This chapter demonstrates that whether the native status of formerly enslaved blacks in the Americas is assumed/explicit or presumed/implicit, blacks have transformed the condition of forced diasporization into a new, native status. In the Americas, this status is constructed both on the supposed absence of Indigenous Peoples - estimated in 1492 to have been between two to four times the total number of blacks that entered the slave trade - and on acceptance of their social marginalization and disenfranchisement. ${ }^{1}$ The epistemological terrain of modern labour - understood here as the theories and explanations produced with regard to the relationships of blacks to slave labour that have been espoused and taken up from the social sciences to literature and within nationalist discourses - and its a priori assumption of native death/ disappearance is formative for the establishment of New World black, diasporic Indigeneities. Creole Indigeneity, a term coined for the specific mode of black Indigenous 'becoming' in the Caribbean, together with other black, New World Indigeneities, signals the practices of belonging that give blacks a new symbolic and material relationship to the land (Jackson, 2012). These new Indigeneities also represent the tensions with whites, Indigenous Peoples and other racialized, transatlantic groups that inform that practice. As Old World natives, blacks now inhabit a unique native status in the Americas, formed out of the crucible of Indigeneity and diaspora.  
Black nativity is a complex phenomenon that involves displacement and diasporization, and the fact that the more than 10 million enslaved Africans who arrived on the shores of the Caribbean and the Americas produced their descendants during and after slavery, not as Africans, but as New World natives,  
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[^0]:    1 For the population estimates of First Peoples, see Alan Taylor, American Colonies (The Penguin History of the United States, Vol. 1) (2001).