The 250 Project is a collective body of work that explores the entangled histories of Black and Indigenous survival,
the realities of ongoing occupation, and the possibilities of solidarity, repair, and right relationship.

In 2026, the United States will commemorate the 250th anniversary of its founding.

Across the country, institutions, organizations, and leaders are calling for celebrations of democracy, independence, and national progress.

Many of these calls will exclude history that must be named in the moment.

The 250 Project: A Black & Indigenous Reckoning begins from a different place.

In the summer of 1974, the American Indian Movement (AIM) organized a conference of about 3,000 people representing 97 tribes.
They gathered to make a clear declaration, invoking the Spirits of their ancestors, and demanded that all colonial governments end so that sovereign people everywhere shall live as they choose, with self-determination, peace, dignity, and freedom.

Modern Indigenous people have been grossly ignored by the dictates of a global white supremacy project, and yet AIM echoed the strength, resilience, and labor of groups of comrades with similar demands.

On December 17, 1951, the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) petitioned the United Nations and charged the U.S government with genocide:

A petition that charged:

“… the oppressed Negro citizens of the United States, segregated, discriminated against, and long the target of violence, suffer from genocide as the result of the consistent, conscious, unified policies of every branch of government.”

With this powerful history in mind, we follow in the paths our shared ancestors laid before us.

We are resolved in declaring that this “anniversary” is not a story of freedom gained, but of bodies massacred, land occupied, labor extracted, treaties broken, and lives reimagined to serve empire.

With that in mind, The 250 Project invites Black and Indigenous writers, artists, thinkers, organizers, advocates, and educators to reflect on what 250 years of the United States means from the vantage point of those who were never invited into the project in the first place:
– Enslaved Africans did not volunteer to build an empire
– Indigenous Nations did not consent to the occupation of their homelands
– Indigenous peoples of the Southwest did not invite borders that made them subjects of empire

And yet our communities have endured, adapted, resisted, and created life in the shadow of a nation
built through our dispossession.