A June 20 festival will tell a truer story of the nation’s semiquincentennial, braiding narratives of Black and Indigenous struggles and visions for our collective liberation.
(Mer Young)
On Saturday, 25 Kent Ave will kick off a new national ritual: Reclamation Day.
The festivities, held in Brooklyn, will be grounded in Black and Indigenous narratives of joy and resilience, blending art, performance, and movement-building, with over 50 other artists, organizers, and cultural leaders. Reclamation Day, also dubbed a Reunion of Hope, will serve as a counter-commemoration to the nation’s 250th anniversary, occurring one day after Juneteenth. It seeks to tell a truer story of the nation’s semiquincentennial—a part of a larger mass movement to reclaim and reframe the story of America—through the lens of its organizer, the BLIS Collective.
BLIS stands for “Black Liberation, Indigenous Sovereignty,” and the New York City–based Collective is dedicated to building narrative and solidarity infrastructure across movements while growing the cultural and strategic power necessary to pass bold policy. The 46-member collective includes national and local organization leaders, content creators, filmmakers, musicians, comedians, academics, and more—brought together virtually once every two months and then for an in-person retreat once a year.
Though its members differ in individual missions, BLIS collectively centers four main initiatives: Indigenous Land Back, Black Reparations, Guaranteed Income, and Baby Bonds (proposed as “the public provision of a substantial trust fund for newborns from families that are wealth-poor,” a race-neutral policy that would support disproportionately affected Black families). Additionally, the collective supports the work of its membership through access to a million-dollar fund with which they can engage in solidarity-based projects.
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One such instance of solidarity comes from collective members Brea Baker and Rebecca Nagle. In a collaborative post on Nagle’s Welcome to Native America Substack, the Native journalist and the Black freedom fighter Baker share the story of their introduction through their respective books, By the Fire We Carry and Rooted , which were released in the same year. The pair worked together blissfully not only on the panels they both spoke on but also in broader conversations. Baker then invited Nagle to join the BLIS Collective.
Recalling the BLIS Collective’s gathering of Black and Indigenous storytellers in North Carolina, called “Disrupting 250,” Baker writes , “Our solidarity and united insistence upon shared visions of justice are the balm and antidote. We are the medicine.”
BLIS’s Fabric of Repair report on “the impact of braiding narratives of Reparations and Land Back on Black and Indigenous audiences” posits that the economic foundation of the US “rests upon two interlinked systems of oppression: the enslavement of African people and the systematic genocide and dispossession of Indigenous people, land and waters.”
The 47-page report tests three narrative approaches, finding that a “braided narrative”—that links struggles across movements—proves the most effective method for communicating initiatives. In short, braiding the narratives of Black and Indigenous struggles and futures tells a more effective story than sharing each narrative separately.
Carrying their narrative power from harmonious retreats to the contested streets of social media, Nagle, Baker, and other leaders practice consolidation, the uniting of these tragedies, which are most often treated in isolation, to produce truer, more cohesive histories and visions for our collective liberation.
For example, in one TikTok , Mother Jones video correspondent Garrison Hayes connects historical narratives of Native and Black communities to explore how reparations might shape their continually connected futures. Speaking from a local plantation, Hayes shares the story of two interconnected “original sins”: Andrew Jackson’s enslavement of hundreds of Black people on lands stolen from Indigenous tribes, namely the Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Shawnee peoples.
“The interconnection between these two movements are clear and are perhaps our best options for addressing the harms of colonialism and slavery,” Hayes says to his audience of 250k viewers. “And they need your support as they seek to accomplish the same goals, which is to reconstruct our economic, political and social status quo, rewriting a new American story.”
The president of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians , Shannon Holsey, who will deliver opening remarks for the festival on June 20, notes the parity between struggles faced by both Black communities and tribal nations.
“In systems that are rooted in land dispossession for tribal nations, broken treaties, and policies of exclusion,” President Holsey told The Nation , “there’s a similarity across the spectrum of people of color. We often see ourselves from a p…
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