When We Recognize Each Other

Dr. Kyle T. Mays on Kinship and the Role of the Historian

ART BY KEENA AZANIA ROMANO

When we first published this conversation between Loam Editor Kailea Loften and Dr. Kyle T. Mays in our 2022 magazine “Black & Native Attention As Miracle,” many readers shared how meaningful Mays’ vision for a “revolution in values” was to them. As we continue to face escalating atrocity, we want to revisit this essay in the prayer that it can support our community. From reflections on callout culture to recommendations on how to build power, Dr. Mays guides us toward a new understanding of kinship in troubled times.

We also want to reshare this essay because it underscores many of our more recent publications. Throughout this essay, you will find links to further readings that we hope can nourish new narratives.

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How do we come to learn one anothers’ histories? And how can history function as a tool of cultivating kinship? In this interview, Dr. Kyle T. Mays, author of “An Afro Indigenous History of the United States,” shares with us the role of history in this moment when we will truly need each other to win the world we want. In the hands of a dynamic historian, history isn’t static but alive, fluid, responsive, instructive. This is why the work of Dr. Kyle T. Mays resonates so deeply. By illuminating and bridging histories that are so often erased from mainstream curricula, Mays offers a vision for how Black and Indigenous movements for liberation can look to the past to reshape the present.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

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Kailea Loften (KL): Kyle, could you share a little bit about how you identify and the communities and people that raised you?

Kyle Mays (KM): I identify as African American and Saginaw Chippewa from Lansing, Michigan and Detroit, as well. And I'll begin with my great grandmother's story. My great grandmother, a Saginaw Chippewa woman, came to the city of Detroit in the spring of 1940 when she was 16, and shortly thereafter, married my great grandfather, who's African American. They produced these Afro-Indigenous children. My great grandma became a respected elder and activist in the city of Detroit in the 1960s until she walked on in 1984. And her children, especially my Aunt Judy, became really important educators around Indigenous education in the city of Detroit. Judy founded what was called Medicine Bear American Indian Academy in the early 1990s. That’s my dad's side. And then my mom's side, her people are from Georgia, and they came up to Cleveland in the 1930s. My mom was mostly a single mother.

It wasn't much of a contradiction being Afro-Indigenous, as much as it is a narrative for a lot of people. It just wasn't a thing. It became a thing when I went to university. And then you start getting into the whole, 'are you ashamed of being Black? 'you're not Native enough.' And that's really when I began to have questions around identity and you realize, 'oh shit, some people are really dedicated to placing boxes around identity in very certain ways.' I would go to the rez even though I wasn't raised there, the Saginaw Chippewa reservation, because my cousins lived there. But I hung out with my cousins and their friends and there wasn't a lot of tension around identity in that way, until getting older. And I'll say, one of the most significant things for me were all of the Native, Black, and Indigenous women who raised me in many respects. I think about hanging out with my aunties in different parts of Detroit, and taking me and my siblings to Taco Bell... random, silly things. And then my mom always trying to hustle as working, poor, mothers often have to do. As I've gotten older, it's given me a greater respect for that sort of labor, but also a more critical eye towards capitalism, and how that puts young women, femmes, in the vulnerable positions where it's a struggle day to day, and I've always increasingly thought about mental health in that regard. Not only for my mom, for example, but for us. I just wish we didn't live in a colonial system that required that resilience or that sort of strength to carry on every day.

KL: I certainly feel the same. I often have these moments of anger because I think about how I could be applying myself differently with how much energy and passion I have, and how instead my energy goes towards putting out a lot of little fires.

So Kyle, I just want to share as someone who has one Black parent and one Native parent, I'm really not exaggerating when I say that I've been waiting my whole life for your book to be written. And I know that there are others who hold this same or a similar kind of identity—the unwilling bridge, the translator, the in-betweener—who feel the same. So I'm curious: was there an exact moment when you decided, 'I must do this project'? What were some of the instances that prompted you to commit to this book?

