Fans criticize Beyoncé for shirt calling Native Americans 'the enemies
of peace'
[June 28, 2025]
By GRAHAM LEE BREWER
A T-shirt worn by Beyoncé during a Juneteenth performance on her “Cowboy
Carter” tour has sparked a discussion over how Americans frame their
history and caused a wave of criticism for the Houston-born superstar.
The T-shirt worn during a concert in Paris featured images of the
Buffalo Soldiers, who belonged to Black U.S. Army units active during
the late 1800s and early 1900s. On the back was a lengthy description of
the soldiers that included “Their antagonists were the enemies of peace,
order and settlement: warring Indians, bandits, cattle thieves,
murderous gunmen, bootleggers, trespassers, and Mexican
revolutionaries.”
Images of the shirt and videos of the performance are also featured on
Beyoncé’s website.
As she prepares to return to the U.S. for performances in her hometown
this weekend, fans and Indigenous influencers took to social media to
criticize Beyoncé for framing Native Americans and Mexican
revolutionaries as anything but the victims of American imperialism and
promoting anti-Indigenous language.
A publicist for Beyoncé did not respond to requests for comment.
Who were the Buffalo Soldiers?
The Buffalo Soldiers served in six military units created after the
Civil War in 1866. They were comprised formerly enslaved men, freemen,
and Black Civil War soldiers and fought in hundreds of conflicts —
including in the Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II —
until they were disbanded in 1951.
As the quote on Beyoncé’s shirt notes, they also fought numerous battles
against Indigenous peoples as part of the U.S. Army's campaign of
violence and land theft during the country's westward expansion.
Some historians say the moniker “Buffalo Soldiers” was bestowed by the
tribes who admired the bravery and tenacity of the fighters, but that
might be more legend than fact. “At the end of the day, we really don’t
have that kind of information,” said Cale Carter, director of
exhibitions at the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum in Houston.
Carter and other museum staff said that, only in the past few years, the
museum made broader efforts to include more of the complexities of the
battles the Buffalo Soldiers fought against Native Americans and Mexican
revolutionaries and the role they played in the subjugation of
Indigenous peoples. They, much like many other museums across the
country, are hoping to add more nuance to the framing of American
history and be more respectful of the ways they have caused harm to
Indigenous communities.
“We romanticize the Western frontier,” he said. “The early stories that
talked about the Buffalo Soldiers were impacted by a lot of those
factors. So you really didn’t see a changing in that narrative until
recently.”
There has often been a lack of diverse voices discussing the way Buffalo
Soldiers history is framed, said Michelle Tovar, the museum's director
of education. The current political climate has put enormous pressure on
schools, including those in Texas, to avoid honest discussions about
American history, she said.
“Right now, in this area, we are getting push back from a lot of school
districts in which we can’t go and teach this history," Tovar said. "We
are a museum where we can at least be a hub, where we can invite the
community regardless of what districts say, invite them to learn it and
do what we can do the outreach to continue to teach honest history.”
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Artifacts are displayed inside the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum
on Friday, June 27, 2025, in Houston, Texas. (AP Photo/Ashley
Landis)
 Historians scrutinize reclamation
motive
Beyoncé's recent album “Act II: Cowboy Carter” has played on a kind
of American iconography, which many see as her way of subverting the
country music genre's adjacency to whiteness and reclaiming the
cowboy aesthetic for Black Americans. Last year, she became the
first Black woman ever to top Billboard's country music chart, and
“Cowboy Carter” won her the top prize at the 2025 Grammy Awards,
album of the year.
“The Buffalo Soldiers play this major role in the Black ownership of
the American West,” said Tad Stoermer, a historian and professor at
Johns Hopkins University. “In my view, (Beyoncé is) well aware of
the role that these images play. This is the ‘Cowboy Carter’ tour
for crying out loud. The entire tour, the entire album, the entire
piece is situated in this layered narrative.”
But Stoermer also points out that the Buffalo Soldier have been
framed in the American story in a way that also plays into the myths
of American nationalism.
As Beyoncé’s use of Buffalo Soldiers imagery implies, Black
Americans also use their story to claim agency over their role in
the creation of the country, said Alaina E. Roberts, a historian,
author and professor at Pittsburgh University who studies the
intersection of Black and Native American life from the Civil War to
present day.
“That’s the category in which she thought maybe she was coming into
this conversation, but the Buffalo Soldiers are even a step above
that because they were literally involved in not just the settlement
of the West but of genocide in a sense,” she said.
Online backlash builds ahead of Houston shows
Several Native influencers, performers, and academics took to social
media this week to criticize Beyoncé or call the language on her
shirt anti-Indigenous. “Do you think Beyoncé will apologize (or
acknowledge) the shirt,” indigenous.tv, an Indigenous news and
culture Instagram account with more than 130,000, asked in a post
Thursday.
Many of her critics, as well as fans, agree. A flood of social media
posts called out the pop star for the historic framing on the shirt.
“The Buffalo Soldiers are an interesting historical moment to look
at. But we have to be honest about what they did, especially in
their operations against Indigenous Americans and Mexicans,” said
Chisom Okorafor, who posts on TikTok under the handle @confirmedsomaya.
Okorafor said there is no “progressive” way to reclaim America's
history of empire building in the West, and that Beyoncé’s use of
Western symbolism sends a problematic message.
“Which is that Black people too can engage in American nationalism,"
she said. "Black people too can profit from the atrocities of
American empire. It is a message that tells you to abandon
immigrants, Indigenous people, and people who live outside of the
United States. It is a message that tells you not only is it a
virtue to have been born in this country but the longer your line
extends in this country the more virtuous you are.”
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