Black Indian Truth

Shonda Buchanan’s memoir takes us into the little-known overlap between Black and Native American culture and history. But Black Indian suggests parallels for Hawai‘i and the Pacific, too.

An Interview with Shonda Buchanan

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Award-winning author Shonda Buchanan recently Zoomed and filled me in on the passion that drove her to write her moving memoir, Black Indian, a PBS NewsHour recommendation for those willing to add to their understanding of race and institutional racism in America. As the American Library Association review says: “In her grimly haunting memoir, Shonda Buchanan reveals many aspects of American racism and sexism as she grapples with a painful legacy.”

I’d met Shonda over two decades ago and can still recall an evening of all of us PEN fellows crowding together in a booth at the Musso & Frank Grill. In that celebrated Hollywood hangout we discussed everything from book projects to the menu’s prices. What came through was Buchanan’s profound certainty and clarity, even then, about what she was writing at the time, which was a novel about that African American / Indigenous Indian experience. Yet the first book to see light was not the novel but the groundbreaking Black Indian, now in its third printing.

It's a fearless work. Shonda delivers the rich prose and a dense heritage narrative of a truth-talker determined to change the conversation about Mixed Bloods, family, identity, women, inherited trauma and history.

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Dr. Stephanie Han

We met during the PEN fellowship in LA—in 1998. At the time you were at work on a memoir. Is this the memoir you were working on?

Shonda Buchanan

Actually, I was working on my novel about the intersections of Black people and American Indians yet I was working on the memoir on the DL. I wasn’t ready to share that. My novel is still unpublished and has gone through many drafts. How time flies. But I continued to write the memoir because I knew that story had to be told. I kept looking for my Black Indian narrative in other books, in fiction and poetry, but I didn’t find it. Also, it was the story of my women. I needed to tell that story first and foremost to heal myself.

Stephanie

How did the book change from what you had planned?

Shonda

It was first solely about my mom, her sisters and my sisters and the legacy of addiction and abuse in our family. Then I realized the more research I did, that we were the product of American racism and ethnocentrism. Of the onslaught of colonization and the pain of colorism. Our lives were repeating the past in ugly ways.

Stephanie

Years of research went into this project. What were you hoping to uncover when you began this journey and how did that change?

Shonda

I wanted to uncover my mother’s secrets. (Laughter) I wanted to know if I was my mother’s child. I felt like I didn’t belong in that family of violent, beautiful people.

Stephanie

And what did you discover about belonging?

Shonda

I realized I definitely was a product of my environment, particularly the Midwest, because our sensibility is one of hard-core people who live with a sense of impending death. You can die in the winter or you can die in the summer in the Midwest–from the weather! We had no time or inclination to bullshit. Whether I was my mother’s daughter or not, I was a daughter of the Midwest, a product of forced migration of my predecessors and definitely a daughter of America. And I’m so proud of my history and heritage. I’m grateful that those first Free People of Color, my Staffords, Manuels, Roberts and Curtises, left the South and migrated to Indiana and Michigan for a better life. I am their seed. Their daughter.

Stephanie

You are also a published poet—what is your relationship to these two different genres of prose and poetry? How does one feed the other, or not?

Shonda

I consider myself a poet first, because that is the language of my first expression. I was first able to express myself as a poet, and it helped me to establish my identity in opposition to my family. It also helped me define my life’s goals. Write, travel, dream.

Being a poet was food for me: indeed, salvation. Black Indian is a poetic memoir. Many readers have said to me that it is rich and dense (the language). “I had to put it down and pick it up and put it down”, “The images are thick and heavy.” Others say, “I love the way you wrote it, I could feel every line.”

That is how I feel life, through the fluidity of imagery and alliteration and the senses: I experience life through the lens of the poem. My poetry and prose feed each other. In fact, my stories have to contain the rich language of poetry in order for it to feel like mine.

Stephanie

In memoir, private information about family or community is often divulged. How did family members feel about this? Is there anything you revealed that you regret? Did you ever discover something that you didn’t want to know?

Shonda

That was my problem and also my strength: I wanted to know everything. My research questions were: “Why does my mother not talk about the past? Why doesn’t my mother know who her great-grandparents are? Where’s the disconnect?”

Then that became: “Why has our past been erased? Why don’t we know what American Indian tribe we came from? What happened that was so dangerous then that it impacts my family now? What was the legacy? What did we inherit that we didn’t even know we possessed?”

