Black Indians are people of mixed African-American and Native American heritage, who have strong ties to Native American culture.[2] Many Indigenous peoples of the Eastern Woodlands, such as the Narragansett, Pequot, Lumbee and Cherokee have a significant number of African ancestors. Historically, certain Native American tribes have had close relations with African Americans, especially in regions where slavery was prevalent, or where free people of color have historically resided. Members of the Five Civilized Tribes participated in enslaving Africans, and some Africans migrated with them to the West on the Trail of Tears in 1830 and later. In peace treaties with the US after the American Civil War, the slaveholding tribes, which had sided with the Confederacy, were required to emancipate slaves and give them full citizenship rights in their nations. The Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole have created controversy in recent decades as they tightened rules for membership in their nations and excluded Freedmen who did not have at least one Native American ancestor on the early 20th-century Dawes Rolls. The Chickasaw Nation never extended citizenship to Chickasaw Freedmen.[3]
Overview
Until recently, historic relations between Native Americans and African Americans were relatively neglected in mainstream United States history studies.[4] At various times, Africans had varying degrees of contact with Native Americans, although they did not live together in as great number as with Europeans. African slaves brought to the United States and their descendants have had a history of cultural exchange and intermarriage with Native Americans, as well as with other enslaved people who possessed Native American and European ancestry. Most interaction took place in the Southern United States, where the largest number of people were enslaved.[5] A significant number of African Americans thus have some Native American ancestry, although not all have current social, cultural or linguistic ties to Native peoples.[6] Relationships among different Native Americans, Africans, and African Americans have been varied and complex. Some groups were more accepting of Africans than others and welcomed them as full members of their respective cultures and communities. Native peoples often disagreed about the role of ethnic African people in their communities. Other Native Americans saw uses for slavery and did not oppose it for others. After the American Civil War some African Americans became members of the US Army and fought against the Native Americans, especially in the Western frontier states. Their military units became known as the Buffalo Soldiers. Black Seminole in particular were recruited and worked as Native American scouts for the Army. On the other hand, other Native Americans and people of African descent fought alongside one another in armed struggles of resistance against U.S. expansion into Native territories, as in the Seminole Wars in Florida.
History
Colonial America
Records of contacts between Africans and Native Americans date back to April 1502, when the first enslaved African arrived in Hispaniola. Some Africans escaped inland from the colony of Santo Domingo; those who survived and joined with the natives became the first circle of Black Indians.[7][8] In the lands which later became part of the United States of America, the first recorded example of an African slave escaping from European colonists and being absorbed by Native Americans dates to 1526. In June of that year, Lucas Vasquez de Ayllón established a Spanish colony near the mouth of the Pee Dee River in present-day South Carolina. The Spanish settlement was named San Miguel de Gualdape; its inhabitants included 100 enslaved Africans. In 1526 the first enslaved African fled the colony and took refuge with local Native Americans.[8] Pueblo peoples had contact with the Moroccan slave Esteban de Dorantes in 1534 before any European contact. As part of the Spanish Pánfilo de Narváez expedition, Esteban traveled from Florida in 1528 to what is now New Mexico in 1539, when he is thought have been killed by Zunis.[9] Intermarriage between enslaved African and Native Americans began in the early 17th century in the coastal settlements[which?].[10][dead link] In 1622 Native Americans attempted to overrun the European colony of Jamestown. They killed the Europeans but brought the African slaves as captives back to their own communities, gradually integrating them.[11] Interracial relationships occurred between African Americans and members of other tribes in the coastal states.[10] Several colonial advertisements for runaway slaves made direct reference to the connections which Africans had in Native American communities. "Reward notices in colonial newspapers now told of African slaves who 'ran off with his Indian wife' or 'had kin among the Indians' or is 'part-Indian and speaks their language good.'"[12][13] Colonists in South Carolina felt so concerned about the possible threat posed by the mixed African and Native American population (arising due to runaways) that they passed a new law in 1725. This law stipulated a fine of 200 pounds for persons bringing a slave to the frontier regions. In 1751 South Carolina passed a law against holding Africans in proximity to Native Americans, which was deemed[by whom?] detrimental to the security of the colony. South Carolina under Governor James Glen (in office 1743-1756) promoted an official policy that aimed to create in Native Americans an "aversion" to African Americans in an attempt to thwart possible alliances between them.[14][15] In 1726 the British governor of colonial New York exacted a promise from the Iroquois Confederacy to return all runaway slaves. He required the same from the Huron tribe in 1764 and from the Delaware tribe in 1765.[11] Despite their agreements, the tribes never returned any escaped slaves[11] - they continued to provide a safe refuge for escapees. In 1763, during Pontiac's War, a Detroit resident reported that Native Americans killed whites but were "saving and caressing all the Negroes they take". He worried lest this might "produce an insurrection". Chief Joseph Brant's Mohawk in New York welcomed runaway slaves and encouraged adoption of them into the tribe and intermarriage.[11] The Native American adoption systems knew no color line.[11] Carter G. Woodson's notion of an escape hatch from slavery proved correct: Native American villages welcomed fugitive slaves and some served as stations on the Underground Railroad. Diana Fletcher (Black Seminole, b. 1838), adopted into the Kiowa tribe. Her father was African American, and her mother was Seminole. Her stepfamily was Kiowa.
During the transitional period of Africans' becoming the primary race enslaved, Native Americans were sometimes enslaved at the same time. Africans and Native Americans worked together, lived together in communal quarters, produced collective recipes for food, and shared herbal remedies, myths and legends.[citation needed] Some intermarried and had mixed-race children.[17] Ads asked for the return of both African American and Native American slaves. Some Native Americans resented the presence of Africans.[18] In one account, the "Catawaba [sic] tribe in 1752 showed great anger and bitter resentment when an African American came among them as a trader."[18] Europeans and European-Americans actively tried to divide Native Americans and African Americans against each other. "Whites sought to convince Native Americans that African Americans worked against their best interests."[19] Europeans considered both races inferior and made efforts to make Native Americans and Africans enemies.[20] Native Americans received rewards if they returned escaped slaves, and African Americans received rewards for fighting in Indian Wars.[20][21][22] European colonists told the Cherokee that the smallpox epidemic of 1739 was due to disease brought by African slaves, to create tension between the groups.[23] The British tried to restrict contact between Africans and Native Americans. They feared Native Americans taking enslaved Africans as spouses and tried to discourage trade between the groups. The British also passed laws prohibiting the carrying of slaves into the frontier of the Cherokee Nation's territory to restrict interactions between the two groups.[23] Some tribes were said[by whom?] to encourage marriage between the two groups, to create stronger children from the unions.[24] Among the Cherokee, interracial marriages increased as the number of slaves held by the tribe increased.[23] The Cherokee had a reputation for having slaves work side by side with their owners.[23] Resisting the Euro-American system of chattel slavery created tensions between the Cherokee and European Americans.[23] The Cherokee tribe began to become divided; as intermarriage between white men and native women increased and there was increased adoption of European culture, so did racial discrimination against those of African-Cherokee blood and against African slaves.[23] Cultural assimilation among the tribes, particularly the Cherokee, created pressure to be accepted by European Americans.[23] In 1758 the governor of South Carolina James Glen stated:
It has always been the policy of this government to create an aversion in them Indians to Negroes.[23]
n the 18th century, some Native American women turned to freed or runaway African men due to a major decline in the male population in Native American villages. At the same time, the early enslaved African population was disproportionately male. Records show that some Native American women bought African men as slaves. Unknown to European sellers, the women freed and married the men into their tribe. Some African men chose Native American women as their partners because their children would be free, as the child's status followed that of the mother. The men could marry into some of the matrilineal tribes and become accepted, as their children were considered to belong to the mother's people. As European expansion increased in the Southeast, African and Native American marriages became more numerous.[20]
1800s through Civil War
In the early 19th century, the US government believed that some tribes had become extinct, especially on the East Coast and those without reservations.[25] It did not have a separate census designation for Native Americans. Those who remained among the European-American communities were frequently listed as mulatto, a term applied to Native American-white, Native American-African, and African-white mixed-race people, as well as tri-racial people.[25] The Seminole people of Florida formed in the 18th century, in what is called ethnogenesis, from Muscogee (Creek) and Florida tribes. They incorporated some Africans who had escaped from slavery. Other maroons formed separate communities near the Seminole, and were allied with them in military actions. Much intermarriage took place. African Americans living near the Seminole were called Black Seminoles. Several hundred people of African descent traveled with the Seminole when they were removed to Indian Territory. Others stayed with a few hundred Seminole in Florida. By contrast, an 1835 census of the Cherokee showed that 10% were of African descent.[13] In those years, censuses of the tribes classified people of mixed Native American and African descent as "Native American".[26] By contrast, during the registration for the Dawes Rolls, generally Cherokee Freedmen were classified separately on a Freedmen roll, even if individuals had Cherokee ancestry and qualified as "Cherokee by blood." This has caused problems for their descendants in the late 20th and 21st-century, as the Nation has passed legislation and a constitutional amendment to make membership more restrictive, open only to those with certificates of blood ancestry (CDIB). Western frontier artist George Catlin described "Negro and North American Indian, mixed, of equal blood" and stated they were "the finest built and most powerful men I have ever yet seen."[11] By 1922 John Swanton's survey of the Five Civilized Tribes noted that half the Cherokee Nation were Freedmen and their descendants. Former slaves and Native Americans intermarried in northern states as well. Massachusetts Vital Records prior to 1850 included notes of "Marriages of 'negroes' to Indians". By 1860 in some areas of the South, Native Americans were believed to have intermarried with African Americans to such an extent that white legislators thought the Native Americans no longer qualified as "Native American," as they were not paying attention to culture but only race. Legislators wanted to revoke their tax exemptions.[11] Freed African Americans, Black Indians, and some Native Americans fought in the American Civil War against the Confederate Army. During November 1861, the Muscogee Creek and Black Indians, led by Creek Chief Opothleyahola, fought three pitched battles against Confederate whites and allied Native Americans to reach Union lines in Kansas and offer their services.[11] Some Black Indians served in colored regiments with other African American soldiers.[27] Black Indians were documented in the following regiments: The 1st Kansas Colored Infantry, the Kansas Colored at Honey Springs, the 79th US Colored Infantry, and the 83rd US Colored Infantry, along with other colored regiments that included men listed as Negro.[27] Civil War battles occurred in Indian Territory.[28] The first battle in Indian Territory took place July 1 and 2 in 1863, and involved the 1st Kansas Colored Infantry.[28] The first battle against the Confederacy outside Indian Territory occurred at Horse Head Creek, Arkansas on February 17, 1864. The 79th US Colored Infantry participated.[28] Many Black Indians returned to Indian Territory once the Civil War had been won by the Union.[27] When the Confederacy and its Native American allies were defeated, the US required new peace treaties with the Five Civilized Tribes, including provisions to emancipate slaves and make them full citizens of their nations, with equal rights in annuities and land allotments. The former slaves were called "Freedmen," as in Cherokee Freedmen, Chickasaw Freedmen, Choctaw Freedmen, Creek Freedmen and Seminole Freedmen. The pro-Union Cherokee government had freed their slaves in 1863, before the end of the war, but the pro-Confederacy Cherokee kept hold of the slaves until later.[11][29]
Native American slave ownership
