Professor Bonita Lawrence And Zainab Amadahy

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Lawrence and Amadahy argued that Canada, unlike America "deny the prevalence of anti-Black racism and the malicious poison of colonial relations toward Indigenous peoples in this country" (p. 105), Tzvetan Todorov the Bulgarian psychologist argues, "Black and Indigenous peoples have experienced unique global levels of devastation as races. Genocide in the Americas represents the largest holocaust that the world has ever known, which destroyed almost one quarter of the earth’s population within 150 years (Todorov 1984, p. 133), yet this most important historical content is not mentioned in contemporary history books or taught in our schools.

Lawrence and Amadahy suggest, "These unique experiences still shape the lives of Native and Black peoples today in particular ways. Indigenous peoples are still being targeted for physical and cultural destruction and are widely assumed to have already "vanished". Erased from history as viable nations, their lands continue to be seen as "there for the taking," either as ongoing sources of resource theft or as real estate for the world’s wealthy migrants. Indigenous peoples globally are still relentlessly being pushed toward extinction, as peoples.

Meanwhile, Black Diasporic peoples today continue to be uniquely racialized by a discourse created through slavery, whereby everything from standards of beauty to notions of criminality hinge on degrees of phenotypic blackness (p. 106)..

Maaka and Fleras (2005) defined Indigenous communities as, peoples and nations are those which, having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of societies now prevailing in those territories or parts of them. They form at present non-dominant sectors of society and are determined to preserve, develop and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories, and their ethnic identity, as the basis of their continued existence as peoples, in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions, and legal systems. (, pp. 30–31) (p. 106).

Z. Amadahy and B. Lawrence, noted on (p. 132) "While the countless complexities of Black–Native identities and alliances in the Caribbean, as well as parts of Central and South America have taken a very different turn from the polarized and contradictory situation in some regions of the United States, the hegemony of the United States not only in influencing how Black–Native relations are perceived, but also in shaping how "race" is understood in Canada, requiring us to focus primarily on the American context in order to begin to describe the Canadian situation".

Arguing that "Indigenous peoples globally have experienced and continue to experience the brutality of colonization, land theft, and being targeted for extermination. In emphasizing historic Indigenous American genocide, they noted that they did not wish to detract from a recognition of ongoing Indigenous holocaust globally, only to highlight the historic scale of depopulation in the Americas and the global imperialist system that the sack of Indigenous America helped to create" (p. 132).

Cramer 2005, noted that in America "communities that are currently struggling for federal recognition as tribes, such as the Mowa Choctaws of Alabama, the Golden Hill Paugussetts of Connecticut, and the Ramapough Mountain Indians of New Jersey. Face a significant problem with the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Branch of Acknowledgement and Research (BAR) is that too much "black blood" is seen as a pollutant for Indian authenticity and can result in a failure to be federally recognized, while "white blood" is seen as more neutral and less problematic (Cramer 2005, p. 60.

Summary

White settlers in Canada consolidated their hold on the nation and maintained a century of Whites-only immigration, a powerful body of racist images harnessed by Black slavery was utilized to promote a sense of White racial superiority and ownership of the land among new European settlers.16 Even today, in the western United States, where the predominant racialized other is Native American, a common racist term for them is "bush nigger."

White images of Indians are so deeply embedded into the dialect of American (and Canadian) society that they are capable of evoking fundamentally demeaning relationships; a body of demeaning images of Black people originating in slavery has also become a potent tool of White identity formation as part of the colonial process, in Anglo North America.

Comanche activist Paul Smith has written, about the United States: "The essence of this country is bound up in Indian land and African slave labor" (Smith 1992, p. 23) (p. 123).

Conclusion

The reality is that in both the past and the present, in Canada and the United States, Black people and Native people have been subjected to different forms of racism and racial categorization by Europeans and their descendants, in the interests of exploiting both peoples. This is most obvious with racial classification in the United States, but the peculiarities of Canada’s "Whites only" immigration system, its pervasive anti-Black racism, its Indian Act, and its constant erasure of Black presence may wreak havoc on Black–Native relations in different ways in the future.

The strength of the historic connections between Black and Native people has been weakened by exclusionary racial classification, by anti-Black racism among Native people and a profound ignorance on the part of many contemporary Black people about Indigenous presence, nevertheless, it appears that there will be growing movements of Black–Native people across both Canada and the United States to reclaim Indigeneity – not only to lost African roots but to contemporary Native realities in Canada.

Throughout days of slavery, Africans and Indigenous people were enslaved together on plantations in the United States as well as in various parts of Latin America and the Caribbean. Throughout this History, there have been alliances between groups and the formation of community as a form of resistance. The crucial difference was that these alliances took place within strong and viable Indigenous cultures whose vitality had not been attacked and usurped through physical extermination and cultural genocide.