This was for me the sense that being Mixed, a mulatto, a Colored, of Color, in this country was considered, at different stages, illegal, immoral, and punishable, particularly if you were a black woman raped by a white slavemaster, and you had a Mixed race child milky-brown child that was also enslaved, well, no one was supposed to talk about that hypocrisy. Your child, the master’s child, could still be a slave. So such hypocrisy and sadistic treatment of our people became the inherited legacy. Those were the secrets my mother was hiding and she didn’t even know it. She’d just been taught by her father and her mother that some things were better left unsaid.

The same, of course, with being the Mixed Black and American Indian in this country, when being an “Indian” or Black was worse than being a dog. There were signs at white establishments that said: “No dogs, no Indians, no niggers.”

Still, I just kept pressing and pressing and pressing the stories out of my people and what I discovered in my immediate family were things that I suspected, but I didn’t know how atrocious the reality of some things were, and I won’t spoil it, but the thing that happened to my mom is something you never want to hear about happened to a girlchild. Or what happened to my aunts, things that happened just because they were these little pretty, mixed blood girls, so beautiful watching them was like looking at fire. People were hypnotized by their beauty. The tragedy? Their father was a violent alcoholic, a belligerent and mean drunk who could care less what his daughters felt and wanted. They were just cattle to be married off to other emotional and physical abusers.

In terms of how my family dealt with the book, it was a mix of responses. My mother said she was proud and happy I wrote the book. I think she knows I was telling some of her secrets that she always wanted to tell but no one would listen. My sister said she couldn’t read the book yet, because she knows I write a lot about her and my nephew. Their relationship was toxic and caustic. It was painful for everyone to watch.

Also, I uncover a lot of history that we are not taught in American history classes, geography classes, you know, how they do The West was Won, and The Founding of America. Lies. But we all know the victor tells the story. They rarely, in any classes, discuss The Trail of Tears, the Black slaves that the Five Civilized Tribes on the Trail of Tears owned, or Free People of Color, many who had never been enslaved and who owned property and held political offices before Reconstruction. We’re not taught what these truths meant or mean to us little Black kids, and little American Indian kids and little Latino/a kids—that there are ancestors who were in positions of power and had wealth and were self-sufficient.

In my book, I uncovered lots of secrets. Historical and family secrets. Some family members didn’t like it; some were grateful I wrote it. They felt like me writing this gave them permission to confront some of the people in their past in the family. If this is what the book did, then I am glad that this book was birthed.

Stephanie

What are some of the stories or ideas you see that you passed on to your daughter, that you hope will carry on to the next generation? What are behaviors you abandoned that were a part of your family?

Shonda

I did set out in my mothering to break the chains of negativity and volatility from when I was growing up. In the book I talk about how I wanted to break the cycle of abuse and addiction in the raising of my daughter, and I wanted to give her the positive traditions and positive cultural nuances that I knew were there in both our African culture, Black American culture and our American Indian culture, so much that I wasn’t taught in my family.

To do this, I brought my daughter to African dance class for 10 years and we learned West African songs, and then we started doing more Indigenous ceremonies, sweat lodges and learning songs, and participating in other ceremonies on reservations in the Northern Plains, in Virgina, in North Carolina and South Dakota. I’m proud to say I have done sweat lodges coast to coast, and ceremonies in West Africa.

I wanted my daughter to have those traditions. It’s important to know you are in possession of your culture on both sides, but also to acknowledge we had white or European in us—we just didn’t know who those people were because of the One Drop Rule. This is the anti-misgenation rule from slavery and perpetuated in Jim Crow times that if you have one ounce of Negro blood, you were unequivocally Negro. We didn’t know much about the European blood until we did our DNA test!

Stephanie

You are a new grandmother! Congrats! What traditions do you continue to share with this new generation?

Shonda

I sing both African and Indigenous songs to him. I was singing them when he was born. I say he came out singing a bear song because I was singing this song while my daughter was in labor. My daughter says, “not true!” But as her doula, I say that’s the story. I was singing a bear song when he came out of you! I have another grandson on the way. My second grandson is due in April and I will be singing bear songs and talking to my grandsons about what it means to know your culture and history. I will talk to them about “your grandmother and your great-great grandmother and grandfather did this and that. They came from here…” I believe it is important to pass down the oral history. I also believe it is important to pass down the researched history so they know where they came from and are empowered by documents that prove our oral history. Not everyone has this option.

