Toward Black and Indigenous Futures

Robyn Maynard & Leanne Betasamosake Simpson.

Black life—for the African diaspora, in particular—has for so long been constituted by placelessness: this is so clear, for instance, when we think about the boatloads of displaced Africans dying en route to Europe, the thousands of deaths in the Mediterranean ocean, the over ten million dead, from centuries past, in the Atlantic ocean. So much Black life continues to be destroyed today in what’s being called the global refugee crisis in the so-called post-colonial world.

Discussions of land and place have been, in many ways, central to Black freedom and unfreedom: the formulation of nation states, which of course were also violently imposed onto pre-existing Indigenous communities, have always been hostile to Black life, so much of the history of drawing borders has always also been about containing Black people’s freedom of movement.

Illustrations by me (inspired by the styles of Boris Schmitz)