Beyoncé Under Fire For Wearing “Buffalo Soldiers” T-Shirt, Which Calls Native Americans “Enemies Of Peace” On The Back Of It

Beyonce

Who knew a t-shirt could make so many people so angry? Then again, it’s 2025… of course a t-shirt can make people angry. Nevertheless, it’s always funny when cancel culture comes for one of its own…

Currently, the artist who somehow won Best Country Album at the Grammys, despite her saying Cowboy Carter wasn’t a country music album, is in a little bit of hot water with her own fans. It’s safe to say that Beyoncé might have benefited from a deeper dive into the text on her Buffalo Soldiers shirt before deciding to wear it. Or at the very least, she could have avoided some of this controversy.

Now to be fair, Beyoncé was likely just trying to find a t-shirt that both supported African American history and her cowboy theming for her tour. Wearing Buffalo Soldiers attire seems like it would be an easy choice to knock out two birds with one stone, but the history of the first African Americans to serve in the United States military is a little bit complicated.

On one hand, the group from the late 1800s that fought alongside European settlers does deserve some recognition. The “problematic” portion of the Buffalo Soldiers stems from the fact that one of their sole jobs was to fight the Native America population. The Buffalo Soldiers were tasked with expanding out west, and stopping at nothing to do so. Though the military leaders that were giving them the orders would be as much to blame, they still were fighting in the American Indian Wars.

Beyoncé was likely just trying to shine a light on a diverse group that played a role in American history. If her shirt would have just featured the two words “Buffalo Soldiers” and image of those servicemen on horseback, this all may have been written off as a misunderstanding. But the t-shirt she wore also had a passage on the back, and portions of the text (including this excerpt below) explicitly described Native Americans as the enemies of peace, when all they were doing was trying to defend their respective homes:

“Their antagonists were the enemies of peace, order and settlement: warring Indians, bandits, cattle thieves, murderous gunmen, bootleggers, trespassers, and Mexican revolutionaries.”

History tells us that the African Americans that served as the Buffalo Soldiers (they were actually given that nickname by the Native Americans they were relocating to reservations) actually faced some moral conflicts with carrying out the orders to displace the people native to the land they were exploring. And while the Buffalo Soldiers weren’t necessarily villainous themselves, and likely deserve more recognition for the tough tasks they were given (often equipped with inferior supplies), the history and context in regards to displacing Native Americans makes the group’s legacy complicated, to say the least.

And that’s why some of Beyoncé’s own fans were responding to her t-shirt choice online like this:

“Not everything in Black history needs to be revered and turned into an aesthetic. The buffalo soldiers did awful things to indigenous people. The way she waves away their atrocities against indigenous people is gross. Beyoncé’s romanticism of this is beyond the pale.”

“Beyoncé is genuinely disgusting for that buffalo solider t-shirt and the villainizing of massacred indigenous people.”

“I love Beyoncé but wearing a shirt glorifying the buffalo soldiers at a moment of global military aggression and rising U.S. imperialism feels tone-deaf at best, and complicit at worst. You cannot uplift one marginalized group by ignoring the violence done to another.”

“This is one time I can’t defend Beyoncé. That buffalo soldiers shirt was just bad optics for the times right now.”

“Bey is one of my all time fav artists… I’m so upset. Why is she glorifying the genocide of indigenous Americans? Like the buffalo soldiers were used to ethnically cleanse indigenous people?”

“I’m side eyeing Beyonce for that buffalo soldiers shirt but I’ll still head to the concert next month. I really think diva was ignorant and didn’t know better, but Hive isn’t helping her case.”

Here’s her post in the shirt:

Here’s a very informational video on the somewhat perplexing history of the Buffalo Soldiers, in case you wanted to learn a little more about the historical servicemen: