Prof. Kyle T. Mays
Department of African American Studies
University of California, Los Angeles

If you will be attending the AAG annual meeting in Detroit, MI, please join us (either in-person or virtually) for the 2025 Antipode American Association of Geographers Lecture, “‘Mary, don’t you weep’: Reclaiming Anishinaabeg Women’s Histories of Detroit”, presented Prof. Kyle T. Mays (Department of African American Studies, University of California, Los Angeles) on Wednesday 26th March from 4:10pm to 5:30pm Eastern Time, in Room 420B, Level 4, Huntington Place.

Abstract: In 1887, Kewaytenoquay, my great-great-great-great grandmother, left with her husband, James, a civil war veteran, to the Sarnia Indian Reserve in Ontario from the Saginaw Chippewa Reservation. She died there, and James returned with his young daughter, Mary. Why did they go there? Did she have family there? These are the questions my family and I don’t know. What I offer in this talk is a history of four generations of Anishinaabeg women in the Great Lakes borderlands, from Ontario to Detroit, Michigan. I am reclaiming and telling the story of these women and how they created Indigenous cartographies within the rapidly changing settler colonial world across borders and in urban spaces. I demonstrate how the fragments of their lives allow us to understand the geographies of gender and indigeneity, and how they put into motion what we might call urban Indigenous feminism.

If you know Prof. Mays’ work, then no doubt you’ll be excited: it’s among the most vital (in every sense of the word) out there today. If you’re new to it, then get ready to go down the rabbit hole: it’s an astonishing oeuvre (not least because Kyle received his PhD in 2015!) and once you start reading, we guarantee that you’ll struggle to stop. For a taste of things to come, we cribbed the descriptions below from various websites—sound bites don’t come much more compelling…

“Kyle’s work broadly explores three questions. What is the relationship between blackness and indigeneity? How does dispossession in cities shape the lives of Black and Indigenous peoples? And finally, how can we imagine and put into praxis a world in the aftermath of settler colonialism and white supremacy?”

Kyle T. Mays is an Afro-Indigenous (Saginaw Chippewa) writer and scholar of US history, urban studies, race relations, and contemporary popular culture, and a Professor of African American Studies, American Indian Studies, and History at UCLA. He is the author of:

City of Dispossessions: Indigenous Peoples, African Americans, and the Creation of Modern Detroit (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022) — “we cannot understand the current state of Detroit without also understanding the longer history of Native American and African American dispossession [and their reactions to dispossession, such as the Red and Black Power movements] that has defined the city since its founding”

An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2021) — “The first intersectional history of the Black and Native American struggle for freedom in our country … Mays argues that the foundations of the US are rooted in antiblackness and settler colonialism, and that these parallel oppressions continue into the present. He explores how Black and Indigenous peoples have always resisted and struggled for freedom, sometimes together, and sometimes apart. Whether to end African enslavement and Indigenous removal or eradicate capitalism and colonialism, Mays show how the fervor of Black and Indigenous peoples calls for justice have consistently sought to uproot white supremacy”

Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes: Modernity and Hip Hop in Indigenous North America (SUNY Press, 2018) — “[In recent years] Indigenous people have blended expressive cultures with hip hop culture, creating new sounds, aesthetics, movements, and ways of being Indigenous … Indigenous people are using hip hop to challenge their ongoing dispossession, disrupt racist stereotypes and images of Indigenous people, contest white supremacy and heteropatriarchy, and reconstruct ideas of a progressive masculinity”

Kyle has a chapter in the #1 New York Times Bestseller, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019, edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain (Random House, 2021) on “Blackness and Indigeneity”, and a chapter in Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education (Routledge, 2019) on “Decolonizing Indigenous Education in the Postwar City: Native Women’s Activism from Southern California to the Motor City” (co-authored with Kevin Whalen).

His most recent book, co-authored with Sam Hitchmough, is Rethinking the Red Power Movement (Routledge, 2024). It “examines Red Power ideology with a focus on its many forms of solidarity with African Americans, the role of gender in shaping the movement, its international expansion, and its current meaning in contemporary activism”.

