Book Review: Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country edited by Tiya Miles and Sharon Holland Durham

Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds, a collection of essays from scholars including Robert Warrior and Virginia Kennedy, as well as Tiya Miles and Sharon Holland, is a timely contribution to the small but growing field of critical literature that examines the African and African–American presence within indigenous American communities and vice versa. The essays range in subject matter from Toni Morrison’s fiction to Lone Wolf’s legal battles to rap and reggae in Hawaii, covering a period of African–American and Native-American history, culture, and literature production that extends from the antebellum era to the present.

Particularly, the essays in this collection are intent upon exploring the variety of ways that African–American and Native- American communities have converged and the results of those convergences. In doing so, authors such as David Chang, Deborah Kanter, and Barbara Krauthamer demonstrate the ways that African and African–American presences have fundamentally reshaped indigenous cultures and communities. This influence, however, is often met with resistance, as Melinda Micco and Robert Collins document in their respective essays; and that resistance is typically couched in Euro- centric, white supremacists terms, demonstrating the ways that other marginalized populations sometimes internalize and enact these Eurocentric hierarchies for their own benefit. Additionally, Virginia Kennedy makes evident the ways that Native-American peoples and cultures have impacted African–American experiences and literatures in her examination of Morrison’s oeuvre.

Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds is framed in ways that echo its predecessors When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote: African-Native American Literature, edited by Jonathan Brennen, and Confounding the Colorline: The Indian-Black Experience in North America edited by James Brooks, in that it is a collection of essays, many of which take an interdisciplinary approach to the subject matter. What Crossing Worlds, Crossing Waters accomplishes, which is unique and important in this emerging field, is to extend the discussions of these convergences beyond the experiences of individuals who claim an African–Indigenous dual heritage. Where the former works consider only the writings and experiences of African–Indigenous peoples, this work ventures into broader arenas within the literary traditions, and political and social histories of both groups to identify and explicate the cultural implications of these intersections. In doing so, Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds evidences that the cultural impact of the physical convergences of these two peoples extends far beyond the population of mixed race individuals produced from those interactions, while at the same time demonstrating the multiple frames through which this study might be conducted.

Of particular interest is Robert Warrior’s ‘‘Lone Wolf and Du Bois for a New Century: Intersections of Native American and African American Literatures’’ in which Warrior writes about the trial of Lone Wolf vs. Hitchcock, contextualizing his examination of that trial with contemporaneous moments in African–American history. What Warrior offers in this essay that is especially useful, is a way of undertaking comparative studies of African–American and Native-American literary, cultural, and historical experiences. In making these connections, it is not enough—Warrior asserts—to rest on superficial comparisons, but they must be firmly rooted in more substantial ground, which can only be found in thorough knowledge of both African–American and Native-American experiences with all that such a knowledge entails.

In acknowledging this need, Warrior also touches on one of the weaknesses of the text, a weakness readily acknowledged by the editors of the edition. Much of the scholarship that is produced about these convergences comes from those trained singularly in African–American or Indigenous studies, and often times the scholarship is conducted primarily by African–Americanists. In order to fully tease out the nuances of these relation- ships and negotiations, scholars of both African–American and Native-American studies must be committed to unpacking these intersections.

Crossing Waters, along other similar texts, is both informed by while simultaneously engaged in the process of reshaping Black Critical Studies in the ways that it shifts the paradigm of Black Studies away from narratives about and reflections on European contact. The text evidences the multiple spheres of influence exercised by African and African–American peoples even in spaces where they were presumed powerless and marginal. This work is necessary because it implicitly broadens discussions about the Black Experience in America, helping to generate, as a result, a more holistic understanding of the nature of that experience.