My daughter shares our culture with her son. This is what it means to be a person who is in possession of her culture. That was not something my mother was interested in. It was only the oral history I got from her, “You know I have some Indian, we got some Indian, German, French and a little bit of Black.” Really, it was her. I had more African from my father’s side. But I made her do her DNA and she has much more white than I do.

Stephanie

How does knowing the past, or even your DNA shift your perspective on self? People are proud to claim Native American heritage.

Shonda

In my family, the lighter you were, the better you were treated. For us that was the colorization drama, the inheritance of light-skinned house Negro vs. the dark-skinned Negro in the fields. This part is probably one of the most tragic parts of our history in America. It’s a legacy that haunts us. The oral history of being both African American and American Indian was promoted and held in high esteem in my family, but the light-skin proved it. But some black people say we’re just uppity.

In fact, for a lot of black people, the underlying and unconscious idea is that if one can claim the Mixed piece, you don’t have to stay in the degradation of blackness and slavery. Other black folks will say “I am fully black and I will never claim anything else.” Black Power. They don’t want to be ostracized for claiming whiteness or American Indian blood. They will stay in blackness. Stay in Black empowerment. Yet that sensibility, while incredibly valuable and absolutely needed, allows for Mixed race folks like me to be invalidated.

So the colorization fight is real in Black communities, even after 400 years of trying to eradicate this taught self-hatred within white American’s discrimination, prejudice and biases. My mom was raised with the oral history that she was more American Indian than white. It was a shock for her to realize she was more white than American Indian.

When I took my DNA, I thought, Lord Jesus! I better have some American Indian DNA and I did—4% lumped in with another ethnicity but a full .2% and then there’s that 9% unknown that is supposedly American Indian traits often for Black people. What I saw was that seven generations back there was a full-blood American Indian ancestry. But, and this was a surprise, seven generations back, I also have a full-blood Filipino ancestor. And Indonesian! Then it becomes for me a question of how did they get to North Carolina to procreate? I know that the Chinese were picking cotton in Mississippi in the 1800s. And my daughter’s dad’s great-great-great grandmother was full-blood Chinese. But no one has told that story yet. We don’t realize what we don’t know until we do that research.

Stephanie

Is an identity always rooted in biology? In Hawai’i there are many mixed people. Within the Hawaiian community there are also a diminishing number who can claim a 100% Hawaiian bloodline. How does an idea of cultural pride and preservation of traditions and philosophy, art and expression, differ from a drive to ethnic purity?

Shonda

I can understand how someone raised or lived in a particular community would feel upset if suddenly they found they were not blood related to that tribe. It is a bit like my mom without history or knowledge or connection to a specific tribe.

There are no more purebloods period in the world. I don’t believe there are. The concept of being pure, even with the Indigenous tribes of North America—they were forced into Oklahoma and Alabama. There was the Trail of Tears, and they were forced to live in other tribal areas, and their places were recarved out sovereign nations for them, the Oglala Sioux, and so you got blended tribes like the Muscogee Creek.

You have nations who came together who were already familiar, and with common interests, yet little land. Knowing your history and heritage is important, but knowing and saying: I am of this family with this heritage and my understanding of it is this. And if I didn't have any American Indian in it, I would have had to say that. But I did. I have the bloodline, the records and the stories.

Stephanie

Whose responsibility is it to preserve heritage?

Shonda

Elders. Teachers. Educators. Departments of Education. Heritage is the responsibility of the elders to pass down, as much as you try to pass down financial stability and mental health stability and physical health, I think heritage is a thing that should be passed down as well.

The British and French and Spaniards, if you look at wars fought about claiming heritage, combining royal houses, ultimately it is the blood that makes it so important. But why can’t we be as proud of the Mixed-race heritage? Why can’t we understand or know that history? Why is it not the responsibility of the country in which we live and have fought for, to give us that history of our kings and queens in Africa, on these North and South American lands, as much as we celebrate and learn about their British, French and Spanish kings? Why can’t we learn this history and our culture in schools as well? Because some are still threatened by this knowledge. It’s ingrained in them to be afraid of Blackness.

