Black Native History with Dr. Tiya Miles

All My Relations Podcast

Matika Wilbur & Temryss Lane

Native, Documentary, Pop Culture, Society & Culture, Relationships, Indigenous, Native American, Society, Contemporary Native American Culture

5 • 3K Ratings

🗓️ 18 March 2022

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Back in 2020, after the murder of George Floyd and during the Black Lives Matter uprisings that followed, All My Relations started a journey to support the Black community and Afro Indigenous relatives through having conversations on police brutality, anti-blackness, Indian Country’s connection to chattel slavery, and Afro-Indigenous history.

This first episode in the series features an interview with Harvard professor Tiya Miles. Professor Miles is a scholar, historian, and writer whose work explores the intersections of African American, Native American and women’s histories. With Dr. Miles, we focus specifically on the history and structure of Black and Native interconnection. Through the lens of early Cherokee interactions with Black people, we talk about Black and Indigenous peoples first relationships that were shaped in a settler colonial landscape. We talk about how some southeastern Tribes like the Cherokee bent to colonial standards and acted in ways antithetical to Indigenous values by owning enslaved Africans, and how this legacy of pain and abuse has effects today for the descendants of those who were enslaved, and our communities as a whole. We touch on current conversations around the recognition of Freedmen Descendants by the Five Tribes.

Our stories are intertwined, and we need to examine the past to determine how best to more forward.

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Resources mentioned in the episode:

Website for Dr. Miles: TiyaMiles.com

The Cherokee Nation has put out a call for freedmen descendants to share cultural artifacts, family photos, and other memorabilia for an exhibit: Call for Freedmen Descendants

Creek Freedmen descendants have a gofundme to raise funds to support the community and legal efforts to gain recognition: GoFundMe

Dr. Keene made a reading list on my blog two years ago on Anti-Blackness in the Cherokee Nation, which has a wide range of academic and non-academic resources on the topic: Dr. Keene’s Reading List

#AMRPodcast #AllMyRelations #AllMyRelationsPodcast #BLM #BlackLivesMatter #afroindigenous

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to all my relations. I'm your friendly co-host, Matika Wilbur from the
0:05.1	Tulalup and Swinn and Mish tribes. And I'm a mom, a photographer, and a storyteller,
0:10.5	and I'm so happy to be back on the air with you today. And before I begin, I just want to send
0:18.0	my love and prayers and good medicine out to each and every one of you. And I'm Adrienne.
0:25.0	I am a writer, a professor, and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. I know it's been a while since
0:30.4	you've heard my voice, but I've missed all of you, and I hope everyone is hanging in there.
0:39.7	To frame the conversation we're going to have today, we have to travel back in time to two years ago.
0:45.6	It was the late spring of 2020. George Floyd had just been murdered by the Minneapolis police,
0:52.0	and the world was watching as community members took to the streets to protest,
0:56.0	and the Black Lives Matter movement was in full force. Here at all my relations, we were trying
1:01.5	to figure out what to do to be as supportive as we could be. Matika and I decided that we wanted
1:06.3	to make an episode that talked about what the broader Indigenous community could do to support
1:10.4	the movement for Black Lives and to support the Black Native and the Afro-Indigenous relatives
1:14.9	in our communities. So we started talking to folks. And with each conversation, we realized that
1:20.5	the story was so much larger than one episode, and that trying to fit everything into a neatly
1:25.9	packaged hour was actually a disservice to the communities we were hoping to support.
1:31.4	So we kept talking, and then Matika and Dazia had more conversations, and now we're sitting on
1:37.0	some very beautiful interviews collected over the course of two years. Some relate to Black Lives
1:42.9	Matter and George Floyd, and others are more current, and others like the conversation you're about
1:48.0	to hear today, bring us back to the historical foundations of the relationships between Indigenous
1:53.1	and Black communities. Recently, something happened that made us want to share this particular
1:58.1	interview with Harvard professor and historian Dr. Taya Miles. Matika and I decided to contact Dr.
	...

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