ABSTRACT
The image of a little red book is imprinted on the minds of many a present-day scholar laboring in the field of Afro-/Native Studies. One of the co-authors of this essay first encountered the tome as a young woman visiting potential colleges with her mother in the late 1980s. In a small black-owned bookstore near Spelman and Morehouse Colleges in Atlanta, that little red book, Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage, was propped up and facing out on a top shelf. Its cover featured an African American man and Native American man standing shoulder to shoulder as they stared back at the camera, bodies stiff, faces alive with enigmatic expression. The bookstore owner explained that Black Indians, published in 1986, was a sleeper hit, popular especially with prisoners who wrote in to request copies by mail. Embraced by an African American reading public consisting of multiple sub-groups, historian William Loren Katz’s book met a more skeptical Native American and general audience. Katz’s celebratory survey of African American and Native American historical relations (intended at first for a juvenile readership) was apparently viewed by many who encountered it as a contradiction in terms. Katz writes in a new preface to the 25th anniversary edition that one characteristic response to the book was: “There were not!”—a direct refusal to entertain the notion represented by his title.1 “Black” and “Indian” were terms that seemed to cancel one another out in the minds of some potential readers. These two words and the conceptualizations that accompanied them appeared divorced to these critics—as areas of personal and community identity as well as fields of intertwined intellectual inquiry. “Black Indian” was therefore a category akin to ghost in the 1980s, barely visible, threatening yet incredible, haunting the edges of the American imaginary.
