At the core of Indigenous futurism as well as Afrofuturism is the understanding that “the apocalypse has already happened” by way of settler colonialism (Larkin “Afrofuturism” 2022, 8). As such, the ways in which Black and Indigenous American communities alike have fought against settler colonial structures is evidence of post-apocalyptic future building practices. For Indigenous groups, many of these practices make up, in part, what has come to be understood as Indigenous Sovereignty and it is the similarities between these practices and those employed by free Black communities in the wake of slavery that I work to uncover archaeologically. As scholars have begun to disentangle the differences between sovereignty as it is juridically understood, and sovereignty as a practice; Black and Indigenous scholars can work as co-conspirators to identify meaningful and effective strategies that communities have used to lay claim to their past, present, and their futures.

A contemporary pueblo in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, that was once a pueblo de cimarrones (pueblo of [Black] maroons), has been the setting of possible future worlds since the 18th century. What work does sovereignty do when applied to colonial Black fugitive populations? What, in fact, do we desire from sovereignty today?

In 1865, 346 Bajans boarded the Cora in search of “more auspicious shores” (Banton 2019) in Liberia. This (reverse) transatlantic voyage presented an opportunity to lead autonomous existences away from the white supremacist social structure that constrained Black life in post-emancipation Barbados. Since 2018, the Back-to-Africa Heritage & Archaeology Research Project has been investigating the material histories of Afro American and Caribbean settlements in Liberia. In May 2024, the Barbadian government hosted the “Sankofa Pilgrimage to Barbados” to honor the historical connections between the two countries.

From family history and genealogy to archaeological research and state-sponsored heritage tourism, this paper will explore the networks that inform the preservation of Afro Caribbean heritage in Liberia and Barbados. I suggest that these efforts constitute new experiments in Pan-Africanism that seek to de-center neo-colonial relationships to the U.S. and the U.K. and reinvest in the project of Black liberation and sovereignty.

In collaboration with the Mi’kmawey Debert Cultural Centre (MDCC) in Nova Scotia, we consider dialogue both as a theoretical concept and as an act of Indigenous sovereignty.

As a concept, dialogue is an oral insistence that moves struggles against imperialism beyond “the level of text and literature” into the mouth (Smith 1999). As an act of sovereignty, this assertion of orality claims dialogue as a site of knowledge production that carries forward Indigenous stories, histories, and theories to orient us toward reciprocity and interdependence.

Specifically, our work with MDCC to help pilot its bespoke Content Management System (CMS) foregrounds dialogue as we attempt to recover L’nu’k (or Mi’kmaq) from colonial records and relate their stories back to communities. We consider how our dialogues with the persons (mis)represented in these records, with each other, with MDCC staff, and with future visitors to the centre, complicate concepts of Indigenous data sovereignty.

The search for Black ancestors requires unearthing buried histories, reclaiming what Toni Morrison called the “Disremembered past,” and re-envisioning landscapes of Black heritage long erased from the map. This paper draws on the Black Heritage Tree Project, a land-based storytelling initiative that centers ancestral trees as witnesses to Black history across the African Diaspora. These Heritage Trees are not only silent witnesses—they act as burial markers, hiding places, meeting points, freedom paths, healing grounds, and grand entrances to worlds of our own design. Their roots and canopies form cultural landscapes that reconnect Diasporic communities and offer new tools to reclaim stories and spaces lost to racial violence. This paper explores how surviving Black Heritage Trees function as living archives of Black sovereignty. From submerged towns to contested lands, these trees mark sites of ancestral connection and spark a call for archaeologists to see Black heritage through a liberatory lens.

In the effort to break away from narratives of colonial inevitability or binaries of domination and resistance, I have drawn a lot of furtive inspiration from science fiction and the imagination of life otherwise. While the genre of sci fi has historically also peddled a colonial mindset (settling new worlds and encountering the alien other), the works of Black and Indigenous authors provide more generative visions. They often see social structure and governance through thriving relationalities; as Audra Simpson has observed, sovereignty need not be solely settler biopower (the right to kill) but rather can be the right to care. In this paper I discuss some sci-fi sources of inspiration, ponder how such perspectives can inflect our interpretation of historical visions of sovereignty, and provide a few examples from Mni Sota Makoce.

This paper works towards building the concept of cultural heritage resource sovereignty. This concept recognizes Indigenous agency and control over a range of heritage sites and materials—natural, cultural, and economic resources of Ndee (Apache) communities. For the Ndee cultural heritage resources are inherently linked to exertions of Ndee sovereignty, self-determination and overall well-being. Foregrounding Ndee ontological reasoning is critical to address various contemporary cultural heritage issues and to truly move beyond structured Western perceptions of interpretation, theory, method and practice in the archaeological discipline that are underpinned in various ways by the legacies of settler colonialism.

The Black Star Line was a Black shipping company founded by Jamaican Pan-African leader Marcus Garvey. Through incorporating a shipping company he intended to promote self-sufficiency and economic opportunity in the Black community. Additionally, there were discussions of going "Back to Africa" on these ships. Through the materiality of the ship remains, I will be discussing how the Black Star Line offered the opportunity for Black seafarers to engage with the ocean in a liberatory way. The goals of the Black Star Line allow for further discussion on what it meant to engage with the sea in the early 20th century, but also reckoning with what it meant to be seeking community on the African continent as well.

This paper explores how nineteenth-century eel-fishing traditions among Black and Indigenous communities on Long Island, New York, were systematically marginalized through processes of racial capitalism and ecological dispossession. Once central to regional subsistence, market economies, and community identities, eel fishing relied on specialized tools, environmental knowledge, and kinship networks. Yet by the late nineteenth century, industrial pollution, racialized fisheries laws, and shifting conservation narratives rendered these practices increasingly untenable. Drawing on archival research, oral histories, GIS mapping, and material culture analysis, this research reframes the disappearance of eel fishing not as a natural decline but as systematic erasure. Ultimately, this project explores eel fishing as a form of cultural resilience and historical memory embedded in coastal ecologies and contested narratives of progress.