By WILLIAM LOREN
KATZ
"If you believe people have no history worth mentioning
it is easy to believe they have no humanity worth defending"
-William Loren Katz
Alex Haley's successful tracking of Kunte
Kinte gave the hunt for African ancestors a needed
shove forward. But driven by their stubborn will
and searching eye, as researchers fanned out
in
pursuit of African connections, another
vision
appeared. First as a recurring distraction, then
a source of wonder, geological detectives
stumbled
on Native American ancestors. Alex Haley
was
hardly alone when he also discovered
Native American roots to his family
tree.
Though often unmentioned except in family
circles,
this biological legacy has been shared by
such
figures as Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther
King Jr., Langston Hughes, Lena Horne, Alice
Walker,
Jesse Jackson, Michael Jackson and L.L. Cool
J.
Today virtually every African American family
tree
boasts an Indian
branch.
This uniquely "only in America" relationship
began
with the earliest foreign landings in the
New
World. From Nova Scotia to Cape Horn, and
along
the jewel-like islands of the Caribbean,
Europeans
imposed a slave system first on Native
Americans.
Then, as millions of Indians fell victim
to
overwork, disease and brutality,
kidnapped
Africans began to take their
places.
There in the misty dawn of the Americas
two
peoples of color began to meet in slave huts,
on
tobacco and cotton plantations, and as workers
in
dank mines. For two centuries Indians and
Africans
remained enslaved together, and Native
Americans were not exempted from the system until after
the
Revolution. Scholar C. Vann Woodward has
concluded
"If the black-red inter-breeding was anywhere
as
extensive as suggested by the testimony
of
ex-slaves, then the monoracial concept of
slavery
in America requires
revision."
The African-Indian connection also adds a
sharp
new dimension to the issue of slave
resistance.
The first evidence of Native American and
African
unity appears in a l503 communication to
Spain's
King Ferdinand from Viceroy Nicolas de Ovando
of Spain's headquarters on Hispaniola, now
Haiti. Ovando complained that his enslaved Africans
"fled among the Indians and taught them bad customs
and
never could be captured." In the last four
words
the governor is describing more than a
problem
with untrustworthy servants or the difficulties
of
retrieving runaways in a rainforest. From
his
thin line of white colonies, he sees
Europeans confronting a new bi-racial enemy that has a
base
of support in the interior. The budding
coalition has new recruits joining each
week.
In Suriname, on the northern coast of
South
America, U.S. anthropologist Richard Price
lived
among and recorded the origins of the
Saramaka
nation. Beginning in the 1680s Saramakas
combined
Indians and Africans enslaved by Europeans.
Sacred
Saramaka legends explained: "The Indians
escaped
first and then, since they knew the forest,
they
came back and liberated the Africans." This
red hand of friendship extended to people of
African
descent is an American tradition as deep
and
meaningful as the first Thanksgiving. From
Canada
to Cape Horn, two peoples fled bondage, united
as
husband and wife, brother and sister, mother
and
child, and formed a military
alliance.
Centuries before the Declaration of
Independence
talked of natural rights and sanctioned
rebellion
against tyranny, African-Indian alliances acted
on
these concepts as they pursued their
American
dream in the mountains beyond the
white
settlements dotting the coastline. In 1537 Viceroy
Mendoza of Mexico, lamenting an insurrection
by
Africans, admitted "the Indians are with them."
As
slave revolts rocked the new European outposts
in
the Americas, they also enjoyed Native
American support.
In hard-to-reach backwaters of the Americas,
two
people of color people began to build their
own "maroon" colonies. Some were outlaw bands,
raiders
who preyed on whites, slaves and Indians
alike,
and lived a short, brutish life. But other
maroons
depended on family farming and herding and
built
peaceful relations and trade with Indian
villages,
slaves, and former
masters.
European officials judged maroons, in the words
of
a French historian, "the gangrene of
colonial
society." Their success as independent
economic
societies refuted white claims of
African
inferiority. Each day Maroons proved once
slaves
wrenched free they could govern themselves
and
prosper. Further, maroon encampments served
as
beacons for discontented slaves in a radius of
a
hundred miles, and stood as a clear and
present
danger to the European conquest. Some whites
saw
maroons as a knife pressed against the thin
line
of their rule, and they had a
point.