Slavery existed among Native Americans before it was introduced by the Europeans, although it was unlike chattel slavery where slaves become the personal property of a master. In oral tradition, for instance, Cherokees recounted people being enslaved as the result of failure in warfare, and as a temporary status pending adoption or release.[30] As the United States Constitution and the laws of several states permitted slavery, Native Americans were legally allowed to own slaves, including those brought from Africa by Europeans. Benjamin Hawkins was the federal agent assigned to the southeastern tribes in the 1790s and advised the tribes to take up slaveholding.[23] The Cherokee tribe had the most members who held black slaves, more than any other Native American nation.[31] In colonial North America, the first exposure that Africans and Native Americans had to each other came from Africans being imported as laborers, both indentured servants and as slaves.[10] Records from the slavery period show several cases of brutal Native American treatment of black slaves. However, most Native American masters rejected the worst features of Southern practices.[11] Federal Agent Hawkins considered the form of slavery the tribes were practicing to be inefficient because the majority didn't practice chattel slavery.[23] Travelers reported enslaved Africans "in as good circumstances as their masters." A white Indian Agent, Douglas Cooper, upset by the Native American failure to practice more severe rules, insisted that Native Americans invite white men to live in their villages and "control matters."[11] Though less than 3% of Native Americans owned slaves, racial bondage and pressure from European-American culture created destructive cleavages in their villages. Many had a class hierarchy based on "white blood."[11] Native Americans of mixed white blood stood at the top, "pure" Native Americans next, and people of African descent were at the bottom.[11] As among mixed-race African Americans, some of the status of white descent may also have been related to the economic and social capital passed on by white relations. Numerous people of African descent were held as slaves by members of Native groups up until the Civil War. Some later recounted their lives for a WPA oral history project during the Great Depression in the 1930s.[32]
Native American Freedmen Members of the Creek (Muscogee) Nation in Oklahoma around 1877. Note mixed European, African and Native American ancestry. L to R, Lochar Harjo, principal chief; unidentified man, John McGilvry, and Silas Jefferson or Hotulko micco (Chief of the Whirlwind). The latter two were interpreters and negotiators.[33]
After the Civil War in 1866, the United States government required new treaties with the Five Civilized Tribes, who each had factions allied with the Confederacy. They were required to emancipate their slaves and grant them citizenship and membership in the respective tribes, as the United States freed slaves and granted them citizenship by amendments to the US Constitution. These people were known as "Freedmen," for instance, Muscogee or Cherokee Freedmen. Similarly, the Cherokee were required to reinstate membership for the Delaware, who had earlier been given land on their reservation, but fought for the Union during the war.[34] Many of the Freedmen played active political roles in their tribal nations over the ensuing decades, including roles as interpreters and negotiators with the federal government. African Muscogee men, such as Harry Island and Silas Jefferson, helped secure land for their people when the government decided to make individual allotments to tribal members under the Dawes Act. Some Maroon communities allied with the Seminole in Florida and intermarried. The Black Seminole included those with and without Native American ancestry. When the Cherokee Nation drafted its constitution in 1975, enrollment was limited to descendents of people listed on the Dawes "Cherokee By Blood" rolls. On the Dawes Rolls, US government agents had classified people as Cherokee by blood, intermarried whites, and Cherokee Freedmen, regardless of whether the latter had Cherokee ancestry qualifying them as Cherokee by blood. The Shawnee and Delaware gained their own federal recognition as the Delaware Tribe of Indians and the Shawnee Tribe. A political struggle over this issue has ensued since the 1970s. Cherokee Freedmen have taken cases to the Cherokee Supreme Court. The Cherokee later reinstated the rights of Delaware to be considered members of the Cherokee, but opposed their bid for independent federal recognition.[34] The Cherokee Nation Supreme Court ruled on March 2006 that Cherokee Freedmen were eligible for tribal enrollment. In 2007, leaders of the Cherokee Nation held a special election to amend their constitution to restrict requirements for citizenship in the tribe. The referendum established direct Cherokee ancestry as a requirement. The measure passed in March 2007, thereby forcing out Cherokee Freedmen and their descendants unless they also had documented, direct "Cherokee by blood" ancestry. This has caused much controversy.[35] The tribe has determined to limit membership only to those who can demonstrate Native American descent based on listing on the Dawes Rolls.[36] Similarly, the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma moved to exclude Seminole Freedmen from membership. In 1990 it received $56 million from the US government as reparations for lands taken in Florida. Because the judgment trust was based on tribal membership as of 1823, it excluded Seminole Freedmen, as well as Black Seminoles who held land next to Seminole communities. In 2000 the Seminole chief moved to formally exclude Black Seminoles unless they could prove descent from a Native American ancestor on the Dawes Rolls. 2,000 Black Seminoles were excluded from the nation.[37] Descendants of Freedmen and Black Seminoles are working to secure their rights.
"There's never been any stigma about intermarriage," says Stu Phillips, editor of The Seminole Producer, a local newspaper in central Oklahoma. "You've got Indians marrying whites, Indians marrying blacks. It was never a problem until they got some money."
An advocacy group representing descendants of Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes claims that members are entitled to be citizens in both the Seminole and Cherokee Nations, as many are indeed part Native American by blood, with records to prove it. Because of racial discrimination, their ancestors were classified and listed incorrectly, under only the category of Freedmen, at the time of the Dawes Rolls. In addition, the group notes that post-Civil War treaties of these tribes with the US government required they give African Americans full citizenship upon emancipation, regardless of blood quantum. In many cases, Native American descent has been difficult for people to trace from historical records.[38] Over 25,000 Freedmen descendants of the Five Civilized Tribes may be affected by the legal controversies.[37] The Dawes Commission enrollment records, intended to establish rolls of tribal members for land allocation purposes, were done under rushed conditions by a variety of recorders. Many tended to exclude Freedmen from Cherokee rolls and enter them separately, even when they claimed Cherokee descent, had records of it, and had Cherokee physical features. Descendants of Freedmen see the tribe's contemporary reliance on the Dawes Rolls as a racially based way to exclude them from citizenship.[39][40] Before the Dawes Commission was established,
"(t)he majority of the people with African blood living in the Cherokee nation prior to the Civil war lived there as slaves of Cherokee citizens or as free black non-citizens, usually the descendants of Cherokee men and women with African blood....In 1863, the Cherokee government outlawed slavery through acts of the tribal council. In 1866, a treaty was signed with the US government in which the Cherokee government agreed to give citizenship to those people with African blood living in the Cherokee nations who were not already citizens. African Cherokee people participated as full citizens of that nation, holding office, voting, running businesses, etc."[41]
After the Dawes Commission established tribal rolls, in some cases Freedmen of the Cherokee and the other Five Civilized Tribes were treated more harshly. Degrees of continued acceptance into tribal structures were low during the ensuing decades. Some tribes restricted membership to those with a documented Native ancestor on the Dawes Commission listings, and many restricted officeholders to those of direct Native American ancestry. In the later 20th century, it was difficult for Black Native Americans to establish official ties with Native groups to which they genetically belonged. Many Freedmen descendants believe that their exclusion from tribal membership, and the resistance to their efforts to gain recognition, are racially motivated and based on the tribe's wanting to preserve the new gambling revenues for fewer people.[34][42]
Geneology
Tracing the genealogy of African Americans and Native Americans is a difficult process. Enslaved Africans were renamed by slaveholders and surnames were infrequently used until after the war. Historical records, such as censuses, did not record the names of enslaved blacks before the American Civil War. Some major slaveholders kept extensive records which historians and genealogists have used to create family trees, but generally researchers find it difficult to trace families before the Civil War. Slaves were forbidden to learn to read and write. A majority of Native Americans did not speak English, let alone read or write it.[4] In some cases elder family members may withhold information about Native American heritage.[4] However, knowing the family's geographic origins is a key factor in helping individuals unravel Native American ancestry.[4] Many modern African Americans have taken an interest in genealogy and are learning about Native American heritage within their individual families. Some African Americans may work from oral history of the family and try to confirm stories of Native ancestry through genealogical research and DNA testing. Because of such findings, some have petitioned to be registered as members of Native American tribes. Each tribe establishes its own criteria for membership. Most do not accept DNA tests as proof, especially since these cannot distinguish among the tribes. DNA testing and research has provided more facts about the extent of Native American ancestry among African Americans, which varies in the general population. As Harvard University historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr. wrote in 2009,
"Here are the facts: Only 5 percent of all black Americans have at least 12.5 percent Native American ancestry, the equivalent of at least one great-grandparent. Those 'high cheek bones' and 'straight black hair' your relatives brag about at every family reunion and holiday meal since you were 2 years old? Where did they come from? To paraphrase a well-known French saying, “Seek the white man.” African Americans, just like our first lady, are a racially mixed or mulatto people—deeply and overwhelmingly so. Fact: Fully 58 percent of African American people, according to geneticist Mark Shriver at Morehouse College, possess at least 12.5 percent European ancestry (again, the equivalent of that one great-grandparent). George Bonga (1802–1880), "Black" fur trader L to R: Mrs. Amos Chapman, her daughter, sister (all Southern Cheyenne, and an unidentified girl of African American descent. 1886[43]
In contradiction to Gates statement The Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolonialism (IPCB) notes that:
"Native American markers" are not found solely among Native Americans. While they occur more frequently among Native Americans they are also found in people in other parts of the world.[45]
Geneticists also state:
not all Native Americans have been tested especially with the large number of deaths due to disease such as small pox, it is unlikely that Native Americans only have the genetic markers they have identified, even when their maternal or paternal bloodline does not include a non-Native American.[46][47]
It should be noted that most statisticians would not necessarily view the IPCB and Geneticists remarks directly above as preventing a sound analysis of genomic contributions from various continents to the make-up of an admixed individual. In general, these analyses are not based on the presence of markers, single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), that the sophisticated analyst would describe as African, Asian, European, or Amerind. Peeking under the hood, one would see that autosomal analysis, as opposed to mtDNA and Y-chromosome analysis discussed below, is based on the relative distribution of the SNPs in these populations coupled with their distribution in the genome being analyzed. Techniques such as maximum likelihood estimation and Bayesian re-estimation provide instruments for assessing ancestry, which also assign a level of confidence to the estimate. Relatively small segments of the genome can be analyzed with these techniques, which are well established, having been applied with great effect in many other areas. The two common types of tests used are Y-chromosome and mtDNA (mitochondrial DNA) testing. The tests processes for direct-line male and female ancestors. Each follows only one line among many ancestors and thus can fail to identify others. Some critics thought the PBS series did not sufficiently explain the limitations of DNA testing for assessment of heritage.[46][47][47] In addition, while full testing may tell an individual if he or she has some Native American ancestry, it cannot distinguish among separate Native American tribes.[48] African Americans are using DNA testing to find out more about all their ancestry. Native American identity has historically been based on culture, not just biology. Autosomal DNA tests survey all the DNA that has been inherited from the parents of an individual.[49] Autosomal tests focus on SNPs, which might of course be found in Africans, Asians, and people from every other part of the world.[49] DNA testing will not determine an individual's full ancestry with absolute certitude.[49]
Notable "Black" Indians
Historic
Crispus Attucks (1723-1770) Wampanoag-African, slave, dockworker, merchant seaman, icon in the anti slavery movement, first casualty of the Boston Massacre and the American Revolutionary War. Joseph Louis Cook, a Colonel in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War. Edmonia Lewis (1845–1911), Ojibwe, African American and Haitian sculptor[50] William Apess (1798–1839), "Black" Pequot Methodist minister and author. John Horse (Juan Caballo) (1812–1882), African-Seminole war leader in Florida, also leader of African-Seminole in Mexico. Charlie Patton (1887–1934), African-Cherokee American and founding father of the blues in the Mississippi Delta. George Bonga (1802–1880), African-Ojibwe fur trader and interpreter in what is now Minnesota, son of trader and interpreter Pierre Bonga. Marguerite Scypion (ca. 1770s—after 1836), African-Natchez slave who won her freedom in court. Illinois Jacquet (October 31, 1922 – July 22, 2004) was an American jazz tenor saxophonist, best remembered for his solo on "Flying Home", critically recognized as the first R&B saxophone solo.
