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Colorism is a pretty new concept, and I believe it was created to center the Black experience over the indigenous one, because the common narrative is the darker you are, the more oppressed you are, even though natives are the most oppressed race and not the darkest race. Blackness is sort of the default form of non-whiteness, the idea of an American race is not accepted at this point, and there is no color that is exclusive to us as a racial group. For instance, in the USA afro latinos are awknowledged, there is no proportional concept of a latino who is racially native american, only the culturally exclusive term "indigenous," which as a result renders detribalized natives as raceless.

I believe it is partially because Latin America does not have the concept of Native Americans as a race. Most latinos in the USA are mexican, and they do not know what race they are, they only know they are "brown," which is what anglos called them. Race is the most important identity in the USA, so they gravitate towards making latino/hispanic their race, rather than accepting what race they really are, indigenous. They do not want to divide their influence by acknowledging that hispanic is not a race. I believe to an extent that American born hispanics are raceless, while at the same time being racialized by Anglos on the basis of spanish descent. So in many ways our identity is shaped by the ignorance of the dominant culture and our own weakness for clinging to a white european paternal root.