The epigraph in my memoir “Black Indian” states: “This book represents only one person and one family’s story of being bi-ethnic/bi-racial, their history and heritage of being African American and Native Americans. It is not the experience of every person, family and nation who claim both African and Indigenous Indian blood, and by no means is this representative of every Indigenous American or their respective experiences in this country. Though I introduce social, racial and cultural issues and explore their implications in my family, there is a pantheon of scholarly literature and documentation steeped in the Mixed Blood discourse. I have listed a good number of the texts and genealogy sites at the end of this book.”
As a writer, educator, researcher and storyteller, an expert in African American and American Indian literature, and Black Indian scholarship, I’m careful to delineate what my research has shown in connection with my personal experiences and family lore — how the paths of two traditionally oppressed peoples in America have consistently merged, converged, and sometimes conflicted, yet more often than not, unified.
In my memoir, I explore how my family’s story represents the saga of Mixed-race narratives of Black people and Native Americans which, in North America, began in the Southeast of this country, the Carolinas and Virginia colonies. One of the earliest intersections of the first enslaved Africans of the Jamestown, Virginia, and Richmond areas (all Powhatan Nation, Nottoway, Cheroenhaka Nottoway, Nansemond lands) Indigenous Indians occurred when they came together as workers on cotton and tobacco plantations, as farmers, hunters, trade smiths, and eventually as family and freedom fighters like the Black Indian Seminole John Horse, liberating their people from servitude.
Another under-researched, though tragic moment African Americans and American Indians coming together from 1820-1860s was when the Five Civilized Tribes – the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole – owned Black slaves in the early 1800s, when they were forced to adopt “white ways,” supposedly to make whites feel “safer” around them, showing that they’d “assimilated.”
In 1833 the U.S. census showed that of the Creek Nation’s 22,694 population, they held 902 black slaves. The 1835 census showed that of the 16,542 Cherokee, they owned 1,592 black slaves. The numbers of slaves owned only increased until the end of the Civil War, when the tribes had to grant their Black or Mixed Blood slaves full tribal rights and citizenship. Although not the “chattel slavery” that white slavers practices on Black slaves, many of these Black slaves were husbands and wives or somehow related as cousins, but it was still enslavement.
These family intersectional lines were constantly blurred.
My mother’s great-grandpa Manuel, a Coharie Indian, married Ida Mahoney, a Mulatto, and Ida’s mom, Mariah “Anne” Peak, is listed on a family photograph as “full-blood Cherokee.” But a later pedigree chart from my great-aunt Katheryn lists Mariah as both Cherokee and Pequot Indian, born in Oklahoma. My Manuel grandfathers were full-blood Coharie/Neuse Indians from Sampson County, North Carolina, who married American Indian, Black or other Mixed-race women.
My mom’s grandmother, Caledonia Frances Stafford Roberts, a Roberts by birth, was one-fourth Cherokee. Caledonia was a descendent of the Roberts Settlement, one of the first Free People of Color settlements in Indiana, in 1830 which was a Mixed-race, bi- and tri-racial community. Roberts family lore has it that the patriarch, James Roberts, born in the mid-1700s was the son of an American Indian mother and African “servant” father who was never a slave. Descriptions of James, a Free Person of Color who owned and sold over 700 acres of land between 1765 and 1809 in Northampton County, North Carolina, confirm his ethnicity. While the family reported that James’ mother was Cherokee, she could very well have been Tuscarora, Nottoway, or Meherrin because those were also predominant tribes in the area at that time. Because of shared experiences in colonial American interracial marriages between African Americans and American Indians in the 1700 and 1800s were the norm, despite prohibitive laws.
My Roberts and Staffords families are listed on the Guion Miller African Cherokee Rolls, a collection of oral narrative interviews from 1908-10 with people who, wanting to receive land allotments promised in exchange for already stolen lands, asserted their Indian lineage but ironically couldn’t prove it by U.S. government standards because of Indian Removal, erasure, and forced migration.
No reparations for them.
In my latest collection of poems, a work-in-progress, “Artificial Earth, Circa Los Angeles, 1771-1848: Poems,”I turn my lens on the Mixed-race founders of Los Angeles, Indios or Indigenous, Africans, and Europeans, who came from Sonora and Sinaloa Mexico. These 11 impoverished families, 44 men, women and children, were paid to come to Los Angeles by the Spanish for their own “grand design” of building missions and “civilizing Indians.” The Mixed-race settlers trekked 1,000 miles from their villages in Mexico, stopped at the San Gabriel Mission to re-supply themselves before moving on to build their homes in what is now known as downtown Los Angeles’ Olvera Street District. They settled near or next to the Indigenous nations already there, or neighboring the area, the Chumash and the Kitz [Keech] Nation, also referred to as Gabrieleño/Tongva people, and other Indigenous peoples. Until we unearth those first experiences, contributions and communal interactions of those first families, the true story of Los Angeles will remain untold. My work and scholarship are an attempt to bring these narratives to life.
My forthcoming book (2024), “Children of the Mixed Blood Trail: The Formation and Migration of Mixed-Race Communities, Free People of Color and Black Indian Families, Settlements and Villages from the Southeast to the Midwest from 1630-1950,”looks at the migratory and intersectional experiences of the Black Indian, Mixed-race families, settlements and communities who were also called Free People of Color and mulatto. More aptly, my book will explore the formation, intersection and migration of this subgroup through the lens of six prominent families who migrated from the North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia’s Southeast into Indiana, Illinois, Ohio and Michigan in the late 1700s to 1890s, and established the first Free People of Color settlements and institutions in the Midwest.
Ultimately, Black-Indian intersections are ripe with cultural significance, social relevance, and pivotal touchstones of our collective history, yet these narratives often remain hidden, untold and for some reason, obfuscated on multiple levels, and especially in our educational systems. By neglecting to include the rich narratives of Black Indian historical figures like John Horse, Crispus Attucks, and Mildred Loving in our classrooms, office spaces and boardrooms, in our literature, art and institutions, we’re missing an invaluable opportunity to learn from their Mixed-race heritage, their struggles, their lives and experiences, and most definitely their, our, ability to maintain our identity and selfhood.