Contemporary
Martha Redbone, Native American Music Award-winning soul music of Shawnee, Choctaw and African American ancestry[51] Radmilla Cody, 46th Miss Navajo Nation (1998), traditional singer, enrolled member of the Navajo Nation with ancestry, and advocate against domestic violence in both the Navajo Nation and the state of Arizona. France Winddance Twine (born 1960) enrolled Muscogee (Creek) Nation sociologist.[52]
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posted
The Katz book is a great report about the Africans who joined the mongoloid Indian nations but it does not tell us the entire history of the Black Indians.
This is just another European attempt at defining who was who in history and perpetuating the lie Black people have always been slaves. It tells a myth that Black people went from being the slaves of Europeans, to being the slaves of mongoloid Indians.
My new book: We are not JUST Africans , tell the actual history of the Black Indians from prehistory to the Emancipation.
posted
Asymmetric Male and Female Genetic Histories among Native Americans from Eastern North America
Deborah A. Bolnick*, Daniel I. Bolnick† and David Glenn Smith‡§
*Department of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin †Section of Integrative Biology, University of Texas at Austin ‡National Primate Research Center, University of California, Davis §Department of Anthropology, University of California, Davis
Abstract
Previous studies have investigated the human population history of eastern North America by examining mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) variation among Native Americans, but these studies could only reconstruct maternal population history. To evaluate similarities and differences in the maternal and paternal population histories of this region, we obtained DNA samples from 605 individuals, representing 16 indigenous populations. After amplifying the amelogenin locus to identify males, we genotyped 8 binary polymorphisms and 10 microsatellites in the male-specific region of the Y chromosome. This analysis identified 6 haplogroups and 175 haplotypes. We found that sociocultural factors have played a more important role than language or geography in shaping the patterns of Y chromosome variation in eastern North America. Comparisons with previous mtDNA studies of the same samples demonstrate that male and female demographic histories differ substantially in this region. Postmarital residence patterns have strongly influenced genetic structure, with patrilocal and matrilocal populations showing different patterns of male and female gene flow. European contact also had a significant but sex-specific impact due to a high level of male-mediated European admixture. Finally, this study addresses long-standing questions about the history of Iroquoian populations by suggesting that the ancestral Iroquoian population lived in southeastern North America.
Results
Y Chromosome Haplogroups
Of the 605 samples examined, 261 males and 344 females were identified. Twenty-four male samples contained insufficient quantities of DNA for further analysis, so we analyzed 237 Y chromosomes. We identified 6 of the 7 possible haplogroups, with 37 individuals falling into the “Other” category. The remaining 200 individuals represent 59 members of haplogroup Q-M3*, 39 of Q-M242*, 15 of C-M130, 80 of R-M173, 3 of P-M45*, and 4 of DE-YAP. Haplogroup frequencies for all eastern North American populations are given in table 1, and haplogroup diversities (h) are given in table 2. The Northeast exhibits significantly higher levels of haplogroup diversity than the Southeast (P < 0.001).
Four haplogroups occur at frequencies greater than 5% [Q-M3* = 23.5%, Q-M242* = 21.0%, C-M130 = 7.8%, and R-M173 = 31.0%], and together they comprise 83.3% of the eastern North American sample. Haplogroup R-M173 likely represents recent [post-1492] European admixture, as may P-M45* [Tarazona-Santos and Santos 2002; Bosch et al. 2003; Zegura et al. 2004]. Y chromosomes belonging to haplogroup DE-YAP probably result from recent admixture with individuals of African or European ancestry [Karafet et al. 1999; Lell et al. 2002]. Following Bosch et al. [2003], these findings suggest that at least 34.2 ± 3% of eastern North American Y chromosomes result from recent admixture. This figure may actually be as high as 47.7 ± 3%, if the 37 “Other” Y chromosomes represent additional European or African lineages rather than previously unidentified founding Native American lineages. Admixture estimates for the Northeast [36.6–52.5% depending on whether the “Other” lineages represent admixture] are higher than those for the Southeast [29.6–38.8%] due to extremely high estimates for 2 of the Chippewa populations [56.9–94.1% for the Turtle Mountain Chippewa and 56.8–78.4% for the Wisconsin Chippewa].
posted
There were five major migrations of Blacks into the Americas. The First, were probably Australian type Blacks who settled Brazil 100,000 years ago. The second group of Blacks to enter the Western Hemisphere were the Khoisan, they arrived in South America 30-45,000 years ago. By 15,000 BC, the Khoisan had introduced the Solutrean culture to North America. The Khoisan were followed by the Anu, or pgymy people after 10,000 BC. Other Africans made numerous migrations to America beginning around 2000 BC. Finally, during the Atlantic slave trade millions of Blacks were taken to the Americas by European slavers.
There is plenty of genetic evidence of an African presence in the Americas. First of all, you have to get away from the idea that Blacks left Africa only around 60kya. There were other migrations out of Africa. For example, the Khoisan who founded the Grimaldi/ Aurignacian culture in Europe left Africa around 40kya, and the Pygmy people who were usually referred to as the Anu, left Africa between 20-15kya. The pgymy people, as evidence of their presence on every continent had an extensive civilization in the past, eventhough , they are hunter-gatherers today.
There is no way the first Americans could have come from Asia, because the Beringa passage between Asia and the American continent did not become passable until after 12kya. But as early as 40kya there were American comunities in South America. I believe the first Africans to settle America were the Khoisan. The San would have carried the mtDNA haplogroup N into the Americas. The major American lineages A,B,C, are all descendent from haplogroup (hg) N.
The mtDNA haplogroups A2,B2 and X2a are daughter clades of N. Since hg N is carried by the Khoisan, this suggest an early presence of this population in the Americas, and supports an early expansion into the Americas.
The Khoisan was the first anatomically modern human population to settle Mexico and South America.
By 15kya we have a new population arriving in the Americas the Anu or pygmy people. There were numerous pygmy communities in South America.These pygmies probably were the first to introduce y-haplogroup R1b into the Americas. Other West African groups brought R1b and mtDNA N into the Americas between 2000BC and 1300 AD.
The presence of y-haplogroup R1b and the lineages descendenting from hg N is testimony to the Pre-Columbian presence of Blacks in the Americas.
The foundational mtDNA lineages for Mexican Indians are lineages A, B, C and D.The frequencies of these lineages vary among population groups. For example, whereas lineages A,B and C were present among Maya at Quintana Roo, Maya at Copan lacked lineages A and B . This supports Carolina Bonilla et al view that heterogeneity is a major characteristic of Mexican population . It is interesting to note that the speakers of the Mixe and Mande languages share many linguistic features and mtDNA haplogroup A.
The presence of mtDNA haplogroup A among Native Americans does not mean Africans may have been representatives of the population from which Luzia originated. Haplogroup A is found among Mixe and Mixtecs .
The mtDNA A haplogroup common to Native Americans is also found among the Mande speaking people and some East Africans .The Mande speakers carry mtDNA haplogroup A, which is common among Mexicans . In addition to the Mande speaking people of West Africa, Southeast Africa Africans also carry mtDNA haplogroup A . The Gullah people of North Carolina also carry haplogroups A and B .
African ancestry has been found among indigenous groups that have had no historical contact with African slaves and thus support an African presence in America, already indicated by the skeletons of the first African Americans, e.g., Luizia, Eva Nahron and the Olmec people. Luiza may have been of Khoisan origin, while Eva Nahron would probably date to the Anu expansion into the Americas.
Lisker et al, noted that “The variation of Indian ancestry among the studied Indians shows in general a higher proportion in the more isolated groups, except for the Cora, who are as isolated as the Huichol and have not only a lower frequency but also a certain degree of black admixture. The black admixture is difficult to explain because the Cora reside in a mountainous region away from the west coast” .
Green et al (2000) also found Indians with African genes in North Central Mexico, including the L1 and L2 clusters. Green et al (2000) observed that the discovery of a proportion of African haplotypes roughly equivalent to the proportion of European haplotypes [among North Central Mexican Indians] cannot be explained by recent admixture of African Americans for the United States. This is especially the case for the Ojinaga area, which presently is, and historically has been largely isolated from U.S. African Americans. In the Ojinaga sample set, the frequency of African haplotypes was higher that that of European hyplotypes”.
Amerindians carry the X hg. Amerindians and Europeans hg X are different (Person, 2004). Haplogroup X has also been found throughout Africa . Shimada et al , believes that X(hX) is of African origin. Amerindian X is different from European hg X, skeletons from Brazil dating between 400-7000 BP have the transition np 16223 . Transition np 16223 is characteristic of African haplogroups. This suggest that Africans may have taken the X hg to the Americas in ancient times.
