African Americans and Indigenous Americans

Hey, folks.

So, as part of my graduate work this semester, I’m taking a course here at Northeastern University titled “Indigenous and Settler Colonial Cities.” The class covers a lot of ground, but a lot of it has to do with the experiences and histories of indigenous/Native American/American Indian people in urban settings. This weekend, I’ve spent a lot of time reading my assigned book for this week, which is called Native Hubs: Culture, Community, and Belonging in Silicon Valley and Beyond by Renya K. Ramirez.

I’m not really here to talk about this class or this book, but I have been in the headspace of thinking about indigenous people a lot this week. So when it came time fore me to do some research on The HistoryMakers Digital Archive, naturally I wanted to see what the people in it had to say about Native Americans.

People of African descent and people indigenous to the American continent, of course, do indeed have a long history of interaction in most countries in the western hemisphere, including the United States. Much of this history is well-known; most of it, probably, not so much. For example, most people are familiar with Crispus Attucks, the escaped slave who was the first person to be killed in the Boston Massacre—often cited as the first casualty of the American Revolution. However, what many may not know is that Attucks was half-indigenous (specifically Wampanoag) and half-African. Indeed, records from the 1770s seem to indicate that Attucks was known more as an indigenous or “mulatto” person than as a Black person.

“Death of Crispus Attucks at the Boston Massacre, 5th March, 1770” by James Wells Champney (1843-1903). Wikimedia Commons.

After several hours of watching clips on the Digital Archive, I was unsurprised to find that a great many HistoryMakers brought up Native Americans mostly to discuss how they themselves, as African Americans, have some native ancestry. They usually didn’t name a tribe, and if they did, the tribe was usually Cherokee or Blackfoot. Here’s a good example: “I think there was a mixture of Cherokee Indian [Native American] in our family some way,” says MusicMaker Michael Mauldin in a clip in which he talks about his family background. “And obviously in that area in North Carolina, there's a lot of Cherokee Indians, you know, the tribes. … But my grandmother had long, black flowing hair, and I've often heard--so, someway, somehow, I think there's an Indian descent of sorts on my mother's side of the family.”

It was really fascinating to see how many people said they had some Native American in their background. Whether those claims are true or not, it’s become something of a meme among Black genealogists that every family has a story of so-and-so being an Indian. Even if there’s no evidence to back it up—or even if they don’t really make sense. For example, there’s no reason a person from the Blackfoot tribe would have been in 1880s North Carolina, when the Blackfeet are from Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho. I’m not saying it’s not impossible, it’s just unlikely.

Ms. DeVore, for example, probably heard that her ancestor was a “Cherokee princess” from one of her older relatives. But, of course, there has never been such a thing as a “Cherokee princess.” Just ask any of the three federally recognized Cherokee tribes in the U.S. today.

HistoryMaker Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in an article for The Root, writes about this family stories of having Native American ancestry. He describes discovering that the family stories that had been passed down to him about being Native American were untrue, and how this disappointed much of his family. It’s an interesting read, if you want to read more about this topic. For our purposes, an important takeaway from the article is that some African Americans do indeed have Native American ancestry, and this often shows up in DNA admixture tests—however, that ancestry probably comes from the colonial period (around the time Crispus Attucks was born!) and not from someone’s great-grandpa with high cheekbones. According to a 2014 study from 23andMe, the average African American has just 0.8% DNA that points toward indigenous American ancestry.

Genealogist Tony Burroughs, in his interview for The HistoryMakers, has one idea about why these stories of being part indigenous persist among so many African Americans. In the clip, “Anthony ‘Tony’ Preston Burroughs talks about the social utility of Native American ancestry,” Burroughs says this: “And I think what happened was as a defense mechanism, so they could survive in the society, that if people weren't as light skinned as those that could pass and they were like, you know, my complexion or whatever, they'd say, well, I'm part Puerto Rican, or, I'm part Native American Indian, you know. And that helped them survive in the community because they weren't like all black which was the lowest rung in the totem pole.” So, that was very interesting to hear about.

Another dimension to this was the fact that some Native Americans, especially those in the so-called Five Civilized Tribes, held Black people as slaves before the Civil War. EducationMaker Willard Johnson, for example speaks about how he had an ancestor (Charlie Davis) who was a Black man enslaved to a Cherokee family. It was very interesting to hear from Johnson about his interactions with real Native Americans and the legacy of both Native American slavery and the Trail of Tears. As Johnson says, “They thought Charlie Davis was a Cherokee, but he's politically a Cherokee. I don't know that he had any genetic connection with the Cherokee at all. And I'm not sure I'll ever be able to find out.”

Lastly, I’d like to share something I thought was relevant today. If you pay attention to the news, you’ve probably heard about how the Washington football team recently changed their name from a racial slur related to Native Americans. However, today many high school mascots and some college mascots are Native American caricatures, including that of my own high school. HistoryMaker Cheryl Saunders had a great deal to say on this subject in her interview: “I was a little apathetic about it as a commuter student until I saw a drawing and it was terrible of a squaw who had Sioux on her dress supposedly depicted a squaw had given a blow job to a bison. And I said that is just base--I'm just--I was against that. When we bring a group of people down to that level and that if you looked at the picture of this woman she could look like anybody's mother, sister, aunt, friend who was Indian, and I think that's wrong. So, I'm, I'm adamantly opposed to that. I don't think we should make people mascots. They're people and they should be proud of their heritage, not where they're kicking a ball, they're symbolizing a ball being kicked around.”

I agree with Saunders wholeheartedly, and hopefully we’re moving toward a future in which everyone understands why such mascots should be socially unacceptable.

Welp, that’s about all I have for this week. I’ll keep you all posted next week!