Emma Blackwood
Issue Brief
Title: Native Americans/African Americans
Description: This issue brief examines aspects of the historical relationship
between Native Americans and African Americans in the United States, in particular
the enduring wounds originating in enslavement and intermarriage.
Key Words: Native Americans, African Americans, Europeans, Enslavement,
Intermarriage
Key Points:

Individuals possessing both African American and Native American heritage
are unable to reap the benefits and identify themselves as Native American
due to the blood quantification system.

While the individuals referred to as “Black Cherokee Freedmen” were raised
within the culture of the Cherokee tribe, they weren’t acknowledged as being
a part of the tribe and their cultural identity was essentially erased.

The blood quantification system employed against those of mixed Native
American/African American race mirrors that of the 1-drop rule applied to
mixed white/African-American populations.

The celebration of “purity” forced individuals of mixed races to be subjugated
and left with a lack of identity.
Brief:
While on the surface it might appear that African-Americans and Native
Americans share only the most obvious of cross-cutting cleavages – mutually
miserable treatment at the hands of white Europeans – an overview of the two
racial groups’ history indicates even deeper, more complex and more tragic
connections. The two ethno-racial groups certainly began their American journey
united through their shared subjugation by white Europeans. European exploration
and colonization of the Americas resulted in the uprooting of Native Americans and
forced assemblage together in smaller regions of the Europeans’ choosing. Similarly,
the European colonization of Africa (and America) forced political, social, religious
and economic practices on Africans while simultaneously displacing and exploiting
them. But these shared experiences of mutual forced relocation and control set the
stage for an even more long-lasting, binding relationship between the two groups.
The earliest record of African and Native American contact was in 1502 when
the first enslaved Africans arrived in Hispaniola. Soon thereafter Africans began
escaping from these European-made colonies and into the tribes of Native
Americans who often absorbed them. This immediately led to intermarriages
between the two groups, permanently establishing their connection. Soon
thereafter, concerns flared among Europeans fearful of the threat posed by the
mixing of these two cultures. The Europeans’ solution was to divide and conquer,
pitting the two groups against one another. They sought to convince Native
Americans that African Americans worked against their best interests, and among
other things offered rewards to Native Americans who returned runaway African
slaves.
As intermarriages between not only Native Americans and African Americans
but also whites and Native Americans continued to increase, cultural assimilation
and a pressure to be accepted by Europeans caused the Cherokee tribe (one of the 5
main tribes) to become divided. Slave-owning Cherokee (making up more than 7%
of Cherokee families) stood on one side of the divide, and African-Cherokee people
and the Cherokee’s African slaves stood on the other. These African Americans who
were once the slaves of the Cherokee we now refer to as Black Cherokee Freedmen.
(In a truly tragic irony, of course, these divisions were temporarily dissolved in the
form of the Trail of Tears, which marked the moment of joint forced exodus of
Cherokee slave-owners, their African American slaves, and those of mixed race from
their original lands to “Indian territory.” This shared experience, while not created
by blood, was an additional tie that inextricably bound the two groups.)
The particular nature of the enslavement of Africans in Cherokee society
mirrored that of American/European enslavement of Africans. While the Native
Americans of the five “civilized” tribes (the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek,
and Seminole) may have instituted their own “slave code” granting African
Americans citizenship to their tribes after emancipation, the practical treatment of
these citizens was not dissimilar to the long history of discrimination and
marginalization of African Americans in the United States. Recent stories appear to
add currency to this legacy of marginalization: Chief Chad Smith, a celebrated
modern leader of the Cherokee Nation, supported the 2011 exclusion of
descendants of the Cherokee Freedmen as citizens, despite their having been
considered a part of the Nation for 200 years.
Finally, the two groups bear a curious similarity in terms of the rules
employed to determine eligibility for the benefits of citizenship. Similar to the “1drop rule” once employed in mainstream America – the principle of racial
classification asserting that any person with even one ancestor of African heritage is
considered to be Black, justifying his deprivation of certain rights – the Black
Cherokee Freedman are now being marginalized by the degree (or lack thereof) of
Indian blood that they possess.
While we may initially contend the only relationship between these two
groups is their status today as minority groups, a brief understanding of their
history indicates a much more complexly layered reality. Europeans effectively
drove a wedge between them such that, despite their parallel circumstances and
their intermixing, they often found they had no true kinship. Finally, while it should
make sense for this two-minority group to bond over their stolen identities, instead
their relationship seems fraught with questions of ethnic wholesomeness and
“purity” instead of an acceptance of a rich, mixed heritage.
Images:
http://www.nativelegalupdate.com/2011/09/articles/cherokee-nation-banishesafricanamerican-members/
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/an-ancestry-of-african-nativeamericans-7986049/
http://www.manataka.org/page2538.html
General References:
“African Americans and Native Americans Share a Rich History”
http://www.aaregistry.org/historic_events/view/african-native-americans-sharerich-history
“Cherokee Tribe Faces Decision On Freedmen”
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7513849
“Black Indians – Maroon Communities, In Indian Territory
http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/articles/pages/6006/Black-Indians.html
Websites:
“An Ancestry of African-Native Americans”
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/an-ancestry-of-african-nativeamericans-7986049/?no-ist
“Researching Black Indian Genealogy”
http://www.african-nativeamerican.com/1IntroPage.htm
“African-Native American Genealogy”
http://www.african-nativeamerican.com/
“Native American Roots in Black America Run Deep”
http://thegrio.com/2012/11/22/native-american-roots-in-black-america-rundeep/
“Cherokee Leader Wants to Overturn Freedman Decision”
http://web.archive.org/web/20070927215238/http://www.kten.com/Global/stor
y.asp?S=4633347