Underhill, et al (1996) noted that:" One Mayan male, previously [has been] shown to have an African Y chromosome." This is very interesting because the Maya language illustrates a Mande substratum, in addition to African genetic markers. James l. Gutherie in a study of the HLAs in indigenous American populations, found that the Vantigen of the Rhesus system, considered to be an indication of African ancestry, among Indians in Belize and Mexico centers of Mayan civilization . Dr. Gutherie also noted that A*28 common among Africans has high frequencies among Eastern Maya. It is interesting to note that the Otomi, a Mexican group identified as being of African origin and six Mayan groups show the B Allele of the ABO system that is considered to be of African origin.
Native Americans carry a high frequency of R-M173 . The most predominate y-chromosome in North America is R-M173. R-M173 is found only in the Northeastern United States along with mtDNA haplogroup X (25%). Both haplogroups are found in Africa, but is absent in Siberia.
There are varying frequencies of y-chromosome M-173 in Africa and Eurasia. Whereas only between 8% and 10% of M-173 is carried by Eurasians, 82% of the carriers of this y-chromosome are found in Africa.
This is very interesting given the presence on R-M173 is found among many American Indian groups (1-2, 12-14). R-M173 among the North American Algonquian group range from Ojibwe (79%), Chipewyan (62%), Seminole (50%), Cherokee (47%), Dogrib (40%) and Papago (38%) . These Indian groups hav a long association with Africans and many live in areas were Europeans found Black Native Americans.
Another interesting y-chromosome found in the Americas is haplogroup A1, common to many sub-Saharan Africans including the Pygmy/Anu people. Y-chromosome A1 is recognized as an African haplogroup. Ancient y-chromosome date was succesfully recovered from 24 skeletal samples of a total of 60 ancient individuals from Patagonia-Tierra del Fuego, dated to 100-400 years. Y-chromosome STRs (DYS434, DYS437, DYS439, DYS393, DYS391, DYS390, DYS19, DYS389I, DYS389II, and DYS388) . These Y-STR alleles are associated with African y-chromosomes .
It is obvious from the above that most Native American R lineages are not R-M269. And even you note that they are majority R-M173. This makes your entire argument bogus.
The fact remains that Khoisan, Pgymy , Fulani and etc., carry M269. This indicates that this y-chromosome was widespread in Africa.
It would have been easy for Africans to pass on R-M173 to Native Americas. They could have done this because many carriers of R-M173 were probably brought to America in the early days of Slavery.In fact most of the Black Native Americans who lived in the South and Northeast established communities before 1799, some as early as the 1500's in the Carolinas and Florida.
The year 1799 is an important date for Afro-Americans. It was after this date that the InterState Slavetrade began. During this slave trade the average slave was sold to another plantation and/or part of the United States by the age of five (5). This meant a lot of intramarriage This Interstate slave trade made the Afro-American population more "homogenous" than the pre-1799 population. It was during this period that the number of Afro-Americans carrying R-M173 probably declined.
Eventhough the Interstate slave trade probably made the Afro-American population more "homogenous" today around 14.30% Afro-Americans carry R-M269.
Finally there was never extensive intermarriage between Northeastern Native Americans and Europeans so they can not account for the spread of R-M173 among Native Americans .
In conclusion, the presence of mtDNA hg N and A; and the Y-chromosome hg R1b and A1, testify to the ancient African presence in the Americas.
-------------------- C. A. Winters Posts: 13012 | From: Chicago | Registered: Jan 2006
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quote:Originally posted by Mike111: Asymmetric Male and Female Genetic Histories among Native Americans from Eastern North America
Deborah A. Bolnick*, Daniel I. Bolnick† and David Glenn Smith‡§
*Department of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin †Section of Integrative Biology, University of Texas at Austin ‡National Primate Research Center, University of California, Davis §Department of Anthropology, University of California, Davis
Abstract
Previous studies have investigated the human population history of eastern North America by examining mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) variation among Native Americans, but these studies could only reconstruct maternal population history. To evaluate similarities and differences in the maternal and paternal population histories of this region, we obtained DNA samples from 605 individuals, representing 16 indigenous populations. After amplifying the amelogenin locus to identify males, we genotyped 8 binary polymorphisms and 10 microsatellites in the male-specific region of the Y chromosome. This analysis identified 6 haplogroups and 175 haplotypes. We found that sociocultural factors have played a more important role than language or geography in shaping the patterns of Y chromosome variation in eastern North America. Comparisons with previous mtDNA studies of the same samples demonstrate that male and female demographic histories differ substantially in this region. Postmarital residence patterns have strongly influenced genetic structure, with patrilocal and matrilocal populations showing different patterns of male and female gene flow. European contact also had a significant but sex-specific impact due to a high level of male-mediated European admixture. Finally, this study addresses long-standing questions about the history of Iroquoian populations by suggesting that the ancestral Iroquoian population lived in southeastern North America.
Results
Y Chromosome Haplogroups
Of the 605 samples examined, 261 males and 344 females were identified. Twenty-four male samples contained insufficient quantities of DNA for further analysis, so we analyzed 237 Y chromosomes. We identified 6 of the 7 possible haplogroups, with 37 individuals falling into the “Other” category. The remaining 200 individuals represent 59 members of haplogroup Q-M3*, 39 of Q-M242*, 15 of C-M130, 80 of R-M173, 3 of P-M45*, and 4 of DE-YAP. Haplogroup frequencies for all eastern North American populations are given in table 1, and haplogroup diversities (h) are given in table 2. The Northeast exhibits significantly higher levels of haplogroup diversity than the Southeast (P < 0.001).
Four haplogroups occur at frequencies greater than 5% [Q-M3* = 23.5%, Q-M242* = 21.0%, C-M130 = 7.8%, and R-M173 = 31.0%], and together they comprise 83.3% of the eastern North American sample. Haplogroup R-M173 likely represents recent [post-1492] European admixture, as may P-M45* [Tarazona-Santos and Santos 2002; Bosch et al. 2003; Zegura et al. 2004]. Y chromosomes belonging to haplogroup DE-YAP probably result from recent admixture with individuals of African or European ancestry [Karafet et al. 1999; Lell et al. 2002]. Following Bosch et al. [2003], these findings suggest that at least 34.2 ± 3% of eastern North American Y chromosomes result from recent admixture. This figure may actually be as high as 47.7 ± 3%, if the 37 “Other” Y chromosomes represent additional European or African lineages rather than previously unidentified founding Native American lineages. Admixture estimates for the Northeast [36.6–52.5% depending on whether the “Other” lineages represent admixture] are higher than those for the Southeast [29.6–38.8%] due to extremely high estimates for 2 of the Chippewa populations [56.9–94.1% for the Turtle Mountain Chippewa and 56.8–78.4% for the Wisconsin Chippewa].
Europeans are liars. The pristine form of R-M173 was found in Africa, not Europe but the authors claim Native Americans obtained R-M173 from Europeans. Europeans rarely mixed with Native Americans until they found oil in Indian territory. R-M173 is evidence of African admixture--not European.
Most Native Americans carry R-M173.
Now that we know Africans carry R-M269 this could also be an indication of African admixture.
posted
Winters C. Inference of Ancient Black Mexican Tribes and DNA. WebmedCentral GENETICS 2015;6(3):WMC004856 doi: 10.9754/journal.wmc.2015.004856
Abstract Background: Controversy surrounds the time period when Indigenous Mexican-African admixture occurred. Most researchers assume this admixture took place after the Atlantic Slave Trade. But, Spanish eyewitness accounts, Mayan skeletons with sickle cell anemia, and West African skeletal remains generally,indicate that there were Black Native Mexican and Meso-American communities in Meso-America before 1492. Using genetic association studies of available Indigenous Mexican and African genome-wide SNP genotypes and HLA we infer the probable pre-or post Columbian date for the admixture. Here we analyze the historical and archaeogentic literature relating to the American foundational haplogroups and HLA to extract ancestry information detailing when Indigenous Mexican-African admixture took place. Results: Indigenous Mexican and African archaeogenetic, DNA and HLA resources were analyzed to determine to what extent admixture had occurred between these populations. The sample indicated that Indigenous Mexican-African admixture has taken place across Mexican fundamental male and female lineages; and that Africans and Indigenous Mexicans share HLA alleles. In addition, archaeogenetic evidence including, African [Mande] inscriptions, Mande substratum in Mayan languages, Africans depicted in Mayan murals at San Bartolo and Xultun, African skeletons generally, and ancient Mayan skeletons with sickle cell anemia support Spanish eyewitness accounts of Black Native American tribes [Otomi, Chontal (Mayan speaking group) ,Yarura and etc.] in Meso-America when they arrived on the scene. Conclusion: We demonstrate that given the age of the African skeletons, excavated at Meso-American archaeological sites and Spanish eyewitness accounts of Black Mexicans, Indigenous Mexican- African admixture occurred prior to the European discovery of America. The date for the African skeletons indicate that there were several waves of West Africans who probably introduced African haplotypes into the Americas. The 25,000 Malians who sailed to America in 1310 probably had a major influence on the exchange of African genes in the Americas.
quote:
There is a high frequency of African-Mestizo admixture ranging between 20-40% (21). The admixture rate between Africans and indigenous Mexican Indians ranges between 5-50% (22-23). The Amerindian haplogroups (hg) are descendant from the L3(M,N, & X) macrohaplogroup): ABCDN and X. The L3 (M,N,X) marcogroup converge at np 16223. The mtDNA haplogroups ABC and X are subclades of haplogroup N. In Table 1, we see the distribution of haplogroup N, in the Americas. The phylogeography of haplogroup C suggest that this American founder haplogroup differentiated in Siberia-Asia (24). The situation is not so clear for haplogrop B2, but A2 and D1 probably differentiated after the mongoloid Native American lineages diverged after crossing the Beringa Straits (24) Haplogroup A2 has the motif 16111T,16223c, 16290T, 16319A and 16223C (25). Haplogroup A is rare in Siberia (26). Interestingly, haplogroup A absent in western North America is common in parts of Central America and Northern America where the Spanish reported the existence of Black Native American communities(1-2). In a recent study of post-Classic Mexicans at Tlatilco , dating between 10-13 centuries the subjects carried the founder haplogroups A (36%), B (13%), C (4.3%) and D (17.4%) (27). We should note, that in Yucatec, the Mayans were predominately haplogroup A, the Maya in Hondurus, a stronghold of the Black Native Americans belonged to haplogroup C. The mtDNA haplogroup A common to Mexicans is also found among the Mande speaking people and some East Africans (28-29). Haplogroup A found among Mixe and Mixtecs (28).The Mande speakers carry mtDNA haplogroup A, which is common among Mexicans (30). In addition to the Mande speaking people of West Africa, Southeast Africa Africans also carry mtDNA haplogroup A (29). The major American Indian male lineages include R1, C,D and Q3.There is evidence of African admixture in the American y-chromosome haplogroups. The Q y-haplogroup has the highest frequency among indigenous Mexicans. The frequency hg Q varies from a high of 54% for Q-M243, and a low of 46% for QM (34). African y-chromosome are associated with YAP+ and 9bp. The YAP-à associated with A-àG transition at DYS271 is found among Native Americans. The YAP+ individuals include Mixe speakers (32-33). YAP+ is often present in haplogroups (hg) C and D. The DYS271 transition is of African origin (32).The DSY271 Alu insertion is found only in chromosomes bearing Alu insertion (YAP+) at locus DYS287 (33). The DYS271 transition was found among the Wayuu, Zenu and Inzano. The Mexican Native American y-chromosome bearing the African markers is resident in haplogroups C and D (34). R-M173 is also found in Mexico. Haplogroups R and Q are part of the CT microgroup which dates back 56kya. Haplogroup R branches from hg Q, with the SNP M242. The CT haplogroup has SNP mutation M168, along with P and M294. Haplogroup P (M45) has two branches Q (M242) and R-M207 which share the common marker M45. The M45 chromosome is subdivided by the biallelic variant M173 (35). In Africa we find P (M173), R1b (M343) and V88; and R1b1a2 (M269). Native Americans carry a high frequency of R-M173 (48). The predominate y-chromosome in North America is R-M173. R-M173 is found only in the Northeastern United States along with mtDNA haplogroup X (25%). Both haplogroups are found in Africa, but is absent in Siberia.
