Before I had the language to explain the intersection between Black and Indigenous people, I knew it through my family.
My great-grandmother was Muscogee Creek. She spoke Muscogee Creek and English and worked as a translator in Oklahoma for many years. Her husband, my great-grandfather, was half Black American and half Choctaw. These histories lived within my family long before I understood how complicated they could be to explain to people whose ancestral stories differed from my own.
I attended my first Muscogee Nation Festival and stomp dance when I was 5 years old in Okmulgee, Oklahoma. I remember dancing in a large circle, taking in a gathering whose meaning I was still too young to fully understand. But even then, I noticed something: I was a Black child. I could see it. And somehow, through my grandmother and great-grandmother, I knew I belonged to Muscogee Nation history, too. Yet sometimes I felt like that part of my history was off-limits.
On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, I think about that Black child and my great-grandmother, Samara Turk. I think about what he understood through family and what he would later have to learn about America and its complex history.
The Muscogee and Choctaw are two of the nations historically grouped under the name “Five Civilized Tribes.” Even that designation tells us something about whose judgment shaped the telling of American history. Indigenous peoples did not need European approval to have civilizations, governments, or ways of life.
But there is another uncomfortable truth within this history: Members of these nations enslaved people of African descent.
When the United States forced Indigenous nations from their Southeastern homelands, enslaved Black people were also forced west into Indian Territory, in what is now Oklahoma. Black history traveled along the Trail of Tears, too. Our ancestors endured that devastating removal while also carrying the burden of enslavement.
That history complicates any easy story about solidarity. It demands that we tell the truth about what happened between our communities as well as what happened to them.
Today, that reckoning continues. Black Creek descendants are still fighting to have their citizenship rights honored. Attorney Damario Solomon-Simmons is helping lead that fight. In July 2025, the Muscogee Nation Supreme Court affirmed the citizenship rights at issue in the case. A year later, plaintiffs returned to court, this time through a federal lawsuit seeking enforcement of those rights. Recognition on paper has not ended their struggle for belonging.
For my family, these questions are personal. They concern the right to citizenship, the right to participate in the life of a nation and the right to have a history acknowledged without Blackness becoming a reason for exclusion.
I can honor Indigenous peoples and insist that anti-Blackness within Indigenous institutions be confronted. I can defend tribal sovereignty and believe that sovereignty carries a responsibility to honor the rights of Black people within those nations.
Acknowledging slavery within some Indigenous nations does not make every Indigenous person or tribe responsible for it. Neither does the history of colonization excuse the oppression of Black people. A people can endure injustice and still have injustices of their own to confront.
That is part of what makes America so complicated. And it is part of what makes my own story so American.
On July Fourth, as this country marked its 250th anniversary, I was deeply critical of the nation. I had every right to be. My criticism comes from knowing what America has promised and what it has done to people whose lives and labor helped shape it.
I hold this country with grains of salt and sugar, the same way I prepare a bowl of grits. Yes, I mix them. The combination makes for a unique taste.
There is sweetness in the people who raised me, in the cultures they carried and in the lives they built. There is salt in what they survived and in the struggles their descendants still face. Both belong in the telling.
I move through this country as a Black man. I love my African ancestry. It is central to my pride, my self-esteem and my understanding of who I am. Acknowledging the other branches of my family does not diminish that love.
My family history also carries Muscogee Creek and Choctaw roots, French and British roots, and Jewish ancestry. Those histories meet within me. Some are histories of survival. Others require questions about power, responsibility and how our families came to be.
My ancestry helps me understand my relationship to America. But no one should have to produce a family tree or a DNA test to prove that they belong here.
When someone sees a Black or Indigenous person criticizing this country, I want them to consider how much history that person may be carrying. I want them to understand that demanding justice can come from a profound connection to this place.
Black or Indigenous Americans should not have to perform gratitude to have our love of country taken seriously. Indigenous peoples should not have to soften the truth about dispossession to have their sovereignty respected.
And people who are both Black and Indigenous should not have to surrender one part of themselves to make another part legible.
Across our communities, there are desires many of us recognize: to be loved, to rest our heads somewhere safe, to enjoy our families, to build a livelihood, to worship freely and to live without persecution because of our race, religion or whom we love.
Our histories and political struggles have important differences. Still, those shared hopes give us a place to begin building relationships.
White supremacy has shaped the conditions under which our communities have had to struggle. Confronting it requires honesty about how its hierarchies can also be reproduced within communities that have suffered under them. Solidarity has to make room for that honesty.
Honoring Indigenous peoples beyond a holiday means listening to local nations, learning their histories and reporting on their priorities. It also means listening to Black Indigenous people and Freedmen descendants whose experiences challenge the stories we find most comfortable.
For those of us in Black-owned media, that is a responsibility. We must make room for the full story, including the parts that challenge our assumptions about who is Indigenous and what Indigenous identity looks like.
I was born in Oklahoma and have lived across this country. After college, I returned to Oklahoma. Today, I live in Georgia, south of Stone Mountain, in a landscape that feels deeply familiar in ways I cannot fully explain.
My grandmother told me that her mother said our people came from this area. That family memory stays with me.
Here, among the forests and hills of the Muscogee homeland, I feel a peace that reaches beyond my own lifetime. I think about the generations before me and the possibility that I am finding rest near a place from which some of my ancestors were forced away.
I cannot turn that feeling into a document. But I can honor it. I can listen to what my family passed down and continue learning about the land beneath my feet.
That is what Indigenous Peoples’ Day brings home to me: a responsibility to remember, to tell the truth and to build relationships strong enough to hold complicated histories.
I am Black. I am connected to Indigenous peoples through my family. I am American.
I carry all of those truths with me, hoping we can build a country where none of us has to choose between honoring who we are and knowing we belong.