KM: There are two instances: First, when I went to Japan. I did a study abroad in Japan. I was there for four months. I'd taken Japanese since seventh grade. So I went to Japan, and I had all these weird racialized experiences. I had a huge afro at the time, and people would be like, "do you want to go to the hip hop performance? Do you want to be a part of the hip hop group?" These are Japanese people asking me. And I'm like, "nah, not really, you know, I just gotta study." And the other thing was, we had to do a research paper for the first segment, and I wanted to do it on Ainu. The Ainu are an Indigenous group in the most northern island, Hokkaido. But the professor, the Sensei, said, "It's an unimportant topic. The Ainu are basically a dying, vanishing group." And I was like, 'that sounds kind of familiar. What do you mean, they're just vanishing? And they're not important, and no one cares about this topic?' So I started digging around, and I didn't have a lot of time, but I wrote the paper anyway. It got me thinking, man, I really need to get back to the U.S. because there's a lot of stuff that I want to think about more, around issues of Blackness and Indigeneity. The structures of it, and what can I learn and also research about, for Afro-Indigenous people while also speaking to larger social movements?

There was another instance where, after having done this research for a senior project, looking at the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement, I was visiting graduate schools, and there was a Black Studies professor who said that there was no relationship between Black and Native peoples during the Black and Red Power movements, which just wasn't true. I hadn't done extensive research, but I literally had a photo of Stokely Carmichael, Russell Means and Dennis Banks, and the radical Jewish lawyer William Kunstler, just hanging out. I was so confused, and so I thought, 'Well, hell, I'm gonna prove you wrong and go find all this information.' And I didn't get to it during my graduate education, but I was dedicated to doing it, so I finished this hip hop book and then I was like, 'I need to write this book now, with all the activism, and solidarity and tensions across the country. I think it's politically an important moment to tell these stories and to demonstrate this history that's outside of the Five Tribes, because that's not my experience, that's not many Afro-Indigenous people's experience, and that dominates the discourse.¹ It was really those instances in my life, and then the contemporary activism spurred me to get this book out now.

KL: Thank you for sharing that. As a child I was obsessed with Japan and studied Japanese and also had similar moments where I have inquired after the Ainu people and the rhetoric is that there's nothing to know, which is a glaring red flag, for any of us who experience literal erasure ‘til the present day, that there's definitely something to be known. So appreciating this long arc, taking you so far away from home, and ultimately bringing you back to dig even further.

As I was reading your book “An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States”, I was thinking, 'This is a tremendous undertaking.' You are not only tracing and weaving together over hundreds of years, a compilation of story, but also bringing to light voices that have often been overlooked. And you really made clear how much of our present-day work and quest towards liberation and sovereignty has been predicated on the work of many others who have come before. What is the specific rallying cry you were trying to bring forth here?

KM: For me, it's really simple. And it's that U.S. democracy, the idea as a political ideology, its proponents, and its ongoing structure, are based upon two things: Dispossession—the dispossession, or the expropriation, or taking of land from Indigenous peoples; and the enslavement and exploitation of people of African descent. Those things are fundamental to American democracy, and as such, are fundamental to American capitalism. For me, if those things are fundamental, every step thereafter must take that into account. And I said that and wrote that because I think African Americans can so easily accept the whole notion of Americanism, or the legitimacy of a settler state, on the one hand. And on the other hand, if we're to engage in acts of decolonization or anti-colonial resistance, then I think tribal nations have to more critically consider the role that they can play in reproducing the legitimacy of the U.S. settler nation state. And that's not me saying 'don't honor the treaties.' But it is to say that the discourse around government-to-government relationships can very easily slide into something that's just very liberal.

That might be controversial for some people, but I'm thinking of scholars like Glen Coulthard, who are saying we should reject the colonial politics of recognition. And in rejecting the colonial politics of recognition, it would require us to come to some hard truths. I'm not talking about everyday forms of survival that we need to do. But as a long-term project, how do we continue to challenge the afterlives of colonialism and anti-Blackness rooted in slavery and various forms of dispossession? We should have more conversations about that. How much are we willing to give up or sacrifice for the sake of recognition? What gets us fundamentally closer to liberation? And I think that point of liberation, what Nina Simone would say, "no fear," is easily lost. I think we need to really recalibrate and focus on the whole idea of liberation sometimes.