Before They Called Us Black

Before they called us Black, we were the land. The first breath, the first builders, the first protectors. This is Turtle Island and we were always here. Melanated, sovereign, divine.

I need my people to sit with this for a second because we’ve been walking around in an identity that was never truly ours to begin with. Before they called us Black we were nations, tribes, and families tied to land and spirit. We had names passed down for centuries, languages born from the rhythm of our own people, traditions rooted in ceremony and the sacred relationship we had with the earth. We were connected to the stars, to the soil, and to each other. Our identity was not vague; it was specific, spiritual, and sovereign.

When colonizers arrived they didn’t just invade our lands, they rewrote who we were. Not only in their books and letters but on every official document they could touch. They used laws, censuses, and church records to strip away the names and nations we claimed. They didn’t simply steal people, they stole identity. They created racial categories and legal statuses that had nothing to do with who we were and everything to do with what they needed us to be in order to control us.

That’s where this word Black comes in. It was not born out of our culture. It was not a tribal designation. It was a manmade category designed to contain, reduce, and erase. Black is not a nationality. It is not a homeland. It is not where we come from. It is what we were rebranded as so the memory of our true origin would fade. Whether you were from a specific African kingdom or a Native nation right here in the Americas, the colonizer used the same stamp: Negro, Colored, and later, Black.

This erasure wasn’t just social, it was strategic. Many of us are descendants of Black Indigenous nations — Wampanoag, Yamassee, Blackfoot, Gullah Geechee, Creek, Cherokee. We were already here farming, governing, trading, defending our territories. But the colonizer understood something. If you were documented as Indigenous you had legal land rights. You could claim territory and sovereignty. If they reclassified you as Black you became stateless in their eyes with no legal path to reclaim what was stolen.

This practice is called paper genocide. It was carried out through laws like the 1924 Virginia Racial Integrity Act, which forced all birth and marriage records to identify anyone with any African ancestry — even if they were enrolled tribal members — as “colored.” Census categories shifted too. In the 1790 U.S. census you could find “Indian” and even specific tribal names in some areas. By the late 1800s and early 1900s more and more Indigenous people were reclassified as Negro or Mulatto, erasing their legal tribal standing.

They also came for the children. From the late 1800s to the mid-20th century federal policies removed Indigenous and Black Indigenous children from their homes and placed them into boarding schools like Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, Hampton Institute in Virginia, and Chilocco Indian School in Oklahoma. At Carlisle the motto was “Kill the Indian, save the man.” Children were stripped of their names, forbidden to speak their languages, forced to cut their hair, and punished for practicing their traditions. They were indoctrinated with Christianity, taught European history while their own was erased, and trained for manual labor instead of given a full education.

Our people were made to abandon their spiritual systems, their languages, their ceremonies. The Dawes Rolls of the late 1800s and early 1900s — used to allot tribal lands — excluded or labeled many Black Indigenous people as “Freedmen,” separating them from full citizenship in their own nations. The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 granted U.S. citizenship to Native Americans but also helped the government finalize the reclassification of thousands of Indigenous people as “colored” in state records.

Some of us were here long before the first slave ships arrived. Others were brought here and merged into the nations already living on this soil. No matter how we got here the same colonial playbook was applied: erase the original identity, impose a false one, and replace truth with a version of history that starts with slavery and ends with survival in someone else’s system.

We’ve carried the name Black as a banner of solidarity, and it unites us in the face of racism. We say it with pride and love. But pride without truth can still keep us in a cage. We have to ask deeper questions. What were we before they called us Black? What languages did our ancestors speak? What lands were we stewards of? What gods did we pray to? What medicines did our grandmothers use? What names were taken, and what stories were silenced?

We are more than Black. We are descendants of tribes, builders of pyramids, keepers of sacred fires. We are Wampanoag, Blackfoot, Cherokee. We are Yoruba, Taino, Gullah, Choctaw. We are Indigenous and African. We are the intersection of bloodlines that were powerful long before borders or boats ever existed.

This generation has a responsibility. Not just to wear Black with pride, but to reclaim our names, our lands, our spiritual inheritance. We must sit with our elders, search the archives, examine Freedmen’s Bureau records, look through census documents, pray for guidance, and remember what has been deliberately hidden from us.

We don’t have to accept the names they gave us. We can speak our true ones. We can raise our children not as a people searching for identity but as sovereign people reconnecting with what has always been theirs. Before they called us Black we were whole. Now, it is time to be whole again.