What about the possibility of studying indigeneity and blackness relationally in the Americas? Shona N. Jackson's Reflections on Indigeneity and African belonging in the Caribbean and the Americas argues that, ironically, blackness was instituted in the New World with the assumption of native absence. Thus, we are faced with a conundrum, namely, that 'the presumed lack of Indigenous presence in the Caribbean islands allows blacks an unquestioned native status, while in North, South and Central America the considerable presence of Indigenous Peoples has precluded formal discussion of black native status, except where the intersections of black and Indigenous lives during and after slavery force the issue'. Still, according to Wynter, black people's presence in the landscape  
of the Americas, through labour, has both transformed their relationship to the land and indigenized it, but has also 'transformed the condition of forced diasporization into a new, native status'. For Jackson, therefore, it is a 'modern labour episteme that undergirds black belonging'. And significantly, 'the wellbeing of the white/Northern/First World is fundamentally predicated upon the death and privation of blacks and Indigenous Peoples'. This for her requires an 'epistemological turn' to understand how 'peoples coercively brought into a territory in which Indigenous Peoples existed now hold identities through which settler colonial power works' effectively to 'extend the colonial subordination of Indigenous Peoples'.