Welcome to the 59th issue of The Funambulist. After a full issue on Palestine, we return to a more international(ist) scale, with this dossier on Black Indigeneities. Originally, I had thought to dedicate this issue to questions pertaining to Black internationalism, inspired (among other things) by the formidable conversation I was lucky to have with Bermudan historian Quito Swan for our 39th issue on The Ocean (January-February 2022)—some of you certainly remember it! Surely, this issue could exist one day, especially if put together with the guest co-editor I have in mind for it, who may recognize herself here. But in the meantime, Black Indigeneities is a topic I find equally pressing, following a number of editorial intuitions built on conversations with friends in the past few years. These intuitions constructed the editorial line of this issue and the curation of its contributions—as well as a few others that, sadly, could not be finalized by their authors in time for publication.
The first point to make—and it’s remarkable that one would need to make it—consists in affirming that there is such a thing as Black Indigenous peoples. When reading some texts produced in US universities, I have to confess my disappointment to see that the nexus of Blackness and Indigeneity was often summarized in the identity forged by people who have one Indigenous parent (understood as Indigenous to Turtle Island), and one Black parent. Of course, my point here is not to deny the importance of this embodied epistemological approach, but rather to observe that when it comes to US-based knowledge production, things often start from the individual. Sometimes they succeed at reaching conclusions based on collective interests—other times, they never do.
It is important to follow this issue’s contributors when they note that the very notions of Blackness and Indigeneity emerge from an epistemological framework focusing on European settler colonialism (more particularly in the North Atlantic, but not exclusively).
This framework was primarily formulated in English or Spanish. Blackness in the context of sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, emerges when placed in relation to European (or Omani, for that matter) colonizers and settlers. As such, it is a concept that does not escape the relationship with colonialism—and for excellent reason given the persistence of settler colonial structures in numerous geographies of the continent, particularly in its most southern regions. It might also at times obfuscate numerous power dynamics between groups that have been historically racialized as black by European colonizers. Within these power dynamics, the very notion of Indigeneity can be weaponized. This has been the case in Rwanda, where, leading up to the 1994 Genocide, the Hutu used phenotypical factors (following German and Belgian ‘scientific’ racism) to deny Tutsi indigeneity to the Great Lakes region, claiming instead that they were originally from the Horn of Africa.
Centering Melanesia. / Map by Léopold Lambert (2025).
Yet the concept of Blackness is interestingly less questioned than Indigeneity throughout the issue by our contributors. For a few writers (in particular two, who could not finalize their contribution), this concept is necessarily linked to settler colonialism. Within this understanding, the Indigenous person only exists in relation to their alter ego, the settler—whether European or one at a more regional scale. I do not feel particularly equipped to argue against this understanding, but I should say that my current understanding is closer to the one formulated by Menna Agha in her contribution. Menna conceptualizes Indigeneity as a set of specific relationships between communities of people and the land. This, of course, is not at odds with a definition where settler colonialism plays a key role, but Menna’s definition goes beyond it.
This issue is organized around three large regions of the world: Melanesia, the African continent, and the Caribbean. Regular readers of The Funambulist will be used to our insistence on situating Melanesia as a key site of Black Indigenous epistemologies. Bearing in mind that this denomination and bordering was created by European colonialism, Melanesia—which encompasses West Papua, Papua New Guinea, the Torres Strait islands, the Solomon Islands, Kanaky, Vanuatu, Nauru, and the Fiji Islands—marks a racialization of the region’s Indigenous people as Black in its very name (Mélas, in ancient Greek, means black). However, just like Afrodescendant and African movements, Melanesian and Australian Aboriginal consciousness have politically reclaimed this colonial racialization to make it the center of their struggle for sovereignty.
The African continent is central to this issue, as African Indigeneities are often minorized in the global epistemology of Indigeneity. Moreover, when acknowledged, they are often reduced to a common African identity, flattening the multitude of regional specificities offered by the continent. The contributions expressing aspects of Indigeneity in Nubia (Menna Agha), Eritrea (Semhar Haile), the Gabonese forests (Maya Mihindou) and within the colonial limits of the state named as South Africa (Nolan Oswald Dennis and Zoé Samudzi), certainly attest to this diversity. When Indigeneity in South Africa—and, to a lesser degree, in Nubia—can be partially defined in relationship with British and Dutch colonialism, Indigeneity in the Horn of Africa (and in Eritrea in particular) needs to also consider regional dynamics of power like those imposed by the Ethiopian Empire—called “the Black Empire” by Semhar Haile in her contribution.
As for the Caribbean (both archipelagic and continental), it embodies a very distinct Afrodiasporic space due to the genocidal process experienced by its Indigenous populations, and the enslavement of kidnapped and deported African peoples. These processes have fundamentally altered many geographies and ecosystems in the elaboration of the Plantation—so much so that contemporary thinkers, such as Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway, have designated the past five centuries as a geological era called “Plantationocene.” In this context, Maroons did not only free themselves from enslavement, they relocated to environments (in particular forests and/or mountains) that were also free from Plantation logics.
This process of recreating new relationships to this environment, informed by African Indigeneities that survived through the Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean, can be seen as forming new Black Indigeneities within this particular context.
Among them, the Bushinenge in French-colonized Guiana and Dutch-colonized Suriname, appear as paradigmatic (see Karl Joseph and Marc-Alexandre Tareau’s contribution).
There is a fourth region of Black Indigeneities present in this issue: one that moves with Afrodiasporic bodies who forcefully or willingly left their lands to inhabit other places, in particular but not exclusively in Europe. The last editorial argument that this issue attempts to make (following our Undocumented International one in January-February 2023) is that Indigeneity is not contrary to migration. One does not stop being Indigenous the moment they set foot outside of where they ‘belong.’ As mentioned earlier, even the deadly Middle Passage did not succeed in severing ways of coexisting with the land; nor does the journey still undertaken by hundreds of thousands of Indigenous migrants, whose lives are made vulnerable by the cruel obstacles of various border regimes—embodied by Fortress Europe, Britain, Australia, and the United States and many more fortified nation states. When thinking of Black Indigeneities, it is therefore crucial to consider the political identities embodied by numerous Malians in France, Eritreans in Italy (Semhar Haile), or Nigerians in Britain, to cite only a fraction.
As mentioned at the beginning of this text, these are only editorial intuitions, articulated in limited words, but I hope that they will provide a few tools to read the beautiful dialogues created by the various contributions you are about to read. I wish you an inspiring time with them. ■