I Have Questions: Learning About Indigenous Studies, Lesson 4

Last week, I felt rather ambivalent about Juneteenth becoming a national holiday. On the one hand, I was touched by Opal Lee’s fight to make it a holiday, a fight that preceded the current version of protest we call the Movement for Black Lives. This Black woman saw her dreams come to fruition in a country where that so very rarely happens for us. And, I was proud of her. In the midst of that pride, several ideas perplexed me. What exactly does Juneteenth mean if voting rights are being eroded? How can we celebrate a holiday that is so regionally specific without education? And, how can that education take place if we can’t talk about race and history in public schools?

Image Description: A small black and white striped cat rests its front paws on a window ledge as if waiting for something, hoping for something, remembering something. Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

I certainly don’t have answers to these questions, but I do know what my recent foray into Indigenous history has taught me. So, I bear in mind last week’s concerns about erasure and ask what happened with Indigenous folks during Juneteenth? And, maybe more broadly, how are the histories of Indigenous people linked with the histories of Black folks and emancipation? Black and Native histories are deeply intertwined. If we’re going to talk about emancipation history with any honesty, we’ll have to discuss Native folks too.

Here’s the thing. I’ve never celebrated Juneteenth. Ever. I’m from New Jersey, and, quite frankly, that seemed very much a part of Texas’s history. I also understand the proprietary feeling Texans and, now, Black folks generally have about this holiday. For the Texans, it is theirs. Now that it is national, it is ours. That jealousy over who celebrates and why and the concern about whether the celebration is pure? I get that. That’s about trying to preserve some dignity when your culture is consistently appropriated.

And, my task here is not to opine about whether Juneteenth should be a national celebration, nor is my intention to wrest it away from its specific Blackness.

Instead, I respect the holiday by being curious about the dynamics surrounding the original date in 1865. I turned to Annette Gordon-Reed’s recent book, On Juneteenth. She is an award-winning historian, famous for her work on Thomas Jefferson, among others. On Juneteenth is part personal history, part Texas history, part United States history. Actually, according to Gordon-Reed, Texas, “more than any state in the Union, has always embodied nearly every major aspect of the story of the United States of America.” A bold (but factual) claim.

When Gordon-Reed tells the history of Texas, she pinpoints that the fight over whether Texas became a part of Mexico, an independent Republic, or a state in the expanding US was about two specific concerns: 1) how to annihilate the Indigenous tribes like the Comanche and Cherokee Nations, and 2) the position of chattel slavery. Then-president of Mexico Santa Ana was perfectly sanguine about Anglo settlers helping him defeat the Native peoples provided they did not bring slavery with them. Texas fought to become an independent republic instead. The founding of the state is mired in a desire to steal both land and labor.

So, what does all this mean for the celebration of Juneteenth? On the one hand, it isn’t necessarily a significant event in the histories of Indigenous people. It does force us to reckon with how exactly emancipation comes to have meaning in this country. On the other hand, telling the story of Juneteenth, when white enslavers extracted another two years labor out of Black folks using the threat of various forms of violence, allows us to also tell about how the white settlers of Texas wanted to subjugate both people groups. The ugliness of it all. The brutality of it all.

This brings me back to my earlier questions about teaching and learning this holiday. Allow me hone the question: how do we commemorate? The answer might be…we don’t. Commemorate is a Latin word meaning “to call to remembrance or preserve in memory by solemnity or celebration” and it tends to connote that such remembrance is in speech or writing. Think: a statue, a plaque. Think: something static.

Think again.

Image description: Layli Long Soldier with glasses and red lipstick in a dark blue denim shirt and lighter blue denim skirt with black leggings or stockings and Doc Marten-type shoes in front of a microphone with bookshelves behind her. She is reading a book. Image courtesy of Indian Country Today.

Layli Long Soldier is an Oglala Lakota poet, writer, and activist. At the Schomburg Literature Festival, she opened the space with a poem about the Dakota 38, a group of men hanged by Abraham Lincoln (how does that Great Emancipator title sound now?) after the US-Dakota war. They were hanged on December 26, 1862. In addition to the Dakota 38, there were also 265 others who were convicted by the US military and 3000 more Dakota people forced to march west out of Minnesota. Layli Long Soldier’s poem, “38,” (Full text here.) could be called a commemoration but for the fact that she questions commemoration itself.

The poem narrates the painful history of the Dakota 38 while critiquing the nature of Indigenous-US relationships. She begins “Here the sentence will be respected.” Such a powerful line to start the poem, especially since treaties between the US and the Dakota peoples are currently being contested and abrogated. Long Soldier’s poem also describes the yearly Memorial Rides to honor the Dakota 38 which end on Christmas Day. She writes “Often, memorials come in the forms of plaques, statues, or gravestones.//The memorial for the Dakota 38 is not an object inscribed with words, but an act.”

I was struck by two aspects of her reading. First, she broke into her reading of the poem to point the audience to a place where they could see the Memorial Rides online. In doing so, she respects the nature of memorializing even in poetry as an ongoing act. Her spontaneous speech, now part of that reading of the poem, urges participation in a continuous act. Her speech will forever be a part of the poem for me and for others in the audience. Second, to call the memorial an act underscores the living, moving, ongoing nature of celebrations and memorials. They can be a statue or a plaque. In point of fact, who we honor with such statues and plaques says much about who and what we value. Her point was that there is another way to remember: to act, to commit to memory in the mind, and body. Muscle memory.

The fact that Abraham Lincoln could pen the Emancipation Proclamation and slaughter the Dakota 38 is consonant with American history. That is what I think Juneteenth marks: the celebration in spite of historical oppression, the necessity of remembering the extracted labor on stolen land. This is why folks are skeptical about turning it into a moment or a monument each year. They, like me, seek another way of remembering.

Thank you, Layli Long Soldier.

If you are curious about why I’m writing about Indigneous Studies, please see Lesson 1.