Perry traces a long line of Haitian indigenist thought and treats it as an alternative to diaspora as a way of framing Caribbean identity.

Two periods anchor the argument: the war of independence, and the cultural movement of the 1920s that formed in opposition to the United States occupation. In both, indigenous rhetoric was about sovereignty. It grounded claims to territory in descent, and it defined certain people as foreign and demanded their removal.

The term indigene, Perry argues, marked a position taken up against an imperial power more often than it named any fixed set of cultural traits, which makes the claim political rather than essentialist. Examining how this rhetoric imagined a relation to the island's aboriginal Taino, the essay sets out what a discourse attempting to root Africans and their descendants in the space of the New World could do, where it fell short, and where it contradicted itself.