Buffalo Soldier Horns vs. Wounded Native Spirits: A Complicated Patriotism, Is Beyoncé Right or Out of order?

Ishmael Bey
Jul 16
6 min read

Out of the Ashes of War

When the guns fell silent in 1865, four million newly emancipated people walked into a republic that would not yet claim them. A year later, Congress offered some of those men uniforms, steady pay, and—perhaps—dignity. The 9th and 10th Cavalry and the 24th and 25th Infantry were born, helmed by white officers but powered by Black sinew and Black dreams. Many troopers carried Muskogee, Cherokee, Seminole, or Lakota blood alongside the scars of bondage; they were, in the marrow of their bones, Black Indigenous citizens of nowhere, trying to make a country of their own making.[1][2] army.milnmaahc.si.edu

They strung telegraph wire across plains that tried to swallow them whole, escorted rail crews through canyons that had only ever echoed with wind, and mapped deserts whose names they could not pronounce. In three decades of frontier duty the regiments posted the lowest desertion rates in the U.S. Army and earned 18 Medals of Honor—proof that loyalty sometimes grows best in hostile soil.[3][4] thenmusa.orgwyohistory.org

Buffalo Soldiers: Fighting on Two Fronts | Full Documentary | A Local, USA Special

A People’s Pride

Look closely and you will see them everywhere American possibility flickers:

Yosemite and Sequoia, 1903. Captain Charles Young—Kentucky‑born, West Point‑forged, part Creek by family lore—rides at the head of Troops I and M. In a single season his men carve the first road into the Giant Forest, repel poachers, and leave the park freer than they found it.[9][10] pbs.orgnps.gov

Santiago de Cuba, July 1, 1898. Under a sky thick with Spanish shrapnel, the 10th Cavalry helps clear the trenches that block the Rough Riders’ path up San Juan Hill, though Roosevelt’s memoir will later call them “shirkers.” History remembers otherwise.[8] history.com

The image that survives is therefore a proud one: men whose very existence rebuked the logic of white supremacy and whose service, rendered in blue wool and buffalo‑hide coats, helped stitch Black accomplishment into the American flag.

The Shadow Side

Yet the same hooves that thundered for liberation also beat against the homelands of the Kiowa, Comanche, Apache, and Mescalero. From the Palo Duro Canyon in 1874 to Rattlesnake Springs in 1880, Buffalo Soldiers scouted, skirmished, and starved out Native nations so that settlers might sleep without fear—or so the orders read.[5][6] nps.govnps.gov

In the Victorio Campaign, 1879‑1880, troopers of the 9th Cavalry hunted Warm Springs Apaches who had fled the squalor of San Carlos Reservation, chasing them across the Black Range and into Mexico. Victorio’s band called the pursuit genocide; army dispatches called it pacification.[7] buffalosoldier.org

Some Native elders recall those years with a bitter, almost familial sorrow: “It was not the buffalo’s strength we honored but the horn that pierced us.”[12] For them, the buffalo‑head crest is less a compliment than a scar, proof that even oppressed men can be wielded as weapons against other oppressed nations.

Memory on Trial

That wound resurfaced this Juneteenth when Beyoncé stepped onstage in Paris wearing a shirt that named the Soldiers’ “antagonists” as “warring Indians” and “Mexican revolutionaries.” Indigenous fans called it erasure; Black fans called it reclaiming. The internet called it a fight with no referees.[11] apnews.com

The argument is older than the pop star: Who owns the story of the Buffalo Soldiers—the descendants who claim them as forebears of Black excellence, or the tribes who remember them as cavalry in a war for someone else’s Manifest Destiny? Baldwin would remind us that both communities inherit a nation that once wanted none of them, and that history will remain a blunt instrument until we learn to hold it at both ends.

Toward an Honest Reckoning

We can praise valor without silencing pain. We can honor the road Captain Young built through the sequoias and grieve the roads troopers burned through the pueblos. We can teach schoolchildren that San Juan Hill was climbed by men whose skin matched theirs, while also teaching that the same men once guarded the barbed‑wire perimeters of reservations.

Reconciliation does not mean pitting oppressions against one another; it means refusing the government trick that told Buffalo Soldiers their freedom required denying someone else’s. It means letting Native voices lead the remembrance of Palo Duro, letting Black voices lead the celebration of Sequoia, and letting both stand—in all their contradiction—inside the same American sentence.

