Black Native Americans

Black Indians are Native American people – defined as Native American due to being affiliated with Native American communities and being culturally Native American – who also have significant African American heritage.

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 holding enslaved African Americans in the Southeast and some enslaved or formerly enslaved people migrated with them to the West on the Trail of Tears in 1830 and later during the period of Indian Removal.

In controversial actions, since the late 20th century, the Cherokee, Creek and Seminole nations tightened their rules for membership and at times excluded Freedmen who did not have at least one ancestor listed as Native American on the early 20th-century Dawes Rolls. This exclusion was later appealed in the courts, both because of the treaty conditions and in some cases because of possible inaccuracies in some of the Rolls. The Chickasaw Nation never extended citizenship to Chickasaw Freedmen.

Overview

Until recently, historic relations between Native Americans and African Americans were relatively neglected in mainstream United States history studies. 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. Enslaved Africans 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 mixed-race persons who had some Native American and European ancestry.

Most interaction took place in New England where contact was early and the Southern United States, where the largest number of African-descended people were enslaved. In the 21st century, a significant number of African Americans have some Native American ancestry, but most have not grown up within those cultures and do not have current social, cultural or linguistic ties to Native peoples.

Relationships among different Native Americans, Africans, and African Americans have been varied and complex. Some tribes or bands were more accepting of ethnic 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. Some 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.

After the American Civil War, some African Americans became or continued as members of the US Army. Many were assigned to fight against Native Americans in the wars in the Western frontier states. Their military units became known as the Buffalo Soldiers, a nickname given by Native Americans. Black Seminole men in particular were recruited from Indian Territory to work as Native American scouts for the Army.

History

European colonization of the Americas

Records of contacts between Africans and Native Americans date 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 Native tribes became the first group of Black Indians.''Muslims in American History: A Forgotten Legacy'' by Dr. Jerald F. Dirks. Page 204. In the lands which later became part of the United States, the first recorded example of an enslaved African escaping from European colonists and being absorbed by Native Americans dates to 1526. In June of that year, Lucas Vázquez 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 Guadalupe; its inhabitants included 100 enslaved Africans. In 1526 the first enslaved African fled the colony and took refuge with local Native Americans.

In 1534 Pueblo peoples of the Southwest had contact with the Moroccan slave Esteban de Dorantes before any contact with the remainder of survivors of his Spanish expedition. As part of the Spanish Pánfilo de Narváez expedition, Esteban traveled from Florida in 1528 to what is now New Mexico in 1539, with a few other survivors. He is thought have been killed by Zuni. More than a century later, when the Pueblos united to rid their homelands of the Spanish colonists during the 1690 Pueblo Revolt, one of the organizers of the revolt, Domingo Naranjo ( – ) was a Santa Clara Pueblo man of African ancestry.

In 1622 Algonquian Native Americans attacked the colony of Jamestown in Virginia. They massacred all the Europeans but brought some of the few enslaved Africans as captives back to their own communities, gradually assimilating them. Interracial relationships continued to take place between Africans (and later African Americans) and members of Native American tribes in the coastal states. Although the colonists tried to enslave Native Americans in the early years, they abandoned the practise in the early 18th century. 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'."Katz, ''Black Indians'', p. 103.

Several of the Thirteen Colonies passed laws prohibiting the transportation of enslaved people into the frontier of the Cherokee Nation's territory to restrict interactions between the two groups. European colonists told the Cherokee that the smallpox epidemic of 1739 in the Southeast was due to disease brought by enslaved African. Some tribes encouraged intermarriage with Africans, with the idea that stronger children would result from the unions.

Colonists in South Carolina felt so concerned about the possible threat posed by the mixed African and Native American population that they passed a law in 1725 prohibiting taking enslaved people to the frontier regions, and imposing a fine of 200 pounds if violated. In 1751, South Carolina passed a law against holding Africans in proximity to Native Americans, as the planters considered that detrimental to the security of the colony. Under Governor James Glen (in office 1743–1756), South Carolina 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.

In 1753, during the chaos of Pontiac's War, a resident of Detroit observed that the Native tribes revolting were killing any whites they came across but were "saving and caressing all the Negroes they take." The resident expressed fear that this practice could eventually lead to a uprising amongst the enslaved people. Similarly, Iroquois chief Thayendanegea, more commonly known as Joseph Brant, similarly welcomed runaway slaves and encouraged them to intermarry in the tribe. Native American adoptions system did not discriminate on the basis of color, and Indian villages would eventually serve as stations on the Underground Railroad.

Historian Carter G. Woodson believed that relations with Native American tribes could have provided an escape hatch from slavery: Native American villages welcomed fugitive slaves and, in the antebellum years, some served as stations on the Underground Railroad.

There were varieties of attitude: some Native Americans resented the presence of Africans.''Red, White, and Black'', p. 99. In one account, the "Catawaba tribe in 1752 showed great anger and bitter resentment when an African American came among them as a trader."

European and European-American colonists tried to divide Native Americans and African Americans against each other. Europeans considered both races inferior and tried to convince Native Americans that Africans worked against their best interests.

In the colonial period, Native Americans received rewards if they returned formerly enslaved people who had escaped . In the latter 19th century, African-American soldiers had assignments to fight with U.S. forces in Indian Wars in the West.

European enslavement

European colonists created a new demand market for captives of raids when they founded what would go on to become the Thirteen Colonies. Especially in the southern colonies, initially developed for resource exploitation rather than settlement, colonists purchased or captured Native Americans to be used as forced labor in cultivating tobacco, and, by the 18th century, rice and indigo.

