Help Fund The 250 Project: A Black & Indigenous Reckoning

An Collective Archive of Resistance for America’s 250th

For the same price as a mobile order of coffee on your way to work, you can help Black and Indigenous voices reclaim the story the United States is telling about its 250th anniversary.

In 2026, institutions, organizations, and leaders across the country are preparing to celebrate democracy, independence, and national progress. Many of these celebrations will exclude the histories that must be named in this moment.

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

While much of the country treats this milestone as an occasion for patriotism, The 250 Project acknowledges the violence aimed at Black and Indigenous bodies since this nation’s founding and exists to challenge that narrative.

Black people built this country. Indigenous people cultivated this land long before any government laid claim to it. Neither group agreed to be part of this centuries-long project, and yet both have been central to it every step of the way.

This “anniversary” is not simply a story of freedom gained. It is also a story of bodies massacred, land occupied, labor extracted, treaties broken, borders imposed, and lives reimagined to serve empire.

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 the borders that made them subjects of empire.

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

The 250 Project is a multi-volume anthology of written and visual art by Black and Indigenous artists following in the footsteps of their most radical ancestors: the descendants of those who were never invited into the founding of this nation in the first place.

Volume One brings together essays, poetry, visual art, reflections, and testimony from Black and Indigenous contributors across communities, geographies, and traditions. This collection accounts for both the hyper-invisibility of federally recognized, state-recognized, and unrecognized Tribal Nations and Indigenous communities, including communities like the United Houma Nation, and the hyper-visibility of Black descendants, for whom no federal designation exists at all.

We’re Joquina Reed and Pixie Lighthorse, the creative directors bringing this anthology to life. We are comrades in Black and Southeastern Tribal resistance who believe this history belongs on American coffee tables, not in the margins.

Our primary goal is to raise $15,000 to produce Volume One.

Your donation helps cover:

Editing
Proofreading
Formatting
Printing
Design
Website and campaign tools
Contributor stipends
Distribution and outreach

Volume One has been carried almost entirely by the unpaid labor of three Black and Indigenous people. That is not sustainable across a multi-volume series. Every dollar raised beyond our primary goal will help us build real capacity for Volume Two, including project management, editorial support, contributor support, and design.

We are asking for your support not because this story needs permission to exist, but because the labor behind it deserves to be paid, which is something history has rarely done for Black and Indigenous people.

This project is not only about naming what was taken. It is about imagining what comes next: futures built on land sovereignty, repair, right relationship, and truth-telling, written and illustrated by the people who have always known the difference between the myth and the truth.

If 5,000 people give what they would spend on one coffee, we hit our goal.

Donate below and help us build a record that outlives the spectacle.

Learn more at https://the250project.com

Help Fund The 250 Project: A Black & Indigenous Reckoning

An Archive of Resistance for America’s 250th

Team Members