Generations ago, many American Indian tribes and blacks searching for a free life held strong bonds.

“Indian people had a perspective that everybody had a right,” Haskell professor Mike Tosee said.

But after years of research and interviews with current Haskell students, Tosee and others have found a stark difference in opinion in some younger American Indians.

Experiences vary widely from reservation to reservation, Tosee said, and with some tribes having little exposure to black communities growing up, some young American Indians today judge blacks in a less than favorable light.

Not surprising

As a professor at Haskell, the results of the research so far haven’t surprised him, he said. But he wants to see the trend end.

Kansas University graduate students Anna Sarcia, left, and Jancita Warrington, right, and KU professor Bobbi Rahder, are conducting research for the Shifting Borders of Race and Identity program project. The project examines intersections between American Indian and black cultures.

So now, his project, the Ford Foundation-funded Shifting Borders of Race and Identity, will spend the next seven months constructing a curriculum to help fight the troubling trend where it often begins: in the classrooms that shape young American Indians’ core values.

For more than two years, the joint Haskell-Kansas University project has used a $300,000 Ford Foundation grant to explore the cultural connections between native and black communities, two groups the project deemed as the most historically significant minority communities in America.

Similar histories

The two distinct cultures share similar histories, the projects’ researchers say. From the Creek-Freedman Indians to bonds between the Buffalo Soldiers and the Cherokee Tribe, American Indians and members of historical black communities lived and worked side-by-side.

“There have been moments in history where there have been connections and alliances,” said Zanice Bond de Perez, co-director of the project.

To capture the connections, researchers and KU Indigenous Nations Studies graduate students have collected oral history interviews and other research that helps tell the story of a mutual racial understanding.

But in the course of researching, Tosee said that the interviews have focused on cultural perceptions and views between the two races. And for some tribal members whose reservations were far removed from black culture, Tosee said it became difficult to see that similarities existed.

Shared struggles

In northern Wisconsin just outside of Green Bay, Jancita Warrington never saw many black faces on her reservation.

“There were never blacks intermingled in the tribes,” she said. “If so, it was very sporadic.”

Haskell Indian Nations University professor Mike Tosee is conducting research for the Shifting

The Menominee and Prairie Band Potawatomi native said her tribal elders knew the history of black tribal members around the country. But it took modern history to shed light on the shared struggles of the two cultures.

In her time working with the project, Warrington, a KU graduate student, said she has heard similar stories from other American Indians.

During the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, black communities around the country fought for equal rights. And along with that, Warrington said, the American Indian movement grew – the same struggle for equality by a different group of people.

“They experienced the same kind of feelings of being outcast,” she said. “It was a lot of the same things in the same context.”

Bond de Perez agrees. With so many parallels during modern struggles in often marginalized communities, she said that the connections between the races should be difficult to overlook.

“I think it would be difficult, at least on some level, to not share culture,” she said.

Sharing connections

But now the project’s focus will center on how to share those connections. Bobbi Rahder, who is on the project’s steering committee, said that she has spent time with her graduate students in KU’s Indigenous Nations Studies department working on just that.

Her focus has been on two areas, she said: how to present the information visually, and collecting data from oral history projects to help form healing narratives – stories that will bridge the gap between tribal and black communities.

But to truly bridge whatever gap may exist, the project’s researchers say constructing a curriculum focusing on the historical and cultural parallels is necessary.

“We have to help both races understand that they weren’t singled out. They weren’t the only ones going through this,” Warrington said.

The project will take the next five months leading up to its national conference in November to mold the sum of their findings into tools that educators can use to show the similarities, and, in some cases, the differences between the two groups.

The education will begin on the college level, Rahder said, with KU classes forming as soon as next semester. But it’s just a start.

The project’s directors hope teachers can teach the cultural connections to students of all ages.

“I hope that will happen eventually,” Rahder said.

Contact forbidden

Nikki Crowe, a Haskell sophomore, hopes so, too. A Chippewa from Wisconsin, she grew up in a home where her parents forbid contact with black kids her age. She couldn’t watch the shows she wanted to, she said. Shows featuring black actors such as “Sanford and Son” and “The Jeffersons” were forbidden.

She overcame her upbringing, she said, eventually marrying a black man. But she wished now that she could have seen the parallels between the cultures at a young age to learn then that native and black cultures have walked down similar paths.

“It would have been nice,” Crowe said, “if we’d have known the truth.”