE pandemic school year started), I attended a virtual session titled The Legacy of Historical Trauma: A Discussion of the Black and Native American Existence, Identity, and Moves Forward to Healing . It was SUCH an enriching, rewarding, spiritual experience for me. I listened to the panelists (most of whom are Black and Indigenous or were raised in Black/Indigenous households OR are raising Black-Indigenous relatives) speak of the intersecting identities and the double oppressions of being both Black and Indigenous and the acknowledgment of anti-Blackness handed down from our collective oppressors and often internalized and laterally expressed in Indigenous communities, really in both communities. The anti-Blackness being weaponized and stripped from Indigenous Peoples by the dominant culture, to the point that Black-Indigenous people would need to deny their Blackness in