Footnotes

U.S. Army, “Looking Back: The Buffalo Soldiers,” 2019. army.mil
National Museum of African American History and Culture, “The Proud Legacy of the Buffalo Soldiers,” accessed 2025. nmaahc.si.edu
National Museum of the U.S. Army, “Buffalo Soldiers,” accessed 2025. thenmusa.org
WyoHistory.org, “Buffalo Soldiers in Wyoming and the West,” accessed 2025. wyohistory.org
National Park Service, “Buffalo Soldiers in the Guadalupe Mountains,” 2021. nps.gov
Fort Davis National Historic Site, NPS, “The Tenth Cavalry,” 2021. nps.gov
BuffaloSoldier.org, “Buffalo Soldiers & Chief Victorio,” accessed 2025. buffalosoldier.org
Iván Román, “The Buffalo Soldiers at San Juan Hill,” History.com, May 12 2022 (updated May 28 2025). history.com
PBS, “Captain Charles Young,” accessed 2025. pbs.org
National Park Service, “Charles Young and the Ninth Cavalry in Sequoia National Park,” accessed 2025. nps.gov
Associated Press, “Fans Criticize Beyoncé for Shirt Calling Native Americans ‘Enemies of Peace’,” June 28 2025. apnews.com
American Indian Source, “Plains Indian View of the ‘Buffalo’ Soldier,” accessed 2025.

“We carry our history like a drum—sometimes a war drum, sometimes a church bell. Either way, it must be heard.”

The choices made by the Buffalo Soldiers—many of whom were Black and Black-Indigenous men—did not arise from comfort or conquest, but from a brutal calculus of survival inside a white supremacist empire that gave them limited options. Their actions must be understood not only through the wars they fought, but through the war that was waged against them since birth. Here’s the painful truth behind what forced their hand:

A Nation That Never Wanted Them!!

After the Civil War, Black men were freed by law, but not welcomed into the republic they had helped preserve.

The Reconstruction era brought hope, but also massacres, lynchings, and voter suppression—from the Colfax Massacre (1873) to the overthrow of Black politicians in Wilmington (1898).

Many Black men joined the army because military service was one of the very few ways to gain a wage, housing, and a sliver of dignity.

“They fought not for conquest but for place—a place in a country that tried to exile them even when they never left.”

Systemic Racism in Military and Civilian Life

Buffalo Soldiers were commanded by white officers and given the most grueling, isolated posts.
They were denied promotions, faced verbal abuse, and were banned from many towns they were sent to protect.
The frontier missions given to them often weren’t framed as conquest, but as “guard duty,” “settler protection,” or “civilizing work.”

The military hierarchy exploited their loyalty while upholding the very white supremacy that enslaved their ancestors.

Weaponized Against Other Brown Nations

The Buffalo Soldiers were sent to fight in:

The Indian Wars (against the Apache, Cheyenne, Comanche, Kiowa, etc.)
The Spanish-American War (against Cubans and Filipinos also resisting imperialism)
The Mexican Border War and Pancho Villa expedition

They were often used to police and suppress other oppressed groups—Native Americans, Mexicans, and Filipinos—who shared their dark skin but not their uniform.

The U.S. turned the sons of cotton pickers into cavalrymen to help build the empire that had once enslaved them.

An Internal Struggle: Conscience vs. Survival

Some soldiers did not agree with the missions. Oral traditions and journals mention:

Black Seminoles and Afro-Creek men who sympathized with the tribes they were told to capture.
Desertions during the campaigns against the Apache.
Code-switching and aid, where some Black troopers secretly helped Native civilians escape military wrath.[1]

But choices were limited by the threat of court martial, imprisonment, or dishonorable discharge, which could destroy a man’s livelihood and legacy.

The American Lie of “Citizenship Through Sacrifice”

Black soldiers were told they could “earn” full citizenship and acceptance by:

Fighting for the U.S. against its enemies—foreign and domestic.
Upholding the “manifest destiny” that had excluded them.
Dying, if necessary, with dignity.

Yet they still returned to:

Segregated hospitals and barracks
Disenfranchisement in the South
Racist riots in cities like Brownsville, Texas (1906), where Black soldiers were scapegoated and dishonorably discharged with no trial

The nation asked for their loyalty but never returned it.

A Choice Between Two Nightmares

The Buffalo Soldiers weren’t given a hero’s path—they were offered a choice between:

Poverty and invisibility, or
Becoming tools of empire in exchange for a uniform, a check, and the hope that maybe, someday, their children would be free.

It is the same cruel dilemma given to colonized people across history: serve the empire that broke you, or be broken completely.

As James Baldwin once wrote:

“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.”

The Buffalo Soldiers lived in that rage, buried it beneath a saddle, and rode into battle not for glory—but for something closer to survival.

SOURCES

Edward M. Coffman, The Old Army: A Portrait of the American Army in Peacetime, 1784-1898
William H. Leckie, Buffalo Soldiers: A Narrative of the Negro Cavalry in the West
National Museum of African American History and Culture – “Buffalo Soldiers Legacy”
Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian – “African Americans and Native Americans in the U.S. Army”

Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528–1990

FIRST TRIBE