Claiming Kin

For a decade, growing numbers of scholars have interrogated the topics of Native American people of African descent, relations between Native Americans and African Americans, and the enslavement of African people by Native people. These subjects were once familiar mostly to specialists in the histories of the native peoples of the regions we now call the Southeast and Oklahoma.¹ But they have drawn increasing attention from scholars in American studies and related disciplines and have become associated with a number of authors, including James F. Brooks, Jack D. Forbes, Barbara Krauthamer, Tiya Miles, Celia E. Naylor, Claudio Saunt, and Circe Sturm. Indeed, the book reviewed here was published almost simultaneously with a closely related work, Saunt's excellent history of a Creek family with African, white, and Indian roots and branches.² Why has a field that some might consider obscure, and some others would prefer to leave in obscurity, come to command such attention?

The study of "black-Indian relations" (as the field is often problematically termed, implying that those categories are entirely discrete) offers a powerful lens through which to explore issues central to American studies. To understand the constructing of categories, the forging of identities, and the power that makes (and is made in) these processes, scholars have turned to the study of margins: it is at the border that we most clearly see the nation, and it is in legal cases over who possesses whiteness that we can grasp the possessive investment in that crucial property.³ Similarly, few fields can tell us more about the interplay of colonialism, race, and slavery than the study of relations among African Americans and Native Americans. It not so much that we must understand colonialism, race, and slavery to study the Cherokee nation. Of course we must. We also need to understand them to study the continent as a whole. Tiya Miles demonstrates how looking at relations between black and Indian people in the Cherokee nation gives definition to our understanding of how colonialism, race, and slavery have interacted to shape the Cherokees and other nations, including the United States. She does this by studying black-Indian relations in another sense—the actual kinship relations that weave together these supposedly discrete peoples and histories.

A second reason that this field has come to command attention is that descendants of black members of a number of tribal nations are insisting that their story be told, heard, and considered in the courts and the media of the United States and tribal nations. In a series of recent and ongoing cases within the Cherokee Nation, the Muskogee Creek Nation, and the Seminole Nation, people of African descent have claimed that they have been improperly denied membership because they are black. Because tribal membership is based on descent lines, these cases turn on the argument that their ancestors should have been recognized as tribal members, but were excluded because of their African ancestry—even when it was intermixed with significant Native ancestry. These cases touch upon important and sensitive questions: what constitutes Native tribal membership, what is the place of race in bounding it, and who has the authority to decide this issue in matters of law? Notably, the debates on these cases are fundamentally historical, even genealogical, in nature.

Given this emphasis on genealogy, family history provides a perfect mode of entry into a topic that promises enormously broad interpretive power. Miles does not dwell on current legal cases in Indian Country. But, like the litigants in these cases, Miles turns to genealogy and family history. She uses these tools to narrate the ways in which Native and African people in the United States have navigated the waters of colonization, slavery, and discourses and practices of race. Those stories are more than merely a means to an end; they are compelling tales in their own right. But if the study of relations between Indian and black people offers a remarkably compact window...