When Heads Bang Together: Creolizing and Indigenous Identities in the Americas

In her 2019 book, The Black Shoals, Tiffany Lethabo King warns that “settler colonial discourse structures the ways people think about and simultaneously forget . Native death are intimately connected in Western Hemisphere” (2019, xiii). This warning is similar spirit to Jody Byrd’s call decenter “the vertical interactions of colonizer colonized” recenter horizontal struggles among with competing claims historical oppressions” (2011, xxxiv). What happens lifeways creolization when brought under scrutiny such analyses? To ask this question differently, how might creolization, as a theory Afro-diasporic experiences shaped histories chattel slavery, displacement migration, working against anti-blackness, approach vigilance for what Lorraine Le Camp (1998) names “terranullism” —a Doctrine Discovery world-orientation reads land be colonized either vacant or all but vacated civilized human communities—that grounds much settler discourse?