American Indians Are Pre Foundational FBA is not Indigenous

The People Were Here Before the Foundation

There is a difference between being foundational to the United States and existing before the United States had a foundation at all.

That distinction matters.

In today's social and political conversations, the word foundational has acquired tremendous weight. Different groups use it to describe their relationship to the creation, labor, economy, citizenship, and historical development of the United States. I respect the right of people to define and explain their own historical experiences.

But First Tribe occupies a different chronological space.

American Indians are Pre Foundational.

We did not begin with the United States.The Foundational Black Americans flag has them starting in 1526 .

We did not begin in 1776.

We did not begin with the Constitution.

We did not begin with the federal census.

We did not begin when somebody decided whether to write Indian, Negro, Mulatto, Colored, Black, White, or something else beside our ancestors' names.

The political structure called the United States was constructed after Indigenous peoples and Indigenous nations were already here.

That is not rhetoric. That is chronology.

The political structure called the United States was constructed after Indigenous peoples and Indigenous nations were already here.

And even the historical date now prominently used within some Foundational Black American symbolism makes the distinction clearer.

The FBA emblem reproduced with this article prominently displays the year 1526. Historically, 1526 is associated with San Miguel de Gualdape, the short lived Spanish colonial settlement established along the southeastern Atlantic coast. Enslaved Africans were brought with that expedition, and the settlement became the scene of an early recorded uprising by enslaved Africans.

That history deserves to be remembered.

But notice what the date itself establishes.

American Indians were already here before 1526.

The Indigenous nations encountered by those sixteenth century Europeans did not arrive after the Africans aboard Ayllón's expedition. They were already occupying, governing, defending, farming, hunting, trading, building communities, maintaining kinship networks, and identifying territories upon the land the Europeans were attempting to enter.

So if 1526 is being presented as a historical starting marker within a modern Foundational framework, then the First Tribe position becomes even easier to understand:

We precede the marker.

1526 does not challenge the Pre Foundational argument.

1526 helps demonstrate it.

The Africans who arrived with the Spanish expedition entered a land that already had Indigenous peoples.

The Spaniards entered a land that already had Indigenous peoples.

The English colonies that followed entered lands that already had Indigenous peoples.

And the United States that eventually emerged from European colonial systems established itself upon territories where Indigenous nations had existed for generations beyond European memory.

That is the chronological distinction First Tribe is making.

We are not saying another people's 1526 history does not matter.

We are saying our history did not begin when theirs arrived.

The clock was already running.

The people were already here.

The soil already had nations upon it.

That is Pre Foundational.

The Foundation Is Not the Skin

I explained it on social media using one of the simplest comparisons I could think of.

When someone applies cosmetic foundation to their face, the foundation is not the skin.

The skin was already there.

The foundation is something placed upon it.

The same principle applies to construction. Before somebody pours a concrete foundation, there is ground beneath it. The concrete does not create the earth upon which it rests.

That is how I want people to understand the difference between First Tribe and modern arguments about who is "Foundational."

The United States has a foundation.

American Indian people precede that foundation.

The National Archives identifies the Declaration of Independence as the document adopted on July 4, 1776, while the Constitution established the framework of the United States government in 1787.

Indigenous presence on this continent is measured not in hundreds of years, but in thousands. The National Park Service states that archaeological evidence demonstrates human presence in North America for at least 23,000 years, with evidence potentially extending even further. The agency also recognizes that American Indian oral traditions describe their ancestors as having lived upon these lands from time immemorial.

Whatever debates scholars may continue to have concerning ancient migration, archaeological chronology, and individual cultural traditions, one fact is beyond serious dispute:

Indian peoples were here long before there was a United States of America.

That is what I mean by Pre Foundational.

1526: Africans Entered an Indigenous World

There is another part of the 1526 story that deserves attention.

Later historical accounts have stated that after the collapse of San Miguel de Gualdape, some of the Africans who had participated in the resistance escaped and found refuge among neighboring American Indians.

That tradition is significant, although the surviving contemporary account does not tell us with certainty what ultimately happened to those particular Africans. For that reason, it should be presented as a later historical interpretation rather than an established detail directly documented in the 1526 account.

But either way, the chronological point remains undeniable.

The Africans of 1526 entered an already Indigenous world.

