Leila K. Blackbird

U.S.

HISTORY
Reenvisioned

from the perspectives of the

Black & Indigenous Peoples

of Louisiana and the Gulf South

Archival
Research

“It Has Always
Been Customary
to Make Slaves
of S*v*ges”:
The Problem of
Indian Slavery
in Spanish Louisiana
Revisited, 1769-1803

The William & Mary Quarterly, 80, no. 2 (July 2023): 525-58.

DOI: 10.1353/wmq.2023.a903166

Language structures the limitations placed upon Native peoples and polities by enforcing anti-Indigenous ideologies, encoding white racial superiority, and legitimating the ascendancy of European empires over Native nations’ sovereignty and self-determination.

Reimagining the place of Black and Black-Native life in the colonial archive.

The archive reenacts the power of the state, becoming a place in which colonial logics are embodied and anti-Indigeneity and anti-Blackness are inscribed.

“There is no bloodless data in slavery’s archive. Data is the evidence of terror…” – @jmjafrx

This is ongoing work toward building a community-engaged database, digital edition, and static site of annotated, transcribed, and translated manuscript documents from eighteenth-century French and Spanish Louisiana that focus on Black and Indigenous life and humanity.

Digital
Humanities

Kinship & Longing:
Keywords for black louisiana

Scholarly Editing 41, no. 1
(June 2024): n.p.

DOI: 10.55520/YSF9HQNH

K4BL.org

an NHPRC-Mellon funded project

Slavery and colonialism are the foundations of capital, and accumulation makes itself legible through formulaic patterns of violence.

It is only at the intersection of Black and Native studies — and through centering the perspectives of descendant communities and tribal nations — that the history of the U.S. South can be properly recontextualized in interpretive and relational frameworks.