In a clockwork of military and legal
reflexes,
European authorities sought to eradicate
Black
Indian contacts and pit Red against Black. In
l523
a Royal Order to Hernando Cortez banned
Africans
from Indian villages. "Division of the races is
an
indispensable [control] element" said a
Spanish
officer. "Between the races we cannot dig too
deep
a gulf," announced a French
official.
Well-trained European armies ordered to
crush
maroon colonies met their match in
distant
mountains and jungles. "[Maroon]
self-respect
grows because of the fear whites have of them,"
a white Brazilian wrote to King Joao of Portugal
in
l719. Maroon songs resonated with
victorious pride:
"Black man rejoice, White man won't come
here.
And if he does, the Devil will take him
off."
White commanders in resplendent uniforms
met defeat and chose retirement in distant
European
capitals.
Foreign soldiers had little stomach for warfare
in
the wilderness against Black Indians, so
Europeans
hired or conscripted Indians. These were
experts
in frontier warfare, but their loyalty
was
questionable. In 1732 Spanish officials
in
Venezuela threw 150 conscripted Indians
and Africans, and 100 white soldiers against
Juan Andresote, a Black Indian, whom the Spanish
Crown
saw as a business rival. When Adresote's
guerrilla
fighters surrounded the invaders, their
soldiers
of color defected. Then, the musket fire
of
Andresote's men finished the work, killing
or
wounding more than half of the whites, as the
rest scurried
home.
Most maroon leaders were African-born, but
after 1700 leadership increasingly fell to those born
to
Black Indian marriages, people familiar
with
European negotiations. Black women, in
short
supply, sometimes played crucial roles in
village
life. In Amazonia, Brazil, Filippa Maria Aranha, who ruled a thriving colony, so
adroitly
maneuvered her armed forces against
the
Portuguese, there was no defeating her
and Portugal granted her people freedom,
independence
and sovereignty.
The largest American maroon settlement was
the
Republic of Palmares, a three-walled city
of 11,000 in northeastern Brazil. For almost
the
entire l7th century Palmares' armies hurled back repeated Dutch and Portuguese
military
expeditions. Finally, in 1794 Palmares
was
overrun, and according to legend, its
warriors,
threw themselves over a cliff rather
than
surrender.
In 1920 Carter G. Woodson, the father of
modern
Black history, wrote that in North America
entire
libraries were devoted to studies of
the
relationship between Africans and Europeans
and
the relationship between Native Americans
and
Europeans. But, said Dr. Woodson, the third
part
of the American triangle remained unexplored.
"One
of the longest unwritten chapters in the
history of the United States is that treating of
the
relations of the Negroes and the Indians."
Woodson
thought slaves "found among the Indians one
of their means of
escape."
The very notion of "Black Indians" still has
most
whites shaking their heads in disbelief or
smiling
at what appears to be a joke, an unlikely play
on
words. No one remembers any such person in
a
school text, western novel or Hollywood movie. None ever appeared. Even in African
American
families Indian connections were
occasionally
mentioned, but not as part of an historic
process.
Despite the vital role of remembrance for
people of color, a gallant heritage remained
hidden.
As researchers traced African roots
Indian
connections could no longer be ignored. In
the
1920s Columbia University anthropologist
Melville
J. Herskovits, renowned for documentation
of
African survivals in American life,
conducted
interviews in New York, West Virginia
and Washington, D.C. which determined that a fourth
to
a third of African Americans had Indian
ancestors.
Today in North American families the figure
is
closer to
95%.
Scholars have uncovered fascinating glimpses
of
the historic legacy. In 1622 the colony
of
Jamestown, Virginia was attacked by
Native
Americans but Africans were spared. In 1763
during
Pontiac's Indian uprising 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 Mohawks in
New York welcomed runaway slaves and
encouraged
intermarriage. Native American adoption
systems
knew no color line and accepted the
breathless
fugitives as sisters and brothers.
Woodson's
notion of an escape hatch notion proved
correct:
Indian villages welcomed fugitives, and served
as stations on the underground
railroad.
Native Americans were proud people, but
without
prejudice, and lacked an investment in
slavery.
Enslaved Africans near New Orleans fled to
nearby
Natchez villages, and by 1723 a free Black
man commanded Natchez expeditions against the
French.
One Black Indian village, Natanapalle, claimed
15
residents with 11 muskets and ammunition,
and
another band camped across Lake Pontchartrain.
