It’s not the farm girl traveling the world that makes her journey remarkable but her courage to cross the deep racial divides rutted throughout the topography of her own ancestry and America’s, unflinchingly detailed in her book, Black Indian. Like many, COVID has slowed her adventuring but she’s been on the road since she was 18. Having grown up on a rural farm in Michigan with the kind of childhood that recalls a “weeping willow” with the same metaphorical memory as the tangible one, Shonda is now an award-winning author, educator, mother and grandmother who resides in California and has traveled to over 12 countries. In a conversation with UNUM, Shonda provokes answers that are both medicine and a knife, the kind Langston Hughes describes: Let us take a knife and cut the world in two – and see what worms are eating at the rind. Many of us identify with a predominant identity and the familial stories we were told growing up but Shonda’s story begs the question: if we point to various places on the map to locate all of our ancestors, how many of us would find conflicting histories of loss, removal, immigration, slavery, indentured servitude, settlers, and conquest coursing through our blood? She always said, 'You've got some Indian in you, some French and German, and a little bit of Black.’ So I lived my life according to what she said, but I also lived in the role society prescribed to me by my race and gender.Īs a descendant of African Americans, American Indians, and Europeans, Shonda Buchanan's journey is one of reckoning with multiple inheritances. Growing up, my mother never used the term Black Indian.
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