American Indian Culture and Research Journal

This essay troubles the theoretical impasses wrought by overdetermined framings of settler colonial theory in order to understand the relationship between blackness and indigeneity. While the framework disrupts Native erasure, the language of “incommensurability” that is increasingly deployed to make sense of the particularity of blackness and indigeneity extends settler logics, or what I refer to as “settler unfreedoms.” Drawing on Black and Indigenous feminist praxis of embodied truth telling, this essay examines how the unknowable and illegible terrains of Black political subjectivities constitutes a space that disrupts settler paradigms of freedom and moves forward to an alternate conceptualization of mutual liberation and decolonization.