Many Nations Longhouse

This paper focuses on Black-Indian (Afro-Indigenous) relations in mainland and on island America, comparing the denationalization of Cherokee Freedmen and Dominicans of Haitian descent. The paper is a philosophical query into the interstices between struggles for native sovereignty, racial formations and citizenship, and draws on these seemingly disparate examples to engage two principle questions: 1) how do our colonial racial legacies manifest themselves in the struggles for citizenship in the context of Native/Indigenous sovereign nations? 2) What do sovereign Native/Indigenous nations gain from the exclusion of “black” subjects?

Ana-Maurine Lara, PhD is an national award-winning novelist and poet. Her fictional publications include Erzulie’s Skirt(RedBone Press 2006), When the Sun Once Again Sang to the People (KRK Ediciones 2011), alongside numerous short stories and poems in featured anthologies and literary magazines. Her published scholarship engages topics on Afro-Latin@ and Afro-Diasporic queer identities and aesthetics. Ana-Maurine recently completed her PhD in African American Studies, Anthropology & Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Her graduate research focused on LGBT political activism and the Catholic state in the Dominican Republic. In the 2014-2015 academic year, she is a Visiting Scholar with the Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies at the University of Oregon. Her first academic book (in-progress) is titled Bodies and Souls: Sexual Terror in God’s New World, and is based off of her graduate research.