If some escaped Africans were subsequently received into Indian communities, they were entering communities that existed before their arrival.

That distinction matters tremendously when 1526 is used today as a Foundational Black American historical marker.

The American Indians were not waiting for 1526 to become a people.

They were already there.

The Africans did not create the Indian communities around them. They encountered them.

The Europeans did not create them either. They encountered them.

And according to later accounts of the episode, some Africans may ultimately have found refuge among those very Indigenous peoples after the European colonial experiment collapsed.

That places the relationship in its proper historical order:

Indigenous people were present first. Africans arrived into an existing Indigenous landscape. Interaction, refuge, alliance, intermarriage, conflict, kinship, and eventually shared descendants came afterward.

That does not diminish African history.

It explains how African and American Indian histories began intersecting on this continent.

And this is precisely why later racial classifications must be handled so carefully. If Africans entered Indian communities, if descendants emerged from relationships between those populations, and if later governments classified portions of those descendants simply as Negro, Colored, Mulatto, or Black, then a Black classification alone cannot automatically tell us where the person's entire family history began.

This is where the history becomes directly relevant to EthnoNullification.

A descendant can become Black on paper while carrying an older Indigenous family history underneath the classification.

So when someone points to 1526 and says, “This is our beginning in America,” my response is straightforward:

Look at who was already there to receive you.

That is the difference between Foundational and Pre Foundational.

The Founding Documents Actually Prove the Point

There is an even more powerful piece of evidence.

We do not have to stand outside the founding documents and argue that Indians existed before the American political foundation.

The founding documents themselves acknowledge it.

Article I of the United States Constitution referred to “Indians not taxed.”

The Commerce Clause separately gave Congress authority to regulate commerce with foreign nations, among the states, “and with the Indian Tribes.”

Think carefully about what that means.

The Constitution did not create Indian tribes.

The Constitution encountered them.

The new American government was constructing rules governing its relationships with peoples and political communities that already existed.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs likewise explains that tribal sovereignty represents inherent powers of self government and notes that European powers were entering agreements with Indian tribes long before the United States existed. The United States itself entered its first treaty with an Indian nation, the Delaware, in 1778.

That relationship only makes sense if the other political community already exists.

You cannot establish a treaty relationship with a people whom your government just invented.

You cannot regulate commerce "with the Indian Tribes" unless there are Indian tribes with whom commerce is being conducted.

This is precisely why Pre Foundational is such a useful conceptual distinction.

Pre Foundational Does Not Mean Superior

This argument should not be confused with a racial competition.

Saying that American Indians are Pre Foundational does not mean that another people's suffering, labor, history, or contributions to America are insignificant.

It means that different historical claims answer different historical questions.

A population may legitimately argue that its ancestors were foundational to the economic construction of the United States.

Another population may have been present before that political and economic foundation existed.

Those propositions do not inherently contradict one another.

They describe different relationships to time.

Problems begin when the word foundational is stretched beyond its proper historical function and becomes a device for absorbing everybody who was subsequently classified as Black, Negro, Colored, or Mulatto into one modern identity.

That is where my concern begins.

Classification Is Not the Same as Origin

A government classification written beside someone's name does not automatically tell us everything about that person's ancestry, nation, family, community, or historical identity.

The National Archives provides a remarkable example of this problem in its discussion of nineteenth century census records.

Federal census practices treated Indians differently depending upon taxation, tribal relations, residence, community, and the instructions given to enumerators. People of mixed Indian ancestry could be recorded in several ways. National Archives researchers note that some individuals of mixed ancestry were coded Indian or White and that, in rare cases, classifications such as Mulatto or Black appeared.

That is extremely important.

A later researcher cannot simply find the letter B or the word Negro on one historical document and declare every other dimension of that person's history nonexistent.

This is one of the problems I describe through EthnoNullification.

EthnoNullification occurs when an Indigenous identity, history, lineage, community relationship, or documentary trail becomes administratively absorbed beneath another classification until the original Indigenous dimension becomes difficult to see.

The classification eventually begins replacing the person.

Then later generations inherit the classification as though it were the complete history.

It is not always the complete history.

Sometimes it is merely the last label somebody wrote down.

Black History Cannot Become an Eraser of Indian History

This is where the present conversation requires maturity.