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Clyde winters, AFRICAN ORIGIN OF NATIVE AMERICAN R1-M173
Abstract
Controversy surrounds the origin of the y-chromosome R lineages among Native Americans in the United States. Most researchers assume that the occurrence of this gene among Native Americans is the result of European admixture. This view is not supported by thephylogeography of haplogroup R1 which does not correspond to the former territories of the European colonies with the highest population densities. The location of this paternal clade, on the other hand, does match the former centers of Black Native American occupation (and the forced migration of Mongoloid and Black Native Americans into the American Southwest), which suggest that the presence of R1 among Mongoloid Native Americans is the result of Mongoloid-Black Native American admixture. This Indian-African admixture would have been between SSA and the Black Native Americans already living here at the advent of the colonial era mating Mongoloid Native Americans. The African specific R-M173 yDNA form a Sub-Saharan African (SSA) subclade, which in association with the SSA R-M269 subclade in Africa, reveal that there was gene flow from SSA toward mongoloid people in North America, probably during the past 500 years. http://img.kb.dk/ha/manus/recke/recke050.jpg
The most predominate y-chromosome of Native Americans in North America is R-M173. R-M173 is found in the Northeastern and Southwestern parts of the United States along with mtDNA haplogroup X (25%). Both haplogroups are found in Africa, but are absent in Siberia. There are varying frequencies of y-chromosome M-173 in Africa and Eurasia. Whereas only between 8% and 10% of M-173 is carried by Eurasians, 82% of the carriers of this y-chromosome are found in Africa (Winters, 2010, 2011b).
In Table 1, we note that R1 clades among NA populations vary. The NA populations that possess the RM173 haplotypes are predominately found in the Northeastern and South eastern parts of the USA (see Table 2). It is important to remember that many Southwest NA population groupings originally lived in the Northeast. This is very interesting given the presence of R-M173 is found among many American Indian groups. RM173 among the North American Algonquian group range from Ojibwe (79%), Chipewyan (62%), Seminole (50%), Cherokee (47%), Dogrib (40%) and Papago (38%) (Malhi et al., 2008). Amerindians carry the X haplogroup (hg). Amerindians and Europeans hg X are different (Person, 2004).
Haplogroup X has also been found throughout Africa (Shimada et al., 2006). Shimada et al., (2006) believes that X(hX) is of African origin. Amerindian X is different from European hg X, skeletons from Brazil dating between 400-7000 BP have the transition np 16223 (Martinez-Cruzado, 2001; Ribeiro-DosSantos et al., 1996). Transition np 16223 is characteristic of African haplogroups. This suggest that Africans may have taken the X hg to the Americas in ancient times.
The African origin of this haplogroup is evident among the Seminoles who continue to show the African phenotype.
The pristine form of R1*M173 is found only in Africa (Cruciani et al., 2002, 2010). The frequency of Ychromosome R1*-M173 in Africa range between 7-95% and averages 39.5% (Coia et al., 2005). The R*-M173 (haplotype 117) chromosome is found frequently in Africa, but rare to extremely low frequencies in Eurasia. The Eurasian R haplogroup is characterized by R1b3-M269. The M269 derived allele has a M207/M173 background.
The Spanish found numerous Black Communities in Mexico when they reached America in 1492. In addition, archaeologist has found skeletons of Sub-Saharan Africans at many ancient Mexican sites. The existence of HLA-B*35 among SSA and mongoloid Native Americans occurs in high frequencies. This suggest that this pattern of shared HLA among these populations is the result of ancient Pre-Columbian contact and not the Atlantic Slave Trade.
quote:Originally posted by Clyde Winters: lioness thanks for starting this thread.
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Clyde come off of it, you are trying to hijack the thraed and promote your kindle book. You have 5 posts in a row. It's not a dialog. And after you already have a couple of your own threads on the topic including one on your book. Clyde you are a shmless self promoter
quote:Originally posted by Clyde Winters: The Katz book is a great report about the Africans who joined the mongoloid Indian nations but it does not tell us the entire history of the Black Indians.
This is just another European attempt at defining who was who in history and perpetuating the lie Black people have always been slaves. It tells a myth that Black people went from being the slaves of Europeans, to being the slaves of mongoloid Indians.
Some Indian tribes provided refuge for escaped African slaves. Others tribes took in Africans as slaves. Are you disputing this fact and saying it's a myth?
posted
So how does one explain the fact that genomic analysis shows that Native American DNA within the AA population amounts to only 2-5%? Is it that the majority of the ante-Bellum blacks were confined to the plantations and were not free to intermingle with Native Americans?
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quote:Originally posted by lamin: Is it that the majority of the ante-Bellum blacks were confined to the plantations and were not free to intermingle with Native Americans?
Yes exactly
Even the vast majority of free men lived in the European settled regions not in the Indian territories
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quote:Originally posted by lamin: So how does one explain the fact that genomic analysis shows that Native American DNA within the AA population amounts to only 2-5%? Is it that the majority of the ante-Bellum blacks were confined to the plantations and were not free to intermingle with Native Americans?
This is because of the fact that they claim R1, was introduced to Native Americans by Europeans eventhough there was few mixed marriage between Indians and Europeans until after Oil was discovered in Oklahoma.
Also, you forget that there were free Blacks who mated with Native Americans in addition to the mating of Blacks and Indians on the plantations.
quote:Originally posted by Clyde Winters: lioness thanks for starting this thread.
.
Clyde come off of it, you are trying to hijack the thraed and promote your kindle book. You have 5 posts in a row. It's not a dialog. And after you already have a couple of your own threads on the topic including one on your book. Clyde you are a shmless self promoter
quote:Originally posted by Clyde Winters: The Katz book is a great report about the Africans who joined the mongoloid Indian nations but it does not tell us the entire history of the Black Indians.
This is just another European attempt at defining who was who in history and perpetuating the lie Black people have always been slaves. It tells a myth that Black people went from being the slaves of Europeans, to being the slaves of mongoloid Indians.
Some Indian tribes provided refuge for escaped African slaves. Others tribes took in Africans as slaves. Are you disputing this fact and saying it's a myth?
5 Native American Communities Who Owned Enslaved Africans
Atlanta Blackstar, 2014
There were some African slaves that joined Native American tribes--but most were Black Indians who joined other tribes as their own tribe declined. A good example would be the Yamasee who lost their lands to the whites, while the Cree took their land in Florida. As a result, they had to ask to join other tribes for survival.
Don't forget that many runaway slaves were enslaved Native Americans, like the Cree, Creek, Choctaw, Yamasee and Blackfeet. .
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Abraham, a Black Seminole leader, from N. Orr's engraving in The Origin, Progress, and Conclusion of the Florida War (1848) by John T. Sprague.
Black Seminoles
est. population: 2000
The Black Seminoles are Black Indians associated with the Seminole people in Florida and Oklahoma. They are the descendants of free blacks and escaped slaves – maroons – who allied with Seminole groups in Spanish Florida. Historically the Black Seminoles lived in distinct bands; some were slaves of particular Seminole leaders, but they experienced more freedom than in white society, including the right to bear arms. Today, Black Seminole descendants live primarily in rural communities within the reservation of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma; its two Freedmen's bands are represented on the General Council of the Nation. Other centers are in Florida, Texas, the Bahamas and Northern Mexico. Since the 1930s, the Seminole Freedmen have struggled with cycles of exclusion from the Seminole Tribe of Oklahoma.[1] In 1990, the tribe received the majority of a $46 million judgment trust by the United States, for seizure of lands in Florida in 1823, and the Freedmen have worked to gain a share of it. In 2004 the US Supreme Court ruled the Seminole Freedmen could not bring suit without the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, which refused to join it on the claim issue. In 2000 the Seminole Nation voted to restrict membership to those who could prove descent from a Seminole Indian on the Dawes Rolls of the early 20th century, which excluded about 1200 Freedmen previously included as members.