I recently saw a newscast where they were voting, I believe in Alabama, to ban critical race theory in Alabama. They do not want it taught, white Republicans and book-banners said, because it was anti-American. This is an egregious explanation for learning the history of the people whose backs this country was built on. Which includes the Africans, Indigenous, includes Asians who built the railroad, any people of color who were the “subservient” workers. We are the ones, and continue to be the ones, maintaining the infrastructure in this society. 

Stephanie

This is a story about women in your family. What differs when we trace our stories through women?

Shonda

I wanted to trace my matrilineal line. I’m a woman and I wanted to pass it down to my daughter. I wanted to know how to mother. I wanted to teach my daughter to be a woman who could be an independent critical thinker, creative, beautiful economist woman in this world. And I thought by knowing the stories of our women and knowing what we had been through the ages, would give her this sense of power. And it has for me. I am empowered by stories from tragic to triumphant, from struggle to a sense of dignity even as they were domestic workers.

Stephanie

There are increasing numbers of people who marry out of their ethnic groups and racial classifications. What do you feel is most important for people to maintain and preserve their own culture or identity if anything, and why?

Shonda

To maintain your cultural identity, all of them have to exist side by side. And that means, for us, we practice certain ceremonies on certain days, and we also will acknowledge Kwanzaa which is a made-up Black holiday, but is the closest thing to a collective African holiday which acknowledges and incorporates African principles, philosophy and cultural practices. I know when some of the Ethiopian, Nigerian and Senalgalese holidays are, but in terms of African principles that we try to maintain, we look to Kwanzaa. 

The cultures need to exist side by side. I think the children should know all of it and not be denied any of it. We are at a time when it is more popular to claim your Mixed-race status. We see so many websites and IG sites celebrating us. At the same time, we are still stigmatized, ostracized: there is still colorization. Or why do you talk white? comments. If we celebrate our cultures side-by-side, we can render those mean, ignorant comments powerless.

Stephanie

You are also a highly regarded educator. Your book is listed by NPR as one of the top 25 reads to understand race in the US. What do you consider some of the priorities of a classroom for younger students, in particular, (K-12) to understand?

Shonda

Educators, teachers, administration, decolonize your books! Decolonize your materials, your theories. Show that you value narratives of color and then the students will also learn to value those narratives of color as well. And I truly believe that is everyone's responsibility to have cultural knowledge, to do cultural work and cultural engagement.

Stephanie

What might you also hope for the post secondary student to learn, know? Texts, concepts, outlooks, experiences. What advice might you give to a young person making their way in the world?

Shonda

My advice for a young person to help define or decide who they are is to be open to the possibilities around you, in your friends, and that includes diversity. That includes opportunities that might arise. As a young person sometimes, we don’t feel like this opportunity will take you to where you want to go, but you have to start somewhere. And you have the ability to pivot and do something else in a year. So take the chances that are offered to you and take the opportunities that are offered to you. Be brave enough to humble yourself and learn from an experience.

It seems like the generation right after my daughter have a sense of entitlement that they didn’t fully earn. But their fight is different from our generation's fight, which is why they were out in the streets marching for Black Lives Matter. They knew something. They knew this was important. I implore them to remain open to all those learning opportunities.

Stephanie

You have done an unflinching examination of women in your family and candidly revealed the challenges of being a woman, both a Black and Mixed woman in American society. What wisdom might you share to women who may be familiar on a personal level with the struggles that appeared within your book?

Shonda

Become a truth talker. If you have a story that no one has told, write that story because someone needs to read it. If you are a woman who knows another woman is experiencing harm, become the truth talker she can’t be for herself and tell someone she is being harmed. Tell someone, a cousin, sister, aunt, granddaughter, father, grandfather, uncle. Keep telling. Don’t shut up. We need to stand up for each other as women, because not all men will. At the same time, there are women who won’t stand up for other women either, when a man will. So look carefully at your allies. Again, there are men who help us, but usually women are the ones who know a thing first: we have to protect each other and tell our stories.

Stephanie

What is your next project?

Shonda

Turning Black Indian into a loosely based screenplay. I’m writing the screenplay but I’m switching it up, so it is not so family-oriented or focused. I just finished editing my collection of poetry about Nina Simone, and I am also working on a collection of poetry, a series, 30-40 poems about the first settlers of Los Angeles. They were Mixed race, these first founders were African, Indigenous Indian, Mexican, and European. Yet I’m including poems about those Indigenous nations who were here prior to that as well.

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Images courtesy of Shonda Buchanan.