Black/Indian Relations: An Overview of the Scholarship

Abstract

Based on a review of the literature, this paper presents an overview of the scholarship on relations between persons of African descent and Native Americans in the Americas. Study of these relations, spread over a number of different disciplines, shaped by the changing interests of these disciplines, has been episodic and seldom continuous. These studies have examined relations between Blacks and Indians in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the northern and the southern areas of what is now the United States. There have also been studies of mixed‐race persons, some of which romanticize Black/Indian relations or attempt to show one suffered more than the other. Other studies use the Indian experience to understand Blacks and the black experience to understand Indians. Finally, there are studies that focus on relations among all three peoples.

Bleach in the Rainbow: Latin Ethnicity and Preference for Whiteness

“…The decision to exit into Whiteness had to be pronounced and definite under the conditions of American apartheid that prevailed from the 1880s into the 1960s. Another exit route from Blackness, taken less frequently, was the construction of an exclusive Native American tribal identity (Jones 2001). All of these cases, records or photographs that "exposed" one's relatives as Black people more likely would be destroyed altogether rather than retained and hidden from public view.…”