To acquire trade goods, Native Americans began selling war captives to whites rather than integrating them into their own societies.Snyder (2010), "Indian Slave Trade" h. 2 in ''Slavery'', pp. 46-79. Traded goods, such as axes, bronze kettles, Caribbean rum, European jewelry, needles, and scissors, varied among the tribes, but the most prized were rifles. The English copied the Spanish and Portuguese: they saw the enslavement of Africans and Native Americans as a moral, legal, and socially acceptable institution; a common rationale for enslavement was the taking of captives after a "just war" and using slavery as an alternative to a death sentence.

The escape of Native American slaves was frequent, because they had a better understanding of the land, which African slaves did not. Consequently, the Natives who were captured and sold into slavery were often sent to the West Indies, or far away from their traditional homeland.

The oldest known record of a permanent Native American slave was a native man from Massachusetts in 1636. By 1661 slavery had become legal in all of the thirteen colonies. Virginia would later declare "Indians, Mulattos, and Negros to be real estate", and in 1682 New York forbade African or Native American slaves from leaving their master's home or plantation without permission. European colonists also viewed the enslavement of Native Americans differently than the enslavement of Africans in some cases; a belief that Africans were "brutish people" was dominant. While both Native Americans and Africans were considered savages, Native Americans were romanticized as noble people that could be elevated into Christian civilization.

It is estimated that Carolina traders operating out of Charles Town exported an estimated 30,000 to 51,000 Native American captives between 1670 and 1715 in a profitable slave trade with the Caribbean, Spanish Hispaniola, and the Northern colonies.Krauthamer (2013), "Black Slaves, Indian Masters" h. 1 in ''Black Slaves'', pp. 17–45. It was more profitable to have Native American slaves because African slaves had to be shipped and purchased, while native slaves could be captured and immediately taken to plantations; whites in the Northern colonies sometimes preferred Native American slaves, especially Native women and children, to Africans because Native American women were agriculturalist and children could be trained more easily.

However, Carolinians had more of a preference for African slaves but also capitalized on the Indian slave trade combining both.
By the late 1700s records of slaves mixed with African and Native American heritage were recorded.Lauber (1913), "The Number of Indian Slaves" h. IV in ''Indian Slavery'', pp. 105-117. In the eastern colonies it became common practice to enslave Native American women and African men with a parallel growth of enslavement for both Africans and Native Americans. This practice also lead to large number of unions between Africans and Native Americans. This practice of combining African slave men and Native American women was especially common in South Carolina.

During this time records also show that many Native American women bought African men but, unknown to the European traders, the women freed and married the men into their tribe. The Indian wars of the early 18th century, combined with the growing availability of African slaves, essentially ended the Indian Slave trade by 1750. Numerous colonial slave traders had been killed in the fighting, and the remaining Native American groups banded together, more determined to face the Europeans from a position of strength rather than be enslaved.

Though the Indian Slave Trade ended the practice of enslaving Native Americans continued, records from June 28, 1771, show Native American children were kept as slaves in Long Island, New York. Native Americans had also married while enslaved creating families both native and some of partial African descent. Occasional mentioning of Native American slaves running away, being bought, or sold along with Africans in newspapers is found throughout the later colonial period. There are also many accounts of former slaves mentioning having a parent or grandparent who was Native American or of partial descent.

Advertisements asked for the return of both African American and Native American slaves. Records and slave narratives obtained by the WPA (Works Progress Administration) clearly indicate that the enslavement of Native Americans continued in the 1800s mostly through kidnappings. The abductions showed that even in the 1800s little distinction was still made between African Americans and Native Americans. Both Native American and African-American slaves were at risk of sexual abuse by slaveholders and other white men of power.

During the transitional period of Africans' becoming the primary race enslaved, Native Americans had been sometimes enslaved at the same time. Africans and Native Americans worked together, lived together in communal quarters, along with white indentured servants, produced collective recipes for food, and shared herbal remedies, myths and legends. Some intermarried and had mixed-race children. The exact number of Native Americans who were enslaved is unknown because vital statistics and census reports were at best infrequent. Andrés Reséndez estimates that between 147,000 and 340,000 Native Americans were enslaved in North America, excluding Mexico.

Among the Cherokee, interracial marriages or unions increased as the number of slaves held by the tribe increased. The Cherokee had a reputation for having slaves work side by side with their owners. The Cherokee resistance to the Euro-American system of chattel slavery created tensions between them and European Americans. 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. Cultural assimilation among the tribes, particularly the Cherokee, created pressure to be accepted by European Americans.

After Indian slavery was ended in the colonies, some African men chose Native American women as their partners because their children would be born free. Beginning from 1662 in Virginia, and soon followed by other colonies, they had established a law, known as ''partus sequitur ventrem'', that said a child's status followed that of the mother. Separately, according to the matrilineal system among many Native American tribes, children were considered to be born to and to belong to the mother's people, so were raised as Native American. As European expansion increased in the Southeast, African and Native American marriages became more common.

1800s through the Civil War

In the early 19th century, the US government believed that some tribes had become extinct, especially on the East Coast, where there had been a longer period of European settlement, and where most Native Americans had lost their communal land. Few reservations had been established and they were considered landless. At that time, the government 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.

The Seminole people of Florida formed in the 18th century, in what is called ethnogenesis, from Muscogee (Creek)

HOME


Content is Copyleft
Website design, code, and AI is Copyrighted (c) 2014-2017 by Stephen Payne


Consider donating to Wikimedia



As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases