The t-shirt worn by Beyoncé during her June performance on her “Cowboy Carter” tour sparked a debate about how Americans framed their history and sparked a wave of criticism for the Houston-born superstar.
The T-shirt worn during a concert in Paris featured images of Buffalo soldiers who belonged to Black Army units operating in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Behind them were long descriptions of soldiers, including “their antagonists were enemies of peace, order and reconciliation. The Indians of battle, bandits, bull thieves, murderers, bootleggers, intruders, and Mexican revolutionaries.”
Shirt images and performance videos can also be found on Beyoncé’s website.
As she prepares to return to the US for a home town performance this weekend, fans and Indigenous influencers have used social media to criticize Native Americans and Mexican revolutionaries for framed as victims of American imperialism and wearing shirts that promote anti-Indigenous peoples.
A Beyoncé spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.
Who was the Buffalo soldier?
The Buffalo soldiers served in six military units created after the civil war in 1866. They consisted of previously enslaved men, Freemen and soldiers from the Black Civil War, and fought hundreds of conflicts, including the Spanish-American War, World War II and World War II until their destruction in 1951.
As Beyoncé’s shirt quote points out, they also fought numerous battles with Indigenous people as part of a campaign of violence and land theft during the country’s expansion westward.
Some historians say that “Buffalo Soldiers” were bestowed on by tribes who praised the courage and tenacity of fighter jets, but that may be more legendary than fact. “At the end, we really don’t have that kind of information,” said Kale Carter, director of the exhibition at the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum in Houston.
Carter and other museum staff said only in the past few years the museum had put in a broader effort to make the more complicated the battles that Buffalo soldiers fought against Native Americans and Mexican revolutionaries, and the role they played in the conquest of Indigenous peoples. Like many other museums across the country, they hope to add more nuance to the framing of American history and more respect for the ways in which they have harmed Indigenous communities.
“We’re making the western frontier romantic,” he said. “The early stories we talked about the Buffalo soldiers were influenced by many of these factors, so until recently we really didn’t see any change in that story.”
Michel Toval, the museum’s director of education, says there is often a lack of diverse voices debating how the history of Buffalo Soldiers is framed. The current political situation puts great pressure on schools, including Texas, to avoid honest discussions about American history.
“Now, in this field, we are being pushed back from many school districts that can’t teach this history,” Toval said. “We’re a museum that can at least become a hub. No matter what the district says, we can do what we can do to invite our community, learn it, and do outreach to teach honest history.”
Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar and Chapel Lawn were some of the major recipients of the 2025 Grammy Awards.
Historians scrutinize the motivations for landfilling
Beyoncé’s recent album, Act II: Cowboy Carter, is played in a kind of American iconography. Many consider her way of filling up the adjoining of the country music genre and cowboy aesthetics for black Americans. Last year, she became the first black woman to top the Billboard country music charts, and “Cowboy Carter” won a Top Award at the 2025 Grammy Awards and Album of the Year.
“Buffalo soldiers play this major role in the ownership of black people in the American West,” said Tad Stormer, historian and professor at Johns Hopkins University. “In my view, (Beyoncé) is well aware of the role these images play: this is a ‘Cowboy Carter’ tour to scream out loud. The entire tour, the entire album, the entire production, is in this layered story. ”
However, Stoermer also points out that Buffalo soldiers are surrounded by American stories.
As Beyoncé’s use of images of Buffalo soldiers suggests, Black Americans use their stories to assert their role in the creation of the country, University of Pittsburgh historian, author and professor Alaina E. Roberts has studied studying the lives of blacks and Native Americans from the Civil War to today.
“That’s the category she probably thought she was in this conversation, but the Buffalo soldiers outweigh that because they were literally involved in a village in a sense of the West as well as in the genocide,” she said.
Online Backlash builds ahead of the Houston show
This week, several native influencers, performers and scholars joined social media to criticize Beyonce and denounce the shirt language as anti-Indigenous. “Do you think Beyoncé will apologise (or approve) the shirt?” Indigenous.TV, a news and culture Instagram account for Indigenous peoples with over 130,000 followers, asked in a post Thursday.
Many of her critics agree as well as their fans. A flood of social media posts called pop stars for historic framing of the shirt.
“The Buffalo soldiers are an interesting historic moment, but we have to be honest about what they did, especially in operations against Indigenous Americans and Mexicans,” said Chisom Okorafor, who posted to Tiktok under @ConfirmedSomaya.
Okolafo said there was no “progressive” way to regain the history of Western American empires, and that Beyoncé’s use of Western symbolism is sending a problematic message. “The black people can also engage in American nationalism.”
“Black people can also benefit from the atrocities of the American Empire,” she said. “This is a message to abandon immigrants, Indigenous people and those living outside the United States. It’s not only a virtue that was born in this country, but it’s a message that conveys that the longer your line grows in this country, the more integral you are.”
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