A shirt used by Beyoncé during a performance in June on its “Cowboy Carter” tour has caused an argument on how Americans frame their history and caused a wave of criticism for the superstar born in Houston.
The shirt used during a concert in Paris presented images of the Buffalo soldiers, which belonged to the black units of the US Army. Killer, smugglers, intruders and Mexican revolutionaries. “
The images of the shirt and the videos of the performance are also presented on the Beyoncé website.
While preparing to return to the USA. For performances in his hometown this weekend, fans and indigenous influencers resorted to social networks to criticize Beyoncé for using a shirt that frames the Native Americans and Mexican revolutionaries as anything except victims of US imperialism and for promoting anti -indigenous language.
A Beyoncé spokesman did not respond to a request for comments.
Who were buffalo soldiers?
Buffalo soldiers served in six military units created after the civil war in 1866. They were composed of men, free and soldiers of the black civil war and fought in hundreds of conflicts, even in the Spanish-American war, the First World War and World War II, until they were disgusted in 1951.
As the Beyoncé T -shirt appointment points out, they also fought against numerous battles against indigenous peoples as part of the US Army violence campaign. UU. And the theft of land during the expansion to the west of the country.
Some historians say that the nickname of “buffalo soldiers” was granted by the tribes that admired the courage and tenacity of the combatants, but that could be more legend than a fact. “At the end of the day, we don’t really have that kind of information,” said Cale Carter, director of exhibitions at the National Museum of Buffalo Soldiers in Houston.
Carter and other museum staff said that, only in recent years, the museum made broader efforts to include more of the complexities of the battles than buffalo soldiers fought against the Native Americans and Mexican revolutionaries and the role they played in the subjugation of indigenous peoples. They, like many other museums throughout the country, hope to add more nuances to the expansion of American history and be more respectful of the ways in which they have caused damage to indigenous communities.
“We romantize the western border,” he said. “The first stories that talked about buffalo soldiers were affected by many of those factors. Therefore, you really didn’t see a change in that narrative until recently.”
There have often there has been a lack of various voices that argue how the history of buffalo soldiers is framed, said Michelle Tovar, director of Education of the Museum. The current political climate has exerted enormous pressure on schools, including those of Texas, to avoid honest discussions about US history, he said.
“At this time, in this area, we are receiving many school districts where we cannot go and teach this story,” said Tovar. “We are a museum where at least we can be a center, where we can invite the community, regardless of what the districts say, invite them to learn and do what we can do the scope to continue teaching honest history.”
Historians analyze the reason for recovery
The recent Beyoncé album “Act II: Cowboy Carter” has reproduced in a kind of American iconography, which many see how their way of subverting the adjacence of the genre of country music to whiteness and claiming the aesthetics of jeans for black Americans. Last year, he became the first black woman in Billboard’s country music list, and “Cowboy Carter” won the first prize in the 2025 Grammy Awards, album of the year.
“Buffalo soldiers play this important role in the black property of the American west,” said Tad Stoermer, historian and professor at Johns Hopkins University. “In my opinion, (Beyoncé is) very aware of the role of these images. This is the ‘Cowboy Carter’ tour to cry aloud. The entire tour, the entire album, the whole piece is located in this narrative in layers.”
But Stoermer also points out that Buffalo soldiers have been framed in American history in a way that also plays in the myths of American nationalism.
As implies the use of the images of Beyoncé buffalo soldiers, black Americans also use their history to claim agency about their role in the creation of the country, said Alaina E. Roberts, historian, author and professor at the University of Pittsburgh who studies the intersection of the black and native life of the civil war until today.
“That is the category in which he thought he was entering this conversation, but buffalo soldiers are even one step above that because they were literally involved not only in the settlement of the West but of the genocide in a certain sense,” he said.
The online reaction builds before Houston’s shows
Several influencers, artists and native academics resorted to social networks this week to criticize Beyoncé or denounce the language of the shirt as an anti-indigenous. “Do you think Beyoncé will apologize (or recognize) the shirt?” Indigenous.TV, an indigenous Instagram account of news and culture with more than 130,000 followers, asked in a position on Thursday.
Many of his critics, as well as fans, agree. An avalanche of publications on social networks called the pop star for the historical frame of the shirt.
“Buffalo soldiers are an interesting historical moment to see. But we have to be honest about what they did, especially in their operations against indigenous Americans and Mexicans,” said Chisom Okorafor, who publishes on Tiktok under the handle @confirmedsomaya.
Okorafor said that there is no “progressive” way of claiming the history of the construction of the United States Empire in the West, and that the use of Beyoncé of Western Symbolism sends a problematic message: “that blacks can also participate in US nationalism.”
“Blacks can also benefit from the atrocities of () American empire,” he said. “It is a message that tells him to abandon immigrants, indigenous peoples and people who live outside the United States. It is a message that tells him that it is not only a virtue of being born in this country, but the more his line extends in this country, the more virtuous it is.”
