When Black Lives Matter Meets Indian Country: Using the Cherokee and Chickasaw Nations as Case Studies for Understanding the Evolution of Public History and Interracial Coalition

Abstract:In 2020 a social revolution to incite change around police violence against Black women and men became so much more. Spurred by the May 25, 2020, brutal murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, monuments to enslavers and colonizers across the United States were toppled. Movements to remove statues commemorating the Confederacy and other symbols related to hatred and genocide have existed for more than one hundred years. But there was one place the movements revolving around Confederate commemoration had largely not touched: Indian Country. That changed when the Cherokee Nation removed Confederate monuments—installed by Cherokee members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy—from the nation's capitol square in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. In this article, the author examines the evolutions of anti-Blackness and anti-racism in Indian Country through case studies of the Cherokee and Chickasaw Nations' twentieth and twenty-first-century Confederate memorialization and 2020 statements on the Black Lives Matter movements. These two nations, as former slaveholding states, are important representations of the possibilities and limits of interracial coalition. The author argues that to fully understand the breadth of the struggle against the effects of settler colonialism in the United States, which include both anti-Blackness and anti-Native sentiment, we must interrogate the anti-Blackness of the Native past and present.