By Amelia Ali
Throughout quarantine, the one university alumna activity I enjoy is conducting interviews with high school applicants. I get to speak with prospective students through their college admissions process and offer insight of my own, as well as write a recommendation on their behalf for admission. Recently, one interviewee and I spoke at length about her high school’s literature course where she read Toni Morrison. I am ashamed to say I first read the late Toni Morrison’s work during my final year of college but her lyrical dexterity has had a lasting impact on me.
Early on in quarantine, I was drawn back to Morrison’s A Mercy because of the racial exigencies that COVID-19 made apparent. Amidst the black squares and corporate statements flooding my feed, Black and Indigenous people became twice as likely to die from the virus than white people. In New Mexico, Indigenous communities began to account for 60% of COVID cases while only composing 9% of the population. The Navajo Nation’s COVID-19 infection rate has surpassed all but two U.S. states since Indigenous persons are hospitalized five times more than that of non-Hispanic white persons. As vaccine dissemination occurs, Black and indigenous communities are rightfully skeptical due to the medical racism they already experienced pre-COVID.
A Mercy is a very different book from Morrison’s other tale about American slavery, “Beloved”. Set in the 17th century, a Dutch tradesman participates in the early moments of the slave trade. Before Dutch Englishman Jacob Vaark dies, he procures mail-order wife Rebekka who must oversee the livelihood and survival of her children; their Native American servant Lina whose tribe was decimated by smallpox; the enslaved girl Florens, who was accepted as payment for a bad loan; and biracial Sorrow. All women are reviled by the neighboring Anabaptist community for their commune. The women must contend with the nascent socioeconomic and religious classes that later founded the new American republic.
Morrison structures an episodic, personal narrative that defies reductive attempts at racial categorization from each woman’s perspective. Morrison allows these women to regain their autonomy in small acts. Lina gradually remembers and tells her tribal lore to the children of the house. She heals through herbs and chants. She provides sustenance to the household by fishing Indian-style. Later, Lina mothers a tender-hearted Florens and improves her literacy gradually. Nevertheless, neither woman has rights in the colony and remains at the mercy of their white masters. Each woman trusts and relies on the other for survival.
Moreover, Morrison reimagines the moment of race consciousness. When Europeans settled on this continent, they enslaved a portion of the indigenous population they did not outright kill. In 1607, the nascent Jamestown colony established who and what American national identity in language, customs, and laws. Thus, by the time the first enslaved Africans reached the shores of Virginia in 1619, they were not the only unpaid and brutalized labor enriching the ruling class. Settlement had agency – to take land, to take women, to erase and to rename. Morrison said, “A Mercy was an attempt to separate racism from enslavement.” She notes that the structures implemented were meant to sustain the ruling class’s dominance that America’s new civilization and wealth depended. It is her vision of America before racialized thinking pervaded society.
For me, revisiting Morrison grounded the intercultural similarities and differences in a white settler state amidst disproportionate Black and Indigenous death in the present-day. As a concerned member in this community, I know the relationship between Black and the Indigenous population of this continent is complex and intersectional. The descendants of enslaved Africans cannot be considered settlers. Enslaved peoples did not consent to being brought to Northern America. Settlement was not a choice for them. For instance, Lina did have ministrations about Florens’ presence though more predicated on her inability to survive on her own as a child as Lina did. Florens’ occupation of space exemplifies settler logic fostered from enslavement. When my family struggled during 2008’s housing crisis, I questioned whose land we occupied. What was private property? I yearned to find common cause with the only community who still has a spiritual connection to this land. Ubiquitously, inequity continues to significantly harm those who are the most vulnerable. Through Lina and Florens, Morrison highlights how enslavement was not necessarily tied to a particular race or color in the 17th-century Americas.
Morrison published A Mercy in 2008 when the U.S. elected its first African-American president. Critics perceived her writing from the perspective of slave-owning and enslaved women as a shift toward more “post-racial” literary discourse. These sentiments were similar to the legacy of Former Pres. Obama’s status as a post-racial politician. However, 2020 has brought forth a much more public and fraught debate about the way politics and settler institutions engender and enact violence against marginalized communities. In an interview on Snapchat’s Good Luck America, the former president angered progressives when he reduced the “defund the police” to a snappy slogan. Rather, it is a radical and actionable demand that millions of people have been globally organizing toward for decades in abolishing the prison-industrial complex. Obama’s legacy as reformist clings to the social and political status quo that the Trump era disintegrated.
