Teaching necessitates privileging stories. Time and curriculum constraints require that instructors select which perspectives we highlight, giving us each an awesome responsibility to fill our syllabi with voices our students need to hear. As tribal college and university (TCU) faculty, we’re charged with privileging Native American perspectives. In addition to the Indigenous texts we share in our coursework, federal holidays offer us a chance to discuss under-told stories about Native people’s connection to historic events.

I teach at the College of Menominee Nation (CMN) which means every Independence Day I’m compelled to tell students on our Green Bay/Oneida campus about how Polly Cooper and a delegation of her Oneida countrymen fed the starving American forces camped at the famed Valley Forge during the furious winter of 1777. On Veteran’s Day, I remind our Menominee students that their county contributed the highest percentage of soldiers per capita to serve during the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars of the early 21^st century. Upon hearing truths such as these, some students express their gratitude for the teaching while others share their frustration about not having heard about them sooner.

We live in a country where political fervor has calcified around regulating race-based conversations, which is all the more reason we need to fortify our students through classroom conversations. This week, our nation celebrates Juneteenth’s second anniversary as a federal holiday, and so now is the time to privilege conversations about the intersections amongst African American and Indigenous history.

No conversation about America’s racial sins can be summarized in a single column, but my hope is that you too come to see Juneteenth as a starting point for overdue discussions. The name itself refers to the day when the last African American slaves were informed of their freedom. While President Abraham Lincoln’s Emaciation Proclamation went into effect on January 1, 1963, it wasn’t until June 19, 1865, that the captives in Galveston, Texas were liberated. Marked ever since, the annual celebration has evolved to include educational events and the recognition of African American achievements. In 2021, President Joseph Biden signed the congressional act thereby making Juneteenth a federal holiday, elevating the day to its rightful place of honor. What was once a local celebration, is now a national day of reflection about the continuing ramifications of enslaving human beings.

This year, we should take time to reflect upon the work of William S. Yellow Robe Jr., an enrolled member of the Fork Peck Assiniboine Nation who also honored his Sioux and African American ancestry. Native theater lost his invaluable voice in July of 2021. Yellow Robe was a prolific playwright, actor, and teacher who was venerated in his field and yet steadfast in generously sharing his work with TCUs. I had the privilege of directing three of his shows for CMN, but what I treasure most is the conversations his work enables me to facilitate. Yellow Robe wrote semi-autobiographical plays about the Rose family, which faced racism for being of both Assiniboine and African American descent. In Rex Politics, a ten-year-old boy attacks his best friend based solely upon his mixed-racial ancestry, while Grandchildren of Buffalo Soldiers, whose title references African American soldiers who served in the American West following the Civil War, “examines the lingering effects of colonial exploitation of tensions between African American and Native American people in the nineteenth century.” Yellow Robe was a master of creating adversaries who shared more commonalities than either entity can recognize, leading to rich conversations without obvious conclusions.  

History defies reductive generalizations, a fact further affirmed by Caleb Gayle’s We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creeks, American Identity, and Power. Published just in time to capture an audience before Juneteenth, the text reveals the story of how the Creek Nation simultaneously owned slaves and recognized African Americans as full tribal citizens. The text centers around the contributions and fallout of the admirable work of chief Cow Tom, a Black Creek farmer who negotiated the 1866 treaty granting full citizenship for adopted African American tribal members. Mixing engaging reportage with his personal reflections as an American of Jamaican descent, Caleb leads his readers through the complex political landscape that resulted in African American Creeks being dropped from the tribal rolls by their tribe’s revised 1979 constitution. While no one outside of tribal members has the right to tell a sovereign nation how to determine its citizenship, Caleb’s text offers a rich narrative of the social forces that led to the revocation of Black Creeks’ ancestral claims and the traumatic ramifications this continues to have on their descendants.

This year’s anniversary of Juneteenth reminds every American of the shameful chapter that slavery etched into America’s history, but in so doing it offers its citizens an opportunity to revisit and salve old wounds. While I do not pretend to have the solutions for all the problems systemic racism has inflicted upon the United States, I’m confident that the next generation will move their countrymen closer to a space of healing. As TCU faculty, we are charged in helping some of America’s most innovative and gifted students reach their full potential, and that means asking them to contemplate some difficult questions. This holiday, let’s share some challenging stories, knowing that our classrooms are filled with passionate leaders motivated to act whenever they’re confronted with injustice. 

Ryan Winn teaches in the Liberal Studies Department at College of Menominee Nation.  

Editor’s note: The opinions expressed in the Inquisitive Academic or any other opinion columns published by the Tribal College Journal (TCJ) do not necessarily reflect the opinions of TCJ or the American Indian Higher Education Consortium. 

References

Gayle, C. (2022). We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creeks, American Identity, and Power. New York: Riverhead Books.

Yellowrobe Jr., W.S. (2009). Grandchildren of Buffalo Soldiers and Other Untold Stories. Los Angeles: UCLA American Indian Studies Center.

Yellowrobe Jr., W.S. (2000). Where the Pavement Ends: Five Native American Plays. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.