Origins
The Spanish strategy for defending their claim of Florida at first was based on organizing the indigenous people into a mission system. The mission Native Americans were to serve as militia to protect the colony from English incursions from the north. But a combination of raids by South Carolina colonists and new European infectious diseases, to which they did not have immunity, decimated Florida's native population. After the local Native Americans had all but died out, Spanish authorities encouraged renegade Native Americans and runaway slaves from England's southern colonies to move to their territory. The Spanish were hoping that these traditional enemies of the English would prove effective in holding off English expansion. As early as 1689, African slaves fled from the South Carolina Lowcountry to Spanish Florida seeking freedom. These were people who gradually formed what has become known as the Gullah culture of the coastal Southeast.[2] Under an edict from King Charles II of Spain in 1693, the black fugitives received liberty in exchange for defending the Spanish settlers at St. Augustine. The Spanish organized the black volunteers into a militia; their settlement at Fort Mose, founded in 1738, was the first legally sanctioned free black town in North America.[3] Not all the slaves escaping south found military service in St. Augustine to their liking. More escaped slaves sought refuge in wilderness areas in Northern Florida, where their knowledge of tropical agriculture—and resistance to tropical diseases—served them well. Most of the blacks who pioneered Florida were Gullah people who escaped from the rice plantations of South Carolina (and later Georgia). As Gullah, they had developed an Afro-English based Creole, along with cultural practices and African leadership structure. The Gullah pioneers built their own settlements based on rice and corn agriculture. They became allies of Creek and other Indians escaping into Florida from the Southeast at the same time.[2] In Florida, they developed the Afro-Seminole Creole, which they spoke with the growing Seminole tribe. Following the British defeat of the French in the Seven Years' War, in 1763 the British took over rule in Florida, in an exchange of territory with the Spanish for former French lands west of the Mississippi. The area was still considered a sanctuary for fugitive American slaves, as it was lightly settled. Many slaves sought refuge near growing American Indian settlements. In 1773, when the American naturalist William Bartram visited the area, the Seminole had their own tribal name, derived from cimarron, the Spanish word for runaway. Cimarron was also the source of the English word maroon, used to describe the runaway slave communities of Florida, the Great Dismal Swamp maroons who had developed on the border of Virginia and North Carolina, and maroons on colonial islands of the Caribbean, and other parts of the New World.[4] Florida had been a refuge for fugitive slaves for at least 70 years by the time of the American Revolution. Communities of Black Seminoles were established on the outskirts of major Seminole towns.[5] A new influx of freedom-seeking blacks reached Florida during the American Revolution (1775–83), escaping during the disruption of war. During the Revolution, the Seminole allied with the British, and African Americans and Seminole came into increased contact with each other. The Seminole held some slaves, as did the Creek and other Southeast Indian tribes. During the War of 1812, members of both communities sided with the British against the US in the hopes of defeating American settlers; they strengthened their internal ties and earned the enmity of the war's American General Andrew Jackson.[6][7] Spain had given land to some Muscogee (Creek) Native Americans. Over time the Creek were joined by other remnant groups of Southeast American Indians, such as the Miccosukee and the Apalachicola, and formed communities. Their community evolved over the late 18th and early 19th centuries as waves of Creek left present-day Georgia and Alabama under pressure from white settlement and the Creek Wars.[8] By a process of ethnogenesis, the Indians formed the Seminole.
Culture
The Black Seminole culture that took shape after 1800 was a dynamic mixture of African, Native American, Spanish, and slave traditions. Adopting certain practices of the Native Americans, maroons wore Seminole clothing; strained koonti, a native root; and made sofkee, a paste created by mashing corn with a mortar and pestle. They also introduced their Gullah staple of rice to the Seminole, and continued to use it as a basic part of their diets. Rice remained part of the diet of the Black Seminoles who moved to Oklahoma.[2] Initially living apart from the Native Americans, the maroons developed their own unique African-American culture, based in the Gullah culture of the Low Country. Black Seminoles inclined toward a syncretic form of Christianity developed during the plantation years. Certain cultural practices, such as "jumping the broom" to celebrate marriage, hailed from the plantations; other customs, such as some names used for black towns, reflected African heritage.[9] As time progressed, the Seminole and Blacks had limited intermarriage; but historians and anthropologists have come to believe that generally the Black Seminoles had independent communities. They allied with the Seminole at times of war.[2] The Seminole society was based on a matrilineal kinship system, in which inheritance and descent went through the maternal line. Children belonged to the mother's clan. While the children might integrate customs from both cultures, the Seminole believed them to belong to the mother's group more than the father's. The African Americans had more of a patriarchal system. But, under the South's adoption of the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, incorporated into slavery law in the states, children of slave mothers were considered born into slavery. Even if the mother had escaped, her children were legally considered slaves and fugitives, like her. As a result, the Black Seminole were always at risk from slave raiders.
African-Seminole relations
By the early 19th century, maroons (free blacks and runaway slaves) and the Seminole were in regular contact in Florida, where they evolved a system of relations unique among North American Native Americans and blacks. In exchange for paying an annual tribute of livestock and crops, black prisoners or slaves found sanctuary among the Seminole. Seminoles, in turn, acquired an important strategic ally in a sparsely populated region.[2] In the 19th century, the Black Seminoles were called "Seminole Negroes" by their white American enemies and Estelusti (Black People), by their Indian allies. Typically, many or most members of the Black Seminole communities were not identified as slaves of individual Native American chiefs. Black Seminoles lived in their own independent communities, elected their own leaders, and could amass wealth in cattle and crops. Most importantly, they bore arms for self-defense. Florida real estate records show that the Seminole and Black Seminole people owned large quantities of Florida land. In some cases, a portion of that Florida land is still owned by the Seminole and Black Seminole descendants in Florida. Under the comparatively free conditions, the Black Seminoles flourished. U.S. Army Lieutenant George McCall recorded his impressions of a Black Seminole community in 1826:
"We found these negroes in possession of large fields of the finest land, producing large crops of corn, beans, melons, pumpkins, and other esculent vegetables. ... I saw, while riding along the borders of the ponds, fine rice growing; and in the village large corn-cribs were filled, while the houses were larger and more comfortable than those of the Indians themselves."
Historians estimate that during the 1820s, 800 blacks were living with the Seminoles.[11] The Black Seminole settlements were highly militarized, unlike the communities of most of the slaves in the Deep South. The military nature of the African-Seminole relationship led General Edmund Pendleton Gaines, who visited several flourishing Black Seminole settlements in the 1800s, to describe the African Americans as "vassals and allies" of the Seminole. In terms of spirituality, the ethnic groups remained distinct. The Seminole followed the nativistic principles of their Great Spirit. Blacks had a syncretic form of Christianity brought with them from the plantations. In general, the blacks never wholly adopted Seminole culture and beliefs, nor were they accepted into Seminole society. They were not considered Indian. Most of the blacks spoke Gullah, an Afro-English-based creole language. This enabled them to communicate better with Anglo-Americans than the Creek or Mikasuki-speaking Seminole. The Indians used the blacks as translators to advance their trading with the British and other tribes.[12] Together in Florida they developed Afro-Seminole Creole, identified in 1978 as a distinct language by the linguist Ian Hancock. Black Seminoles and Freedmen continued to speak Afro-Seminole Creole through the 19th century in Oklahoma. Hancock found that in 1978, some Black Seminole and Seminole elders still spoke it in Oklahoma and in Florida.[2]
Seminole Wars
After winning independence in the Revolution, American slaveholders were increasingly worried about the armed black communities in Florida. The territory was ruled again by Spain, as Britain had ceded it East and West Florida. The US slaveholders sought the capture and return of Florida's black fugitives under the Treaty of New York (1790), the first treaty ratified under the Confederation.[13] Wanting to disrupt Florida's maroon communities after the War of 1812, General Andrew Jackson attacked the Negro Fort, which had become a Black Seminole stronghold after the British left Florida. Breaking up the maroon communities was one of Jackson's major objectives in the First Seminole War (1817–18).[14] Under pressure, the Indian and black communities moved into south and central Florida. Slaves and Black Seminoles frequently migrated down the peninsula to escape from Cape Florida to the Bahamas. Hundreds left in the early 1820s after the United States acquired the territory from Spain, effective 1821. Contemporary accounts noted a group of 120 migrating in 1821, and a much larger group of 300 African-American slaves escaping in 1823, picked up by Bahamians in 27 sloops and also by canoes.[15] Their concern about living under American rule was not unwarranted. In 1821, Andrew Jackson became the territorial governor of Florida and ordered an attack on Angola, a village built by Black Seminoles and other free blacks on the south of Tampa Bay on the Manatee River. Raiders captured over 250 people, most of whom were sold into slavery. Some of the survivors fled to the Florida interior and others to Florida's east coast and escaped to the Bahamas.[16][17][18] In the Bahamas, the Black Seminoles developed a village known as Red Bays on Andros, where basket making and certain grave rituals associated with Seminole traditions are still practiced.[19] Federal construction and staffing of the Cape Florida Lighthouse in 1825 reduced the number of slave escapes from this site.
The Second Seminole War (1835–42) marked the height of tension between the U.S. and the Seminoles, and also the historical peak of the African-Seminole alliance. Under the policy of Indian removal, the US wanted to relocate Florida's 4,000 Seminole people and most of their 800 Black Seminole allies to the western Indian Territory. During the year before the war, prominent white citizens captured and claimed as fugitive slaves at least 100 Black Seminoles.[citation needed] Anticipating attempts to re-enslave more members of their community, Black Seminoles opposed removal to the West. In councils before the war, they threw their support behind the most militant Seminole faction, led by Osceola. After war broke out, individual black leaders, such as John Caesar, Abraham, and John Horse, played key roles.[20] In addition to aiding the Indians in their fight, Black Seminoles recruited plantation slaves to rebellion at the start of the war. The slaves joined Indians and maroons in the destruction of 21 sugar plantations from Christmas Day, December 25, 1835, through the summer of 1836. Historians do not agree on whether these events should be considered a separate slave rebellion; generally they view the attacks on the sugar plantations as part of the Seminole War.[21] By 1838, U.S. General Thomas Sydney Jesup tried to divide the black and Seminole warriors by offering freedom to the blacks if they surrendered and agreed to removal to Indian Territory. John Horse was among the black warriors who surrendered under this condition. Due to Seminole opposition, however, the Army did not fully follow through on its offer. After 1838, more than 500 Black Seminoles traveled with the Seminoles thousands of miles to the Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma; some traveled by ship across the Gulf of Mexico and up the Mississippi River. Because of harsh conditions, many of both peoples died along this trail from Florida to Oklahoma, also known as The Trail of Tears. The status of Black Seminoles and fugitive slaves was largely unsettled after they reached Indian Territory. The issue was compounded by the government's initially putting the Seminole and blacks under the administration of the Creek Nation, many of whom were slaveholders.[8] The Creek tried to re-enslave some of the fugitive black slaves. John Horse and others set up towns, generally near Seminole settlements, repeating their pattern from Florida.
Migration to Mexico
Facing the threat of enslavement, the Black Seminole leader John Horse and about 180 Black Seminoles staged a mass escape in 1849 to northern Mexico, where slavery had been abolished twenty years earlier. The black fugitives crossed to freedom in July 1850.[2] They rode with a faction of traditionalist Seminole under the Indian chief Coacochee, who led the expedition. The Mexican government welcomed the Seminole allies as border guards on the frontier, and they settled at Nacimiento, Coahuila.[23] After 1861, the Black Seminoles in Mexico and Texas (see below) had little contact with those in Oklahoma. For the next 20 years, Black Seminoles served as militiamen and Indian fighters in Mexico, where they became known as los mascogos, derived from the tribal name of the Creek - Muskogee.[24] Slave raiders from Texas continued to threaten the community but arms and reinforcements from the Mexican Army enabled the black warriors to defend their community.[25] By the 1940s, descendants of the Mascogos numbered 400-500 in Nacimiento de los Negros, Coahuila, inhabiting lands adjacent to the Kickapoo tribe. They had a thriving agricultural community. By the 1990s, most of the descendants had moved into Texas.[26]
Indian Territory/Oklahoma
Throughout the period, several hundred Black Seminoles remained in the Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). Because most of the Seminole and the other Five Civilized Tribes supported the Confederacy during the American Civil War, in 1866 the US required new peace treaties with them. The US required the tribes emancipate any slaves and extend to the freedmen full citizenship rights in the tribes if they chose to stay in Indian Territory. In the late nineteenth century, Seminole Freedmen thrived in towns near the Seminole communities on the reservation. Most had not been living as slaves to the Indians before the war. They lived —as their descendants still do— in and around Wewoka, Oklahoma, the community founded in 1849 by John Horse as a black settlement. Today it is the capital of the federally recognized Seminole Nation of Oklahoma.
