Course Overview:
Crispus Attucks, the first martyr of the US War for Independence was a working-class New Englander of both African American and Indigenous descent. In the five hundred years since Europeans first brought Africans to the shores of North America, they forged shared histories, communities, and families alongside, and often together with Native peoples. Racism, legal frameworks, and historical particularities have often divided the two communities. This course considers examples of Black-Native unity, Blood quantum, historical and contemporary anti-Blackness in the U.S., communities of Black Indians including Louisiana Creoles, and the enslavement of African Americans by “civilized tribes” and resulting Freedmen.
Course Objectives
Students will: Demonstrate familiarity with themes from lectures and assigned readings • Develop an accurate mental timeline of important people, events, and eras of African-Indigenous relations • Articulate the ways and reasons that Native American and African American peoples have both come together and pushed each other away under white supremacy and why that is important to understand • Explain the distinct categories of “race” and indigenous status, along with the distinctions for politics, law, and culture • Draw on lecture materials and reading assignments to develop and express informed opinions about the relationship between Africans, Indigenous peoples, and Afro-Indigenous peoples of North America, primarily within the United States including histories, literary production, and cultural production to each other
Crispus Attucks, the first martyr of the US War for Independence was a working-class New Englander of both African American and Indigenous descent. In the five hundred years since Europeans first brought Africans to the shores of North America, they forged shared histories, communities, and families alongside, and often together with Native peoples. Racism, legal frameworks, and historical particularities have often divided the two communities. This course considers examples of Black-Native unity, Blood quantum, historical and contemporary anti-Blackness in the U.S., communities of Black Indians including Louisiana Creoles, and the enslavement of African Americans by “civilized tribes” and resulting Freedmen.
Course Objectives
Students will: Demonstrate familiarity with themes from lectures and assigned readings • Develop an accurate mental timeline of important people, events, and eras of African-Indigenous relations • Articulate the ways and reasons that Native American and African American peoples have both come together and pushed each other away under white supremacy and why that is important to understand • Explain the distinct categories of “race” and indigenous status, along with the distinctions for politics, law, and culture • Draw on lecture materials and reading assignments to develop and express informed opinions about the relationship between Africans, Indigenous peoples, and Afro-Indigenous peoples of North America, primarily within the United States including histories, literary production, and cultural production to each other
- Teacher: Robert Caldwell