Recently. New Mexico Representative Deb Haaland was nominated to lead the Interior Department as the first Native American Cabinet secretary in U.S. history. It was the indigenous Navajo Nation who facilitated President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral victory in Arizona and New Mexico. Despite high physical and geographical barriers to voting, the Navajo Nation registered tens of thousands who shifted their states from red to blue for the first time since 1996. Biden released a plan on tribal nations during his campaign because he recognizes the importance and the sweep of their sovereign rights. A member of New Mexico’s Laguna Pueblo people, Haaland elevates tribal interests and rights particularly as traditional ecological knowledge and methodology are being incorporated to combat climate change. As a member of the House Natural Resources Committee, Haaland championed renewable energy and policies with ample support from environmental groups, indigenous peoples’ advocates, and members of Congress.
Legally, a greater emphasis on tribal treaty rights and sovereignty could have far-reaching implications for environmental decisions concerning pipeline construction, drilling permits, land withdrawals, or water deliveries. Haaland has the grueling task of being the first Indigenous person nominated as a cabinet secretary. Unlike Obama, her legacy and legislative past will not be contended with in years to come but rather in mere weeks once Biden is inaugurated. Black and Indigenous communities bear the brunt of social and environmental injustices from the same systems of oppression. It is a Catch 22.
Previously, Haaland co-sponsored legislation with the Choctaw Nation which removed treaty protections to Freedmen, who were former enslaved Blacks of the five major Oklahoma tribal nations. The Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek) and Seminole Nations – collectively known as the Five Civilized Tribes – are not monolithic. Yet, its members enslaved Blacks and fought on the side of the Confederacy in the Civil War. It was not until 1866 that enslaved Blacks were granted freedom, tribal citizenship, and equal interest in the soil and national funds in the Treaties of 1866. In 1983, the Choctaw constitution eliminated Freedman citizens based on blood quantum. In June 2020, Rep. Maxine Water sought the Choctaw nation to comply with 1866 treaty language and give Freedmen promised rights before the tribe could receive federal housing funds.
There was staunch rebuke from Chief Gary Batton of the Choctaw Nation who wrote a letter to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. By Chief Batton’s estimation, new Choctaw law would be “untenable to reach back into defensible and conflictive periods of history and impose just one portion of a treaty without regard to the meandering mass of countervailing treaties, law and policy that followed.” Anti-blackness in Indian Country affects the descendants Freedmen, Afro-Indigenous, and the greater Black Native community. Acknowledging Freedmen and granting them protections is pivotal as Congress debates resource distribution for COVID-19 relief funding, particularly since tribal law exists in a liminal space from constitutional law. It is hypocritical to count Freedmen when it comes to federal funding though deny them of the financial benefits reaped from their existence.
Recent anger over Haaland’s past record illustrates that today’s activists and their allies are linking racial justice demands to global critiques of structural inequality. I revisit to Morrison because her female characters personify a counter-history at the intersection of the fictive and the historical. Morrison’s novel reorients the American origin story steeped in whiteness whereby non-whites fostered linkages that have not been as emphasized as in recent months. The intercultural narratives of being Black and Indigenous is a constant conversation of learning and unlearning. I am excited for Rep. Haaland because this could be the step to healing and to correcting the historical atrocities against the Native people in this country.
Nevertheless, how can we operate in a colonial structure? How do we critique efforts to uplift at the expense of others? Can we critique their efforts? Decolonizing America and its structural problems requires work. Indigeneity in America is intersectional and complex. Both communities experienced forced migration, decimation, and land seizure. For Natives, it was the Trail of Tears and the Sand Creek Massacre. For Blacks, it was the end of Reconstruction and the rise of Ku Klux Klan, as well as the Tulsa Race Massacre. Both communities have tales of their ancestors fleeing west and hoping for freedom and autonomy because America has two original sins. COVID-19 is not the first pandemic to hit Native Americans. Indigenous modes of survival and resurgence carry lessons for us all.