Following the Civil War, some Freedmen's leaders in Indian Territory practiced polygyny, as did ethnic African leaders in other diaspora communities.[27] In 1900 there were 1,000 Freedmen listed in the population of the Seminole Nation in Indian Territory, about one-third of the total. By the time of the Dawes Rolls, there were numerous female-headed households registered. The Freedmen's towns were made up of large, closely connected families. After allotment, "[f]reedmen, unlike their [Indian] peers on the blood roll, were permitted to sell their land without clearing the transaction through the Indian Bureau. That made the poorly educated Freedmen easy marks for white settlers migrating from the Deep South."[28] Numerous Seminole Freedmen lost their land in the early decades after allotment, and some moved to urban areas. Others left the state because of its conditions of racial segregation. As US citizens, they were exposed to the harsher racial laws of Oklahoma. Since 1954, the Freedmen have been included in the constitution of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma. They have two bands, each representing more than one town and named for 19th-century band leaders: the Cesar Bruner band covers towns south of Little River; the Dosar Barkus covers the several towns located north of the river. Each of the bands elects two representatives to the General Council of the Seminole Nation.
Florida and Bahamas
Black Seminole descendants continue to live in Florida today. They can enroll in the Seminole Tribe of Florida if they meet its membership criteria for blood quantum: one-quarter Seminole Indian ancestry. About 50 Black Seminoles, all of whom have at least one-quarter Seminole ancestry, live on the Fort Pierce Reservation, a 50-acre parcel taken in trust in 1995 by the Department of Interior for the Tribe as its sixth reservation.[31] Descendants of Black Seminoles, who identify as Bahamian, reside on Andros Island in the Bahamas. A few hundred refugees had left in the early nineteenth century from Cape Florida to go to the British-held islands for sanctuary from American enslavement.[32] After banning the international slave trade in 1808, in 1818 Britain held that slaves brought to the Bahamas from outside the British West Indies would be manumitted.[33][34] In 1834 Britain abolished slavery in these colonies and Bermuda. They have been sometimes referred to as "Black Indians," in recognition of their history.
SEMINOLE FREEDMAN EXCLUSION CONTROVERSY
In 1900, Seminole Freedmen numbered about 1,000 on the Oklahoma reservation, about one-third of the total population at the time. Members were registered on the Dawes Rolls for allocation of communal land to individual households.[35] Since then, numerous Freedmen left after losing their land, as their land sales were not overseen by the Indian Bureau. Others left because of having to deal with the harshly segregated society of Oklahoma. The land allotments and participation in Oklahoma society altered relations between the Seminole and Freedmen, particularly after the 1930s. Both peoples faced racial discrimination from whites in Oklahoma, who essentially divided society into two: white and "other". Public schools and facilities were racially segregated. When the tribe reorganized under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, some Seminole wanted to exclude the Freedmen and keep the tribe as Indian only. It was not until the 1950s that the Black Seminole were officially recognized in the constitution. Another was adopted in 1969, that restructured the government according to more traditional Seminole lines. It established 14 town bands, of which two represented Freedmen. The two Freedmen's bands were given two seats each, like other bands, on the Seminole General Council. There have been "battles over tribal membership across the country, as gambling revenues and federal land payments have given Indians something to fight over."[36] In 2000, Seminole Freedmen were in the national news because of a legal dispute with the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, of which they had been legal members since 1866, over membership and rights within the tribe. The Seminole Nation of Oklahoma held the Black Seminoles could not share in services to be provided by a $56 million federal settlement, a judgment trust, originally awarded in 1976 to the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma and the Seminole Tribe of Florida (and other Florida Seminoles) by the federal government.[37] The settlement was in compensation for land taken from them in northern Florida by the United States at the time of the signing of the Treaty of Moultrie Creek in 1823, when most of the Seminole and maroons were moved to a reservation in the center of the territory. This was before removal west of the Mississippi.[37] The judgment trust was based on the Seminole tribe as it existed in 1823. Black Seminoles were not recognized legally as part of the tribe, nor was their ownership or occupancy of land separately recognized. The US government at the time would have assumed most were fugitive slaves, without legal standing. The Oklahoma and Florida groups were awarded portions of the judgment related to their respective populations in the early 20th century, when records were made of the mostly full-blood descendants of the time.[37] The settlement apportionment was disputed in court cases between the Oklahoma and Florida tribes, but finally awarded in 1990, with three-quarters going to the Oklahoma people and one-quarter to those in Florida. However, the Black Seminole descendants asserted their ancestors had also held and farmed land in Florida, and suffered property losses as a result of US actions. They filed suit in 1996 against the Department of Interior to share in the benefits of the judgment trust of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, of which they were members.[36][38] In another aspect of the dispute over citizenship, in the summer of 2000 the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma voted to restrict members, according to blood quantum, to those who had one-eighth Seminole Indian ancestry,[30] basically those who could document descent from a Seminole Indian ancestor listed on the Dawes Rolls, the federal registry established in the early 20th century. At the time, during rushed conditions, registrars had separate lists for Seminole-Indians and Freedmen. They classified those with visible African ancestry as Freedmen, regardless of their proportion of Indian ancestry or whether they were considered Indian members of the tribe at the time. This excluded some Black Seminole from being listed on the Seminole-Indian list who qualified by ancestry.[36] The Dawes Rolls included in the Seminole-Indian list many Intermarried Whites who lived on Indian lands, but did not include blacks of the same status. The Seminole Freedmen believed the tribe's 21st-century decision to exclude them was racially based and has opposed it on those grounds. The Department of Interior said that it would not recognize a Seminole government that did not have Seminole Freedmen participating as voters and on the council, as they had officially been members of the nation since 1866. In October 2000, the Seminole Nation filed its own suit against the Interior Department, contending it had the sovereign right to determine tribal membership.[36] In April 2002, the Seminole Freedmen's suit against the government was dismissed in federal district court; the court ruled the Freedmen could not bring suit independently of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, which refused to join.[39] They appealed to the United States Supreme Court, which in June 2004 affirmed that the Seminole Freedmen could not sue the federal government for inclusion in the settlement without the Seminole Nation joining. As a sovereign nation, they could not be ordered to join the suit.[40] Later that year, the Bureau of Indian Affairs held that the exclusion of Black Seminoles constituted a violation of the Seminole Nation's 1866 treaty with the United States following the American Civil War. They noted that the treaty was made with a tribe that included black as well as white and brown members. The treaty had required the Seminole to emancipate their slaves, and to give the Seminole Freedmen full citizenship and voting rights. The BIA stopped federal funding for a time for services and programs to the Seminole. The individual Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood (CDIB) is based on registration of ancestors in the Indian lists of the Dawes Rolls. Although the BIA could not issue CDIBs to the Seminole Freedmen, in 2003 the agency recognized them as members of the tribe and advised them of continuing benefits for which they were eligible.[41] Journalists theorized the decision could affect the similar case in which the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma excluded Cherokee Freedmen as members unless they could document a direct Indian ancestor on the Dawes Rolls.
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An Ancient Seminole Christmas Gift: Freedom
On Christmas day 1837, 176 years ago, the Africans and Native Americans who formed Florida’s Seminole Nation defeated a vastly superior US invading army bent on cracking this early rainbow coalition and returning the Africans to slavery. The Seminole victory stands as a milestone in the march of American liberty.
his daring Seminole story begins around the time of the American Revolution when 55 “Founding Fathers” broke free of British colonialism and wrote the immortal Declaration of Independence. About the same time Seminoles, suffering ethnic persecution under Creek rule in Alabama and Georgia, fled south to seek independence. African runaway slaves who earlier escaped bondage and became among its first explorers, welcomed them to In Florida.
The Africans did more than offer Seminole families a haven. They taught them in methods of rice cultivation they had learned in Senegambia and Sierra Leone, Africa. Then the two peoples of color forged a prosperous multicultural nation and a military alliance ready to withstand the European invaders and slave-catchers. The Seminoles were led by such skilled military figures and diplomats as Osceola, Wild Cat and John Horse.
This alliance drove US slaveholders to sputtering fury. They saw Seminole unity, prosperity and guns as a lethal threat to their plantation system. Here was a beacon that enticed escapees and offered them a military base of operations. Further, these peaceful communities destroyed the slaveholder myth that Africans required white control.
Slaveholders and their allies kept up a drum-beat for US military intervention in Florida, and in 1811 President James Madison authorized covert US invasions by slave-catching posses called “Patriots.” Then in 1816, General Andrew Jackson ordered General Gaines to attack the Seminole alliance and “restore the stolen negroes to their rightful owners.” A major US assault began on hundreds of people living in “Fort Negro” on the Apalachicola River. As US Army Colonel Clinch sailed down the Apalachicola he wrote: “The American negroes had principally settled along the river and a number of them had left their fields and gone over to the Seminoles on hearing of our approach. Their cornfields extended nearly fifty miles up the river and their numbers were daily increasing.”
When a heated US cannon ball hit “Fort Negro’s” ammunition dump, the explosion killed most of its more than three hundred defenders. The survivors were marched back to slavery. Then in 1818 General Jackson invaded and claimed Florida, the United States “purchased” it [$5,000,000] from Spain in 1819, and sent a US army of occupation for “pacification.”
But suddenly the US faced the largest slave revolt in its history, its busiest underground railroad station, and the strongest African/Indian alliance in North America. The multicultural Seminole forces carefully moved families out of harm’s way from 1816 to 1858 as they resisted the US through three “Seminole wars.” Today many Seminoles still claim they never surrendered.
In June 1837 Major General Sidney Thomas Jesup, the best informed US officer in Florida, described the danger posed by the Seminole alliance: “The two races, the negro and the Indian, are rapidly approximating; they are identical in interests and feelings . . . . Should the Indians remain in this territory the negroes among them will form a rallying point for runaway negroes from the adjacent states; and if they remove, the fastness of the country will be immediately occupied by negroes.”
Then on Christmas Day 1837, 380 to 480 Seminole fighters gathered on the northeast corner of Florida’s Lake Okeechobee ready to halt the armies of Colonel Zachary Taylor, a Louisiana slaveholder and ambitious career soldier. He was building a reputation as an “Indian killer.” Taylor’s troops included 70 Delaware Indians, 180 Tennessee volunteers, and 800 US Infantry soldiers.