British racial policy relied on divide and
rule.
In 1721 most English settlements denied
entrance
to Indians and ten years later whites in
Carolina
who brought Blacks to frontier lands faced
fines
of 100 pounds. Louisiana Governor Etienne
de Perier, whose African slaves escaped and
united
with Natchez Indians and in one raid destroy
a
French colony and left 200 whites dead,
warned
this "union between the Indian nations and
the
black slaves" could lead to "total loss" for
his
colony.
In British North America each treaty with
Native
Americans provided for the return of runaways.
In
1721 the Governor of Virginia made the
Five
Nations promise to return all fugitives; in
l726
the Governor of New York had the
Iroquois Confederacy promise; in l746 the Hurons
promised
and the next year the Delawares
promised.
Compliance was another matter. According
to
scholar Kenneth W. Porter none of these
nations
returned a slave. British officials also
offered staggering rewards to Indians who would
hunt
fugitives. In Virginia price was 35 deerskins,
and
in the Carolinas it was three blankets and
a
musket.
To finally seal off Native American villages
and
make Indians partners, British
merchants introduced Africans as slaves to the Five
Nations
- Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks
and
Seminoles.
Though less than 3% of Indian people owned
slaves,
bondage created destructive cleavages in
their
villages and promoted a class hierarchy based
on
"white blood." Indians of mixed white blood
stood
at the top, "pure" Indians next, and people
mixed
with of African descent were at the bottom.
In 1860 Indian populations figures over a
30-year
period showed a decline ranging from 20% to
40%,
but the numbers of slaves had increased to
2,511
for the Cherokees, 2,344 for the Choctaws
1,532
for the Creeks and 975 for the Chickasaws.
Slavery
had become a major economic factor in each
nation.
Indian masters, however, rejected the
worst
features of southern white bondage.
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 a brutal form
of bondage, insisted that Indians invite white
men
live in their villages and "control
matters."
Force, division and law threatened but failed
to
end Black-Indian friendships. Thomas
Jefferson
discovered among the Mattaponies of Virginia
"more Negro than Indian blood." The city of Los
Angeles
was founded in 1781 by forty-four people of
whom
all but two were African, Indian or a mixture
of
the two peoples. In the 1830s frontier
artist
George Catlin described "Negro and North
American
Indian, mixed, of equal blood" as "the
finest
built and most powerful men I have ever yet
seen."
Prominent whites, including Governor Perrier
of Louisiana, claimed Indians had "a great
aversion"
to Africans. But this was wishful thinking.
In 1730 his Choctaw allies, captured dozens of
Black
runaways who had served as military allies of
the
Natchez nation, but then refused to surrender
them. When the Africans were finally
returned
after 18 months, they boasted of their freedom
with the Natchez and the Choctaw. An angry
Perrier reported the returnees had a new "spirit
of
laziness, independence and
insolence."
The greatest flowering and most
militant
expression of the Black-Indian alliance took
place
in Florida. Enslaved Africans fled bondage
in
Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama and the Carolinas
to
make a new life on the peninsula claimed
by
Spain. Around the time of the American
Revolution,
Africans welcomed the Seminoles, a
breakaway
segment of the Creek nation, to the peninsula
and
taught them rice cultivation methods they
had
learned in Sierra Leone and Senegambia. On
this basis the two peoples formed an agricultural
and
military alliance that defeated repeated
invasions
by U.S. slaveholding
posses.
Finally, in 1819, to end a perceived threat
by
U.S. slaveholders, the United States purchased
Florida. By this time African-run
plantations
stretched for fifty miles along Florida's
fertile
Appalachicola river valley, and included herds
of
cattle and horses. In Florida the Red and
Black
Seminoles fought the United States Army, Navy
and
Marines to a standstill for four decades, and
some
Seminoles never surrendered. In three
Seminole
Wars the United States armed forces lost more
than
1500 U.S. soldiers, spent more than
$40,000,000
and at times Seminole armed forces tied up half
of
the U.S. Army on the peninsula. "This, you may
be
assured," said U.S. General Thomas Jesup in
l837,
"is a Negro, not an Indian war." It was
both.
Once away from European rule, African and
Native
American men and women found they had more
in
common than a foe wielding muskets and
whips.