I have no interest in disrespecting Black American history.

There is an enormous, documented history of people classified as Black who built communities, resisted slavery, fought segregation, created institutions, transformed American culture, and demanded citizenship from a nation that repeatedly denied their humanity.

That history deserves protection.

But protecting Black history cannot require the destruction of American Indian history.

If an ancestor was historically documented within an Indian family, Indian community, tribal relationship, or Indigenous lineage, a later Black classification cannot automatically be allowed to erase all of that evidence.

Likewise, Indigenous ancestry should never be manufactured simply because someone dislikes a Black classification.

The records must lead.

That principle cuts in both directions.

Do not erase Indian evidence because somebody was called Negro.

Do not invent Indian evidence merely because somebody was called Negro.

Prove the claim.

Follow the family.

Compare records.

Study geography.

Examine tribal relationships.

Read the actual testimony.

Distinguish evidence from interpretation.

That is how serious historical research protects everybody.

“Aboriginal” and the Meaning of the Soil

When I speak of being aboriginal to this land, I use "of the soil" as a metaphor for an ancestral relationship to the land itself.

Strictly speaking, aboriginal refers to peoples existing in a land from its earliest known times or before later colonizing populations arrived. "From the soil" should therefore be understood as my cultural and political metaphor, not a literal linguistic translation of the word.

But the image is important.

The soil comes before the concrete.

A nation can draw borders across soil.

A government can place counties upon it.

A census can divide its inhabitants into categories.

A legislature can rename people.

An administrator can change a racial designation.

None of those actions travels backward through time and creates the people who were already there.

Government classification has tremendous power.

But government classification is not creation.

First Tribe Means Exactly That

This is why I continue to use the language First Tribe.

It is not a claim that nobody else has history.

It is not an invitation to compete over oppression.

It is a statement about chronological relationship to this land.

First means first.

When the United States government came into existence, it encountered Indian nations.

When the Constitution was written, it acknowledged Indian tribes.

When federal Indian policy developed, it was responding to political communities whose existence preceded the federal government itself. Even the Bureau of Indian Affairs today describes the long federal history of policies aimed at terminating, relocating, and assimilating American Indian peoples and tribal nations.

You cannot assimilate something that did not already exist.

You cannot relocate a people who had no homeland.

You cannot terminate a political relationship that never existed.

And you cannot make a preexisting people historically younger simply by inventing a newer racial label for some of their descendants.

This Is Where EthnoNullification Enters the Conversation

My objection is not to somebody calling themselves Foundational.

People have every right to develop terminology for understanding their own historical experience.

My objection begins when a Foundational framework attempts to swallow Indigenous people into itself simply because some of those Indigenous descendants were later classified as Black.

At that point we are no longer discussing self identification.

We are discussing the reassignment of somebody else's history.

When an American Indian ancestor becomes Negro on paper, and the later Negro classification is then treated as proof that the preceding Indian history never existed, we have created a circular system of erasure.

First the record changes the identity.

Then somebody points to the changed record as proof that the original identity was false.

That is precisely the kind of historical mechanism that the study of EthnoNullification is intended to expose.

A classification should be evidence to investigate.

It should not be a historical execution order.

Before the Foundation

So when these conversations arise, my position is straightforward.

If your subject is the founding of the United States, have that conversation.

If your subject is slavery, have that conversation.

If your subject is Black American history, have that conversation.

If your subject is immigration, citizenship, Reconstruction, civil rights, or American nationality, have those conversations too.

But if we are discussing the peoples whose nations, communities, ancestors, and civilizations existed upon this land before the political foundation called the United States was constructed, then we have entered another historical layer.

We are talking Pre Foundation.

That does not make the later foundation irrelevant.

It establishes chronological order.

Skin before makeup.

Soil before concrete.

People before paperwork.

Tribes before federal recognition.

Indigenous nations before the United States.

And that is why First Tribe should never be casually folded into modern Foundation politics.

We are not trying to become older than somebody else.

We are refusing to be made younger than the record proves we are.

That is the difference.

That is the conversation.

And if we are going to discuss Indigenous identity seriously, then slick terminology cannot be permitted to outrun documented history.

American Indians are not merely Foundational to America.Foundational Black American does not mean Indigenous 

We are Pre Foundational.

The foundation came later.