As Taylor’s huge army approached Seminole marksmen waited perched in trees or hiding in tall grass. The first Seminole volleys sent the Delaware fleeing. Tennessee riflemen plunged ahead until a withering fire brought down their commissioned officers and then their noncommissioned officers. The Tennesseans headed home.
Then Taylor ordered the US Sixth Infantry, Fourth Infantry and his own First Infantry Regiments forward. Pinpoint Seminole rifle fire brought down, he later reported, “every officer, with one exception, as well as most of the non-commissioned officers” and left “but four . . . untouched.” That Christmas Day Colonel Taylor counted 26 U.S. dead and 112 wounded, seven dead for each slain Seminole, and he had taken no prisoners. After the two and a half hour battle the Seminoles took to their canoes and sailed off to fight again.
Lake Okeechobee became the most decisive US defeat in more than four decades of Florida warfare. But after his survivors limped back to Fort Gardner, Taylor declared victory – “the Indians were driven in every direction.” The US Army promoted him and he later became the 12th president of the United States.
Lake Okeechobee took place during the Second Seminole War that took 1500 US military lives, cost Congress $40,000,000 (pre-Civil War dollars!) and left thousands of American soldiers wounded or dead of disease. Seminole losses were not recorded.
The truth of Lake Okeechobee remained buried. When President Taylor died in office, in Illinois Abraham Lincoln memorialized him on July 25, 1850. “He was never beaten,” Lincoln said, and added: “. . . in 1837 he fought and conquered in the memorable Battle of Lake Okeechobee, one of the most desperate struggles known to the annals of Indian warfare.”
A century and a half later noted Harvard historian and author Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in The Almanac of American History: “Fighting in the Second Seminole War, General Zachary Taylor defeats a group of Seminoles at Okeechobee Swamp, Florida.”
The United States needs to face its past. Americans of all ages have a right to know and to celebrate the freedom fighters who built this country, all of them. Our schools, children, teachers and parents deserve to learn about a daring Christmas day that has been too long neglected and distorted.
This award was issued by Phil Pompey Fixico, President of the Semiroon Historical Society. He is a direct descendant of the Caesar Bruner Band of Florida that battled the United States Army, Navy and Marines for forty two years. He is also a direct descendant of the John Brown Band of Seminoles (who along with other young men from Indigenous Nations) fled the Oklahoma Indian Territory during the Civil War. These brave men of the First Kansas Volunteers then served under John Brown’s former officers!
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. 11. TeresitaApacheChiefCostelitos72807DRepublicTexas Apache Chief Costelitos, Teresita, and unidentified Black Seminole woman. Photo courtesy Daughters of the Republic of Texas Sadly, for many people these negative feelings are still there. They have affected the transmission of the Afro-Seminole Creole discussed in this article. Existence of the Seminoles’ language was kept from outsiders until 1976, and for the past two generations parents haven’t passed the language on for the reasons given above. Today it is practically extinct; there may be fewer than 200 people who speak it, all of whom are elderly.
The Origins of Afro-Seminole Creole
Afro-Seminole is an early offshoot from Gullah (also called Geechee or Sea Islands Creole) spoken along the coast and especially the offshore islands of South Carolina, Georgia and northern Florida. There the Gullah language is disappearing too, but not because it isn’t being passed along to the next generation in the way that Afro-Seminole is being lost; it is being diluted out of existence by the English that now surrounds it. A process creolists call “metropolitanization”. Gullah texts from a century ago (e.g. in the works of A. Gonzales or Jones) reflect a Gullah that is no longer heard along the Atlantic seaboard. It is heard in Texas, however, and by a community in northern Mexico some 200 miles away, and until the mid-20th century, in Oklahoma too.
10. Seminole_family_Cypress_Tiger Seminole family of Cypress Tiger at their camp, near Kendall, Florida, 1916. Photographer: Botanist John Kunkel Small, 1869-1938. To understand the origins of Afro-Seminole Creole, one must first look at the origins of Gullah. During the Atlantic slave trade, the British took most of their African captives to Barbados, which they settled in 1627, before distributing them to their other Crown colonies. This included Carolina, which was founded in 1670, though after 1698 slaves were being brought in more and more from Africa directly. Carolina originally covered a huge area, which even included much of what is today Florida. Georgia was then Creek Indian country, and was free territory. When it became a colony in 1732, it immediately tried to prohibit slavery, but because of pressure from Carolina was unsuccessful.
Georgia initially purchased its own slaves from Carolina, but after 1749 began to import them from the West Indies. Nevertheless, slaves continued to come into both Carolina and Georgia directly from Africa in large numbers, significantly from the Upper Guinea Coast. Between 1701 and 1808, imports from Africa into Carolina were as follows: from Sierra Leone and The Gambia 76,000, from Ghana 28,000, from Liberia 19,000, from Benin 4,000 and from Biafra 23,000—and into Georgia (between 1766 and 1858): from Sierra Leone and The Gambia 12,000, from Liberia 2,200, from Ghana 3,800 and from the ‘central coast’ 5,800. Thus for each colony the totals for Sierra Leone and The Gambia (where the Anglophone Creole Krio is spoken, to be presented in a later issue of Kreol) exceeded the totals for all other regions combined. In the book, “The Africanist”, Paul Hair (1965: 81-82) observed that “from these figures, it can hardly be doubted that Sierra Leone languages have made a major contribution to the Africanisms in the Gullah dialect… we know of nowhere else in America where the influence of Sierra Leone languages can be traced to anything like this extent”. According to Gullah specialist Salikoko Mufwene (1997: 11) “the period between 1720 and 1750 [was] the critical stage in the emergence of Gullah as a distinct African American variety”, the crucial period of its formation also agreed upon by Opala (1986). How much the 18th century West African pidgin or Creole that eventually became Krio also played a part in the origins of Gullah is a question still being debated by creolists and historians.
Both Black and Native American escapees from the English plantations in the 17th and 18th century were able to find refuge in Spanish Florida. They were allowed to establish autonomous communities around St. Augustine and where they were known as cimarrones, the origin of the word Seminoles, and which means, roughly, ‘fugitives’. Already by 1821 there were 34 Seminole settlements in northern Florida, three of which were African. According to Giddings (1858:3), the word “Seminole” was first used to refer to the Black escapees into Florida, and was only later applied by the Creeks to the Indian fugitives. They numbered an estimated 7,000, and were welcomed by the Spanish government since they served as a buffer between themselves and the newly-created United States. In 1817 General Andrew Jackson and his army were sent to northern Florida to subdue the rebellious Seminoles and seize the land, killing livestock, burning crops, and destroying the Black forts along the Apalachicola and Suwannee Rivers. One of the drafters and signers of the Constitution of the United States complained about the numbers of slaves escaping from South Carolina into Florida, which by then had become U.S. territory. At that time slavery was still legal, and raids to capture free Africans created considerable problems for the governor in his efforts to develop the new territory.
The reasons for the Seminole diaspora
8. scouts
Seminole Indian Scouts. John Kibbetts was commissioned a sergeant at Fort Duncan, and ten Black Seminoles enlisted as privates. The Seminole Wars in the 1830s were bloody conflicts that led to the mass removal of Seminoles to Indian Territory in what is today Oklahoma. Groups of Black Seminoles left Florida for other places as well; some went to the Bahamas, some reportedly to Guanabacoa in Cuba, and others were invited to stay with the Cherokee. Only about 300 Seminoles—almost all of them Indians—remained in Florida, where they had been granted five million acres of land further south in the Everglades. In 1849, some of the Oklahoma Seminoles applied to the Mexican government for permission to go and live in that country, possibly because they believed they would be more at home in a Hispanic environment and perhaps could speak Spanish. However, the main reason for the request was that almost as soon as they had arrived in Indian Territory, the US government declared them legally to be slaves, while slavery had already been abolished in Mexico some twenty years before. A group of about 500 Black and Indian Seminoles left Oklahoma in the late fall of 1849, crossing Texas where they were joined by two hundred Kickapoo Indians in the Brazos river Valley near Waco, and crossing into Coahuila, Mexico in July 1850. At first the Black Seminoles settled in Moral, not far from the Texas border, while the Indian Seminoles settled separately at La Navaja and the Kickapoo at Guererro. Later the Black Seminoles moved a hundred miles further into Mexico to Musquiz, soon after that moving a few miles away to El Nacimiento de los Negros, with a few families going instead to Matamoros. The Kickapoo moved to the nearby colony of El Nacimiento de los Indios, but practically all of the Indian Seminoles decided to return to Oklahoma. In Mexico, the Black Seminoles met another Creole-speaking group who were already there. These were the Black Creek who, like the Afro-Seminoles, were originally Africans who had become acculturated to the Indians they lived with without losing their Creole language. They were the Africans who lived with the Upper Creek in Georgia, and who had also been sent West to Indian territory. While the Afro-Seminoles, who lived with the Lower Creek and others in Florida, left Tampa Bay by boat for New Orleans and traveled to Indian Territory via the Mississippi River, the Black Creek reached Oklahoma overland. They were brought to Coahuila and left there by their Indian owners, who had been negotiating for land for them since 1834. In addition to these two groups, the community was also being joined by “state-raised” men and women escaping from slavery in Texas via an underground railroad leading south into Mexico. Such families as the Gordons and the Shields descend from these fugitives.
The American Government’s betrayal of the Seminoles
Black Seminoles Scouts. In 1870 following negotiations with Mexico, the American government sent US Cavalry Captain Franklin Perry to Nacimiento to recruit the Seminoles, because of their reputation as fighters and because of their familiarity with Native Americans, to come and help the US Army drive the Plains tribes out of West Texas so that settlement there would be less of a problem for the Whites. The Seminoles agreed, and garrisoned themselves under the leadership of General Bullis in Fort Duncan at Eagle Pass in Maverick County, and Fort Clark at Brackettville in Kinney County, in south Texas. They were successful, and continued to serve the United States until they were discharged in 1914. They were never informed of their rights as American Indians, and later attempts to be included on the Seminole Register and to obtain land of their own were ignored. Woodhull (1937:127) wrote:
“The scouts have been disbanded and their families have been moved off the Reservation at Fort Clark. They are not entitled to consideration as Indians, because they did not register under some provision of Congress, of which they knew nothing, and they get no consideration as Negroes”.
In 1992 members of the Texas Seminoles and the Sea Island Gullahs were reunited for the first time in 166 years at the Third Biennial National Black Arts Festival in Atlanta, Georgia.
On September 16th, 2007, a delegation from Oklahoma led by Representative Angela Molette (Tuscaloosa Ohoyo) officially confirmed the Black Seminoles as the United Warrior Band of the Seminole Nation (one of the so-called “Five Civilized Tribes”) in a ceremony in Brackettville, Texas at which Seminole Negro Indian Scout Association President William Warrior was sworn in as tribal chief.
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