Olivia Ward Bush-Banks and New Negro Indigeneity

I seemed to have lost my identity regarding the distinctness of race, being of African and Indian descent.

Olivia Ward Bush-Banks (“Autobiographical,” Collected 313)

Among New Negro Renaissance greats such as Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and Wallace Thurman, early twentieth-century African American newspapers referred to the Afro-Montauk Olivia Ward Bush-Banks as “the grand dame of the literati” (Byrd A8).¹ Her poetry and plays often feature representations of African American and Native American life and speculate on the ways these groups’ interactions with each other influenced cultural and racial identity formation. The few scholars that remember her name today might argue that her earlier works reflect on her African-Native American heritage, while her later works focus exclusively on her African American culture (Grant).² However, Bush-Banks’s writings on self- and imposed identities, spanning from the 1890s to the 1940s, challenge ideas about indigeneity, race, and “Americanness” beyond the divides of the dominant black–white color line.

Bush-Banks’s literary work draws attention to the complex relations of African Americans and Native Americans while deconstructing the ideology of black separatism. Her poetry, plays, and creative nonfiction offer an understudied perspective on the emergent internationalism and pan-Africanism within New Negro philosophy and its literary renaissance.³ Furthermore, her works call for New Negro Indigeneity, a political critique of anti-Blackness and claims of racial purity, that acknowledges African Americans’ and Native Americans’ separate yet intertwined histories. Bush-Banks’s works broaden contemporary approaches to defining indigeneity, a term that has garnered renewed attention as people around the globe use it to foster a sense of belonging that often relies on geographic origin. However, just as the concept of race is a social construction, so is the concept of indigeneity, in that it has no universal definition or application. New Negro Indigeneity responds to ancestral dispossession and white-settler colonialism’s debilitating effects on cross-racial and cross-cultural collaboration.

I read Bush-Bank’s literary work as a lens through which to critically study anti-Blackness and racism alongside colonialism in the United States. Considering scholarship from African American and Native American studies, I propose the concept of New Negro Indigeneity and consider its multiple historical, theoretical, and literary interventions. Theorizing Bush-Banks’s work with attention to New Negro Indigeneity has historical implications regarding how scholars might reassess topics such as racial passing, the “one-drop rule,” and the concept of the New Negro. New Negro Indigeneity also invites scholars to challenge theoretical divisions across African American and Native American studies. The growing interest in African-Native American studies invites scholars to reconsider how compartmentalization of authors’ identities limits our readings of their works, guides readers’ attention to the issues presented in their works, and influences the ways in which scholars canonize mixed-heritage authors.⁴

Bush-Banks pays careful attention to the connections between African Americans and Native Americans at a time when many African-Native individuals struggled to assert their identities through legal measures or have their mixed heritages accepted by their communities and by society at large. One can only speculate that Bush-Banks’s disappearance from contemporary literary studies of the New Negro Renaissance is due to her uniquely democratic attitude toward indigeneity, race, and culture during a period when movements tended to form according to racially stratified lines. Writing with attention to New Negro Indigeneity allows Bush-Banks to take part in revising a US cultural history that insists on racial purity and racial stratification according to a black–white binary. In doing so, Bush-Banks intervenes in an issue that Carter G. Woodson points out: that “one of the longest unwritten chapters of the history of the United States is . . . the relations of the Negroes and Indians” (45).

A Member of the Race

Olivia Ward Bush-Banks was born on 27 February 1869 in Sag Harbor, New York, to Abraham Ward and Eliza Draper. Between 1899 and 1942, she composed over seventy-five poems, twenty-three plays and sketches, numerous essays and newspaper articles, and a...