Given that North America had about 388,000 African slaves, and at least 2.5 million Native American slaves, the abolition of slavery in the United States of America is an important matter in Native American history. Most people Juneteenth dates as milestones in African American history, but they all were important events in Native American history as well.

Histories of the United States tend to frame the struggles of Black and Native Americans as allied but separate: Native Peoples were genocidally disappeared to be replaced by white landowners, who then enslaved African Americans. But Indigenous Peoples never vanished. They endured, survived, and have been present and participants throughout all of the United States’ history, through the wake of hundreds of years of racist and genocidal policies. For two and a half centuries, their stories have overlapped and intertwined with those of Black Americans. This includes the stories of slavery and Juneteenth.

Juneteenth does not only hold space to remember. It is also a platform to speak out. This Juneteenth, Native people across the United States stand up in support of Black Lives Matter and in solidarity with Black communities. Like their pasts, the present and futures of Indigenous and Black people remain entwined and interwoven.