Essay
“Betsy Love’s life experiences stand in for a broader historical phenomenon: the complex and exploitative relationships between people of color.” Chickasaws are a proud people: proud of the strength and military might we were known for among Indians in what is now the southeastern United States; proud of the strategic alliances we made with the »
Essay
A E Faircloth died on Easter morning 2014. Among the things he left behind was a tidy double-wide on an acre lot in Longs, an unincorporated community in the northeastern corner of South Carolina. The lot fronted a couple of old wooden sheds, behind them a meticulously groomed if wholly plain vegetable garden. Twenty humped »
Essay
“Chattel slavery and Indian Removal have bequeathed us a ‘hard history’ indeed.” In 2020, during debates about the reauthorization of the Native American Housing and Self Determination Act (NAHASDA) in Congress, Representative Maxine Waters proposed an amendment to the law that would deny federal housing monies to any Native nation that denies tribal citizenship to »
Essay
“Understanding the persistence of colonial power structures reveals the ways in which our pasts can so monstrously echo our present.” Every October, Beaufort County, South Carolina, holds a tax sale auction for delinquent properties. Last year was remarkable for two reasons. First, the auction of October 4, 2021, had more registered bidders (260) than properties »
Essay
“I remain haunted by what I can never know or speak of.” Growing up in the sandhills of Nebraska, I remember how my displaced Chickasaw father always surrounded us with his southern sensibilities: fried green tomatoes and eggplants, okra, black-eyed peas to start the new year, corn bread, and pit-roasted pig, javelina boar, or other »
Essay
Telling one’s own story is a way of asserting identity. It is simultaneously a fundamental responsibility and an inherent gift for each human being—and is often one of the first casualties of colonialism and oppression. Indigenous storytellers, knowledge holders, and practitioners who tell their own stories have long been viewed as superstitious or primitive by »
Essay
“This was genealogy as survival, genealogy with land and livelihood on the line.” As a child in the 1980s, I sensed that family history was deadly serious. Family history was material, physical, and psychological survival. In New Jersey, where I grew up, our family was Black; back in Oklahoma, my grandmother reminded us, we were »
Memoir
“my lament begins / where the bodies are buried / beside each other . . . ” 1. Achiel Knock, knock.Who’s there? Mano en ng’a?Ai yawa, it’s me. Anyalo donjo?Me who?Me who hates meandering introductions.
Essay
I am currently living in several places at once: in Stone Mountain, Georgia, on the homelands of the Muscogee Nation; in the United States; on Turtle Island, Abia Yala, or Mother Earth. As part of my commitment to the Muscogee (Creek) people who have stewarded this place longer than anyone else, I am learning a »
Art
This essay is part of our Shutter art and photography series. “Called to the Camera: Black American Studio Photographers” is on view at the New Orleans Museum of Art, September 16, 2022–January 8, 2023, and “The Photographs of Ralph Eugene Meatyard” at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, October 1, 2022–January 15, 2023. Because we can make »
Essay
Consider the evolution of cultural forms and our present role—whether active or passive—in shaping the folklore of the future. Folklorist Henry Glassie elaborates on his conception of tradition as “the creation of the future out of the past,” as, “A continuous process situated in the nothingness of the present, linking the vanished with the unknown, »
Essay
Thanksgiving gathers us around a table with mouths full of food, stories—and opinions. American Thanksgiving lore suggests that everyone from sea to shining sea enjoys the same iconic dishes: turkey, dressing, cranberries, and pie. In practice, that’s not the full picture. When it comes to a southern family’s (actual and/or chosen kin) T-Day table, most »