Next year marks the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States of America. While from the administration of President Donald Trump and his supporters we can expect a year full of toxic nationalism—misdescribed, of course, as “patriotism”—it will likely fall largely on Black and Indigenous people to hold up a mirror to the nation and carve out space for accountability, honesty, and repair.
In movement spaces, we often say that those closest to the problems are also closest to the solutions. To meet this moment and center those most marginalized by the nation’s dominant origin story, the Black Liberation-Indigenous Sovereignty (BLIS) Collective hosted an intimate writers’ retreat entitled Disrupting 250.
Our objective was…to bring together like-hearted (and big-hearted) storytellers from Black and Native backgrounds to envision a liberated next 250 years.
As Black and Indigenous people, we know firsthand that the creation of this nation happened at our ancestors’ expense. The legacies of anti-Indigeneity and anti-Blackness live all around us. The nation’s first sins were genocide and slavery, so our collective redemption is only possible through reckoning with and restitution for those harms.
In other words, our solidarity and united insistence upon shared visions of justice are the balm and antidote. We are the medicine. And this summer, in that spirit, a group of us gathered in Asheville, NC, to imagine and design new narrative possibilities.
Seeing Together
Our objective was explicit: to bring together like-hearted (and big-hearted) storytellers from Black and Native backgrounds to envision a liberated next 250 years. What would a United States that doesn’t trample on our needs, culture, ambitions, and desire to thrive look, taste, and feel like? How can writers chart a path forward?
As writer Alexis De Veaux said, “Writers are given the responsibility of sight.” By convening writers in this critical moment in time, we at BLIS are accepting that responsibility head-on.
The first step in planning a retreat for brilliant thinkers and doers is to set clear intentions and ask writers to consider how to expand their reach. As Black and Native writers, the work needed often requires us to wear many hats. We are public academics, writers, editors, content creators, videographers, community organizers, and so much more. Rest has become a primary objective for us. We sought to offer a beautiful and relaxing space for writers to decompress, clear their minds, and usher new ideas in.
We chose Asheville as the venue and backdrop for this retreat for many reasons. Asheville is about a one-hour drive from the historic Cherokee Nation territory, which tens of thousands of Cherokee people called home before the Trail of Tears.
Additionally, beginning in 2020, Asheville committed to a process of outlining and implementing citywide reparations recommendations. Asheville’s reparations commission is one of the first in the country to seek to address the legacy of slavery and continued anti-Blackness. The intersection of the historic roots and modern significance to both our communities offered the perfect site for individualized and shared reflection.
We explored…what it would mean to weave together our shared histories, ongoing fights, and calls to action as interdependent rather than siloed.
Our Narrative Dream Team
There in Asheville surrounded by greenery and natural beauty, I spent four days learning alongside five incredible leaders:
- Kahlil Greene, also known as the Gen Z Historian, an Emmy-nominated and Peabody Award–winning digital educator with over 800,000 followers and 50 million views across his social media profiles
- Rebecca Nagle, a Cherokee citizen and two-spirit woman who authored the award-winning book By The Fire We Carry and whose work focuses on advancing Native rights and ending violence against Native women
- Jessi McEver, a Cherokee woman who has dedicated her career to uplifting Native American narratives as a producer, filmmaker, and culture change strategist, having worked on some of the highest-grossing projects featuring Native actors and storylines
- Kyle Mays, an Afro-Indigenous (Saginaw Chippewa) writer and scholar who has written several books including the acclaimed An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States
- Chelsea Tayrien Hicks (Wahzhazhe, of Pawhuska District), author of A Calm and Normal Heart and recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 award, and who organizes Indigenous language creative writing gatherings and works across various creative mediums
Through an all-expenses-paid three-day period away from our day-to-day responsibilities, we each leaned into a space where dreaming and collaborating could take center stage. The only expectation was that each participant facilitate a 45-minute workshop answering the question: “What do Native and Black people need to know about ourselves and one another in order to draw us closer to a liberated world?”
These weren’t lectures; we workshopped ideas for new projects, grappled with intracommunity battles over identity, and pinpointed the biggest hurdles standing in the way of justice for Black and Indigenous Americans. Specifically, when thinking about what it means to “disrupt 250,” we brainstormed the hidden histories that need to be revealed and the contemporary issues that are often invisible.
Together, we imagined how a range of mediums—written word, short-form videos, podcasts, television, and film—could serve as interventions particularly in the coming year. Most importantly, we explored the idea of braided narratives and what it would mean to weave together our shared histories, ongoing fights, and calls to action as interdependent rather than siloed movements.
