The Documentary History of a Word That Did Not Begin in the United States The Foundational Black Myth There is a growing argument in some American identity debates that the word Black belongs uniquely or exclusively to people whose ancestry is rooted in the United States. That argument may serve a modern political or lineage-based purpose, but as a statement about the history of the English language, it does not survive examination of the documentary record. The United States did not create...

California legislation provides one of the clearest official examples of administrative Indigenous erasure California Assembly analysis of AB 1581 states that nearly nine out of ten American Indian and Alaska Native students in California are not identified as such, with an estimated 156,000 Indigenous students undercounted. The proposal would require schools to collect Tribal-affiliation information and report it through the state student-data system. The official analysis explains exactly...

They Remembered What the Records Erased: Indigenous Lineage, Federal Slave Narratives, and Ethnonullification There are moments when an archive stops feeling like a collection of aging paper. A name appears. A family relationship is spoken. A mother, grandmother, or great grandmother is remembered as Indian. A language once spoken inside a family rises again from a typewritten page. That is what happens when we read the testimonies of Betty Robertson, Larkin Payne, and Robert Solomon. These...