Finally, in 2024 Prof. Mays was a Fulbright Scotland Distinguished Visitor at the University of Edinburgh, working on landback, reparations, and decolonising the university: “Meeting at the intersection of Black and Indigenous studies, history, and cultural studies, this project seeks to understand the relationship between individual and collective rights under liberal democracy, and the limits of reparations discourse that ignores that people of African descent were exploited on Indigenous land”.

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We were delighted when Kyle agreed to join us in Detroit, and we’d like to thank him again for doing so. In anticipation of what we know will be a brilliant lecture, we’re making the following essays freely available to readers for a limited time—an archive of peer-reviewed articles published in Antipode that are germane to the topics of Kyle’s work. Think of them as a primer or further reading to the lecture.

The Antipode Editorial Collective, March 2025

Virtual Issue

Diplomatic Training and Spaces of Anticolonial Worldmaking by Ruth Craggs, Jonathan Harris, Fiona McConnell (2025)

Articulations and Erasures of the Black Sense of Place in Colombia by Ylver Mosquera-Vallejo (2024)

Between Now and Future Sovereignty: Indigenous Forestry in the Conjuncture by Michael Simpson, Clifford Gordon Atleo and Bruce Braun (2024)

Indigenous Natures and the Anthropocene: Racial Capitalism, Violent Materialities, and the Colonial Politics of Representation by Penelope Anthias and Kiran Asher (2024)

Visually Attending to black Senses of Place Through “Everyday Things” in White City, West London by Nathaniel Télémaque (2024)

Feeling the Vibe: Relations and Praxes of a Black Sense of Place in Oakland, California by Kaily Heitz (2024)

Bending Possession: How Detroiters Care for Land by Remediating Settler Property by Nicholas L. Caverly (2023)

Fossil Fuels and Fossil Kin: An Environmental Kin Study of Weaponised Fossil Kin and Alberta’s So-Called “Energy Resources Heritage” by Zoe Todd (2022)

The Maya Train: Infrastructure and Racial Capitalism in Southeast Mexico by Claudia Fonseca Alfaro (2025)

Towards Hemispheric Conversations in the Americas: Internal Colonialism and Efforts to Decolonise the Self in Abya Yala by Daniel P. Gámez, María-Belén Noroña, Fernanda Rojas-Marchini and Inari Sosa-Aranda (2025)

Gridlock: Infrastructure and Jurisdiction in Eastern Navajo Agency by Silas Grant (2025)

Knowledge(s) and Power in the Stop Line 3 Movement: From Colonial Logics to Epistemic Justice by Sirkka Miller (2025)

Hauntings of Absence and Erasure: Black Archival Practices of Property Data by Joyce Percel (2024)

Traversing the Urban Soundscape: Black Sonic Geographies within The Minneapolis Sound by Zuhri James (2024)

“What is Our City Doing for Us?”: Placing Collective Care into Atlanta’s Post-Public Housing Movements by Akira Drake Rodriguez (2024)

A Logic of Care and Black Grassroots Claims to Home in Detroit by Jessi Quizar (2024)

Speculative Urban Worldmaking: Meeting Financial Violence with a Politics of Collective Care by Brandi T. Summers and Desiree Fields (2024)

Grassland Geopoetics: Son Jarocho and the Black Sense of Place of Plantations and Pastures by Diego Astorga de Ita (2024)

Mutual Aid as a Praxis for Critical Environmental Justice: Lessons from W.E.B. Du Bois, Critical Theoretical Perspectives, and Mobilising Collective Care in Disasters by Rachel G. McKane, Patrick Trent Greiner and David Pellow (2024)

Colonial Continuities in Closure: Indigenous Mine Labour and the Canadian State by Rebecca Hall and Brandon Pryce (2024)

The Countersovereignty of Critical Infrastructure Security: Settler-State Anxiety versus the Pipeline Blockade by Kai Bosworth and Charmaine Chua (2023)

Tek Down Nelson! The Struggle for Repair in Barbados by Zaira Simone (2023)

Indigenous Youth and Decolonial Futures: Energy and Environmentalism among the Diné in the Navajo Nation and the Lepchas of Sikkim, India by Mabel Denzin Gergan and Andrew Curley (2023)