Recent research conducted by BLIS affirms that narratives linking struggles and futures across movements can be the most powerful tool for increasing support and building cross-movement solidarity. Instead of screaming into the void one at a time, we can come together as a chorus and raise our collective volume in order to drown out the racist stories being told about our people.
Beyond these sessions, we intentionally carved out time for slow mornings, shared meals, and optional evening activities like a screening of Sinners, a game night, and sunset hikes. The goal was restoration and space for conversations rooted in trust and solidarity. What better way to commit to one another than to understand one another more fully.
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Solidarity Is a Muscle
At BLIS, we say that solidarity is a muscle and one that must be exercised rather than taken for granted. Platitudes aside, what does it mean to earmark time, money, and energy toward growing our capacity for solidarity? Solidarity doesn’t just spring up out of nowhere. It is a seed planted in fertile ground, watered, and tended to by wise and patient hands.
Untold capital, on the order of trillions of dollars, has been invested in disunity and individualism resulting in fragmented communities, fearmongering, stereotyping, and violence. Solidarity has the potential not to turn back the hands of time—because what is done can never be fully undone—but to imagine and actualize a tomorrow characterized by honesty, love, mutual aid, and trust.
What progressive storytellers and content creators need now is space to tinker with our ideas, build a proactive strategy rather than an exclusively defensive one, and to produce these narratives in thoughtful ways. It reminds me of the ways that activists, influencers, and artists collaborated during the civil rights movement, such as Dr. King and Harry Belafonte, Shirley Chisolm and Diahann Carroll, Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X, and so many others. Through intimate space, they magnified their work.
We know that power flows through relationships, and multiplying through strategic connections and nodes of influence, care, and creation that reinforce each other over time. Particularly when it comes to storytelling, we have the opportunity to dispel racist norms and replace them with more regenerative ones, together.
The problem isn’t that those who came before us weren’t intervening well, but that we need narrative change to come from multiple angles.
What progressive storytellers…need now is space to tinker with our ideas, build a proactive strategy…and to produce these narratives in thoughtful ways.
The far right has mastered the technique of seemingly being everywhere at once. Though their message is wrong, the tactic is deeply effective. Solidarity can simultaneously be a powerful method of cross-amplification and movement building. We must invest in every tool and medium at our disposal and relentlessly amplify these messages every chance we get. This sounds grueling but when we are motivated by solidarity, we don’t do it alone. Rather, we learn to truly believe and embody the saying that none of us are free until all of us are free.
Building Forward
Centuries of oppression are not healed in three days. This was our first time bringing together Black and Indigenous members of the BLIS Collective, ahead of our first full membership retreat in October. But while we didn’t heal the divides among our communities, we believe we made significant headway toward relationship building and advancing a sense of community.
Participants at the retreat had space to grapple with what they needed from one another and how their gifts could fill in the gaps. We asked ourselves what our audiences needed to hear from and about each other and we committed to doing the work to make that happen.
In the weeks since the retreat, Kahlil has produced a video op-ed about racist mascots and Indigenous invisibilization garnering more than 45,000 views across Instagram and TikTok. Kyle bought Chelsea’s book and my own, weaving them into his upcoming curriculum as a college professor.
BLIS is also investing in and supporting Rebecca Nagle’s next podcast, co-created with other Indigenous writers, organizers, and scholars, which will launch in 2026 and serve as a vital platform to deepen public understanding of Indigenous history, culture, sovereignty, and politics.
Our group chat has remained active, sharing important news and media to amplify. What began as a small gathering in the mountains of North Carolina is now radiating outward across our collective, our movements, and society, as we continue to reshape how this nation remembers, reckons, and reimagines. Our work won’t stop there.
We live in a country where a major news pundit casually says that the nation did not kill enough Indigenous people, where the sitting US president threatens to interfere with a stadium deal if a football team refuses to reinstate a Native slur as its name, and where hundreds of Black-authored books are being banned from school libraries. This “cultural war” is an attack on Black and Indigenous narratives, a deliberate attempt to define who belongs, who matters, and whose stories are allowed to be told.
This is the terrain White supremacy fights on—narrative, memory, identity—and advocates of a multiracial democracy in the United States must meet it there. As writers, creatives, and truth-tellers, we have a duty to intervene in order to reckon with the country’s original sins of genocide and slavery. Stories are not neutral, and our future is dependent on our solidarity and insistence that our braided futures are the balm and the antidote.
Imagine what it would look like for more philanthropists and nonprofit leaders to focus less on quantitative key performance indicators, and to instead empower generations of Native and Black creatives to do what we do best: dream together and develop stories that inspire the next generation.
With the space and opportunity, we’ve seen what is possible. We will continue scheming so that the next quarter-millennium looks better than the last.