Scholar Claude Levi-Strauss found both peoples
had
"precise knowledge" and "extreme familiarity
with
their biological environment," and gave
it
"passionate attention." Dr. Theda Perdue's
study of the Cherokee nation found that red and
black
people saw the spiritual and environmental as
one,
and common activities such as rising in
the
morning, hunting and curing illness as imbued
with
religious significance. Mountains and
hills
represented divinities; people, animals and
plants
carried life's messages; religion was not
reserved
for Sundays, but a matter of daily
reflection.
Indians and Africans both sought to
live
harmoniously with nature, cherished
kinship, stressed cooperation and created economies
based
on subsistence agriculture. Both peoples
rejected
pursuit of worldly treasures, and allowed
kinship
rather than ownership to dictate economic,
social
and judicial decisions and marital
customs.
Individual roles were subservient to and
flowed
from transcendent community
duties.
Analysis of faunal materials from a Black
18th
century colony at Fort Mose, Florida, by Dr.
Jane
Landers reveals that in their eating
habits
"Indian and black villages resembled each other
in many respects." Cherokee and other Native
American
rulers, noted Perdue, governed not by obtuse
legal
doctrines, but by an overarching,
"friendly
compact" members were born into and agreed
to
follow. These societies contrasted with
European
models that slashed the narrow ribbon of peace
to pursue individual wealth and regretted nothing
but
defeat.
By l860 African Americans has so thoroughly
mixed
with Native Americans throughout the
Atlantic
seaboard, that white legislators wanted to
revoke
their tax exemptions. In the Oklahoma
Indian
Territory 18% of the Cherokees,
Choctaws,
Chickasaws, Seminoles and Creeks were of
African
descent.
No less than in the North and South, the Civil
War
tore Indian nations apart. Surrounded
by
Confederate troops and influenced by
Confederate
Indian agents, most Native Americans in
Oklahoma
felt they had little choice but follow
the
Confederacy. However, in November 1861 hundreds
of
black and red Indians led by Creek Chief
Opothle Yahola, fought three pitched battles
against
Confederate whites and Indians to reach
Union
lines in Kansas, and offer their services.
With
the defeat of the Confederacy and its
Indian
allies, northerners sought revenge and the
U.S. scrapped existing treaties with Native
American
nations.
The Seminole nation made the most rapid
adjustment
to emancipation, electing six Black members to
its
first post-war governing Council. Black
Seminoles
began to build homes, churches, schools
and
businesses. Cherokees and Creeks moved
toward
equality somewhat slower and Choctaws
and
Chickasaws slower
yet.
Whatever unfairness African Americans felt
living
among Indians, they knew did not compare with
what
they could expect from southern whites.
"The
opportunities for our people in that
[Indian] country far surpassed any of the kind possessed
by
our people in the U.S.," wrote Editor O.S. Fox
of
the Cherokee Afro-American Advocate. His
people
knew that they lived among Indian men and
women
who would never brutalize or lynch their sons
and
daughters.
At the famous Congress of Angostura in
l8l9,
liberator Simon Bolivar was elected President
of
Venezuela and planned a military course that
would
eventually free the Americas of foreign rule.
But
he also took time to talk of our racial
history:
"It is impossible to say to which
human
family we belong. The larger part of
the
native population has
disappeared,
Europeans have mixed with Indians
and
the Negroes, and the negroes have
mixed
with the Indians. We are all born of
one
mother America, though our fathers
had different origins. This dissimilarity
is
of the greatest
significance."
Many people of African descent found escape
and
some located their American dream among
Native
Americans. Together two peoples of color
became
the first freedom-fighters of the Americas.
Their
courageous contribution to our legacy
of resistance to tyranny deserves
greater
recognition.
Copyright (c) 2001 William Loren Katz. All
Rights
Reserved.
---------------------------------------------------
William Loren Katz is a historian and author
of
almost 40 books on African American History.
He
can be reached at wlkatz@aol.com.
"William Loren Katz said he refused to
continue
teaching American history story from textbooks
he
felt told a distorted story of white
cowboys
winning the West and an all-white Congress
paying
the way to democracy. "So for the past 40
year, Mr. Katz has directed his energy toward what
he
regards as correcting the pages of the
nation's
history - a history, he says that must
include
forgotten accomplishments of American blacks
and
Indians. . .. 'A half history is dangerous, 'he
said. 'The truth will set us all
free.''
-The Washington
Times