ABHM Book Club: An Afro-Indigenous History of the U.S.
We are pleased to announce ABHM’s October Book of the Month: An Afro-Indigenous History of the U.S. by Kyle T. Mays. We invite you to join us on November 22st at 1:30 p.m. for a discussion of the book at America’s Black Holocaust Museum (ABHM) or virtually via Zoom.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Kyle T. Mays’s An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States offers a connected history of Black and Native peoples in what became the United States, beginning in the pre-Revolutionary era and extending into contemporary struggles for justice and sovereignty. Mays, an Afro-Indigenous scholar of Saginaw Chippewa heritage, challenges the tendency to study these histories separately. He examines how enslaved Africans and Indigenous peoples were incorporated into a developing American society through systems that depended on enslaved labor, the seizure of Indigenous lands, and racial hierarchies. The book explores enslavement, Indigenous dispossession, resistance, citizenship, and the complicated relationships that developed between Black and Native communities.
The later chapters follow Black and Indigenous political movements through the Progressive Era, the Civil Rights era, Black Power and Red Power, and contemporary movements addressing policing, cultural representation, and sovereignty. Mays highlights moments of solidarity, including relationships among figures such as Angela Davis, Dennis Banks, Russell Means, Oren Lyons, and Clyde Bellecourt, while also examining periods when Black and Native communities struggled to understand or support one another. The book ultimately asks readers to consider how the histories of slavery and settler colonialism have shaped the United States and how greater understanding between Black and Indigenous peoples might contribute to new possibilities for solidarity and justice.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kyle T. Mays is an Afro-Indigenous (Saginaw Chippewa) writer and scholar whose work focuses on U.S. history, African American and Indigenous studies, urban history, race relations, and popular culture. He is a professor of African American Studies, American Indian Studies, and History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Mays earned his bachelor’s degree from Michigan State University’s James Madison College and his Ph.D. in U.S. history from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His scholarship examines the historical and contemporary relationships between Blackness and Indigeneity, with particular attention to dispossession, resistance, and cultural expression.
Mays is the author of several books, including Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes: Modernity and Hip Hop in Indigenous North America (2018), An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States (2021), and City of Dispossessions: Indigenous Peoples, African Americans, and the Creation of Modern Detroit (2022). His more recent work continues to explore Afro-Indigenous solidarity and the historical relationships between Black and Indigenous communities. In 2023–24, he served as a Fulbright Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Edinburgh. Through his teaching, scholarship, and public writing, Mays brings Black and Indigenous histories into conversation and asks how understanding their interconnected pasts can help imagine more just futures.