This manuscript is designed to honor the truth respecting my Afro-Native Ameri-can ancestor’s struggle against Euro-American hegemony, enslavement, degradation, and encroachment. The extended “Trail of Tears” from the Indian Wars and forced migration to concentration-like reservations to the civil rights struggles through the 60s and 70s is examined in regard to Dawes policies of exclusion, Jim Crow, and the “divide-and-conquer” policies. Black-Indian heroes are highlighted during the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries for their contributions to the quest for freedom, self-determi-nation, respect, and justice.

            Interpretations used provide progressive and alternate explanations of how Black- Indians maintained their dignity, traditions, customs, and more against greed-based hegemony that forced them to concede ownership of the ancestral grounds, as well as all claims to recognition and reparations. As landowners among the Indians and in their own towns, Blacks of Native American today are primarily landless or vessels of banks and mortgage companies. Self-determination forged by hunting and fishing is now replaced with mass consumption and handouts. But there are those that do not buy the corporate line that “material wealth defines success” and continue to fight, with their progressive allies, for the humanity of this historically and tribally excluded group.

            What circumstances, institutions, and events created courtships and intermarriages between the runaway African slaves and Native Americans to produce Black-Indians?  One estimate is that seventy-five percent of the African American population has Native American lineage. The Father of Black History, Carter G. Woodson, wondered aloud whether runaways did not find the “means to escape from slavery” among the Indians. In addition, he believed that this story is “one of the longest unwritten chapters in the history of the United States” (Katz, 1986; Woodson, 1920).

            Black-Indians are a product of the peculiar institution that placed Indian women slaves into the communal quarters with African men and their offspring’s in the sanc-tuaries for runaways among the tribes and maroon communities. The quest for freedom led some of the latter (offspring’s) to either escape individually or join the Afro-Indian plantation raiders. The Euro-American colonist responded by using a “divide-and-conquer” policy to force Indians to surrender the runaways under their protection. This policy evolved into more forceful and legal means to separate African Americans from Indian Americans. After three Seminole Wars, “Trail of Tears”, and other successful military actions against the under armed Afro-Indian alliance, confining Native Ameri-cans to concentration-like reservations as wards of the state, Jim Crow and Dawes policies the Euro-Americans successfully broke the Afro-Indian alliance to the detriment of both groups and the environment. This book does provide suggestions on how this alliance can be rebuilt and how it would make this society more humane, inclusive, and in harmony with the environment to save our future. 

            How then did the peculiar institution produce Black-Indians and their resistance against slavery? The suitability of Native-Americans to fit-in a labor-intensive agricul-tural economy, their lack of immunity to European diseases, ability to escape to Native American sanctuaries and the wealth amassed through the African slave trade led Euro-Americans to install an African-based institute of slavery (Minges, 1999; Wilson, 1935).  African slavery was imposed on the top of pre-existing system of Indian slavery (Minges, 1999; Williams, 1882). Africans and Indians were perceived as one in respects to labor or source of wealth and security risk, if not harshly controlled they must be subordinated.

            Sharing the common experience of enslavement, Africans and Native Americans worked together in the fields, they shared communal living quarters, worldviews, customs, traditions, myths and legends (Minges, 199; Washington, 1909; Willis, 1970).  Interracial marriages were outcomes of proximity, nature and shortages of suitable mates.  There were three times more African men to women compared to three to five times more Indian women to men among the slave population during the eighteenth century when the slave trade peaked. Many of the Native American males were victims of the intertribal wars initiated by the English to extract female Indian slaves, European-breed diseases, and prolonged war with the colonist (Minges, 1999; Perdue, 1998; Wright, 1981). 

            Black-Indians, the offspring’s of love in and from Euro-American slavery, and their contributions to the development of this superpower has been and continues to be treated by traditional historians as invisible, denied or handed to others. Past events were seen through the eyes of a slaveholding and Indian killing class (Katz, 1986). The omis-sion of the contributions of Black-Indians to this nation’s wealth and development was more serious than distortions portrayed. Artist like George Catlin who painted a magnify-cent portrait of Chief Osceola omitted any images or mention of the fifty-two Black Seminoles out of the fifty-five warriors serving as his personal bodyguards. Omissions of this kind vastly undermined the role of Black-Indians in our history (Katz, 1986).

            The seizure and mistreatment of Indians and the enslavement of Africans are the parallel institutions that create Black-Indians. To protect the peculiar institutions whose labor was a source of the colonist’s wealth and prevent massive resistance, Euro-Americans developed brutal methods of control (divide-and-conquer) and degrading racial policies including racism and white hegemony (Katz, 1986).

            This book introduces evidence that European genocidal attacks on Indians may have an explanation besides land hunger and greed. Fear of the alliance between Indians and Africans did encourage Euro-Americans to eliminate members of the former group.  This overriding fear was clearly a motive for the Seminole Wars and genocidal “Trail of Tears.”

            Knowledge revealed can reinforce the drive for self-determination, recognition, respect, and justice. In doing so, it would also lessen the “stereotype threat” that undermines African and Native American achievement, performance, and potential. The truth will set us free from self-degradation, hopelessness, depression, and despair in a “blame-the-victim” society where people of color are disproportionately casted among the unemployed, underemployed, uneducated, victims of street crimes, and the impri-soned. 

            Special thanks go to Helen Majors and Nichol Stephens who each proofread a chapter. I also would like to thank the African American Studies Association for encouraging me to elaborate on my thesis regarding the Afro-Indian relationship and its impact on our history. AASA has invited me to present chapters to its annual conventions in Houston 2005 and Baton Rouge 2006-07 with the Native American, Hispanic and Latino, and Asia Studies Associations. Discussions and comments sparked further inquiry and research.

            Technologically and instrumentally the Editor Software for Teachers and Stu-dents was invaluable in proofreading all chapters and the preface. This software product is capable of identifying tens of thousands of mistakes and weaknesses of the kinds that elude the word processors’ writing tools. It helped me clean up the clutter including my repetitious error pattern respecting jargon, slang, misused words, and syntax. If these errors persist, suggestions were either ignored or omitted. Properly making a point or communicating what happened and why holds precedence over perfect diction.

                                                                                                     Rufus O. Jimerson, Ed. D.

REFERENCES

Katz, W. L.  (1986). Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage. New York: Atheneum.

Minges, P. N.  (1999). “`all my Slaves whether Negroes, Indian, Mustee, or Molattoes:’ Toward a Thick Description of Slave Religion.” American Religious Experience.

Perdue, T. (1998). Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835. Lincoln: University Press.

Washington, B. T. (1909). The Story of the Negro: The Rise from Slavery. New York: Doubleday and Co.

Williams, G. W. (1882). History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880: Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and Citizens. New York: Knickerbocker Press.

Willis, W. (1970). “Anthropology and Negroes on the Southern Colonial Frontier.”  James Curtis and Lewis Gould, Editors. The Black Experience in America.  Austin: University of Texas Press.

Wilson, S. (1935). “Indian Slavery in the South Carolina Region.” Journal of Negro History, 22, 440.

Woodson, C. G. (1920). “The Relations of Negroes and Indians in Massachusetts.”  Jour-nal of Negro History, 45.

Wright, J. L. (1981). The Only Land They Knew: The Tragic Story of the American Indians in the Old South. New York: Free Press.