BLACK INDIAN RELATIONS

Chief Mankiller:


What is the site?

Dr. Minges:

The site is http://www.columbia.edu/~pm47/afram.  And if you want to look for it by using keywords, use "aframerindian slave narratives." If you search for that you will be able to find it. Once again, I think they are a very important resource.

Chief Mankiller:

Thank you, that was very moving. We go now to Ms Deborah Tucker, whom I met when Willard Johnson brought her to my home.

I probably should make another comment about Willard. What I found absolutely fascinating was that Willard found that there was a Lowrey in his background, a Cherokee family named Lowrey, through the research of his Institute. He came to Eastern Oklahoma, and not only did he find the Lowrey family in the [Freedmen] records, but there was a Lowrey community, and a Lowrey school that had a direct connection to his family. He is helping people involve family connections.

Anyway, Debbie came with him. She is the director of Community Outreach and Cultural Activities at the Adamany Library of Wayne State University, and is a Board Member of the KIAANAFH. She is a lecturer on cultural affinities and historic patterns of miscegenation between African American and Native American people. She is interested in this issue and has done a lot of research on it, so with that I will pass it on to her.

Ms. Deborah Tucker:

Thank you. Good afternoon! When I was reviewing the tons of material that I have collected over the past twenty years or so, it was really overwhelming to find materials that weren't just about Blacks, and Blacks and Indians, as a mixture, but materials about blacks and slavery, materials about Native Americans and the government, in serious journals. But yet all of them had some spot where they talked about the connection between the two groups.

And it really reminded me that this is a perpetual parallel.

· Both groups had experienced forced removal, the Blacks from Africa, from their continent, and both had been enslaved by the settlers, early on. The Indian experienced social disorder, colonialism and the removal for more than five hundred years, while Blacks had endured (this) more than four hundred years.

· Both groups were called savages. Both groups were forced into a three-way racially and culturally denigrating situation, thereby forcing immense and intense cultural interaction, in order that the European might take the Red man's land, and used the Black man's labor to work that land.

· Both groups had strong oral traditions for record keeping purposes, family ancestry, and for instructional purposes-- storytelling traditions that both entertain and inform, as well as oral traditions for the development of helping-, listening- skills (something we probably have forgotten a lot, of late) and

· Both groups have powerful cultural traditions with a feeling for death and birth, very similarly. A lot of customs are shared.

· Both groups have strong spiritual traditions, with rituals and ceremonies that are an integral part of daily life. Indians feel the "Great Spirit" as a spiritual theme, while Blacks' survival of slavery was really based around the church. The holy men, the Shaman, have the positions of highest esteem within the tribe. And they are the link between the people and the spirits. And most of them, Black and Indian, had healing powers and clairvoyant powers.

· The musical component is a strong point in both groups' ceremonies. When the drum was taken away from the Black slaves, they resorted to tapping out their messages, and thereby developed tap dancing.

· Dance was a major part of the ceremonies and cultural expression in both groups.

· Both the Red and the Black cultures include medicine men and use of natural medicinal herbs. That is a strong tradition among the enslaved Africans as well as among the indigenous people. Slaves transferred their medical skills into home-remedies based on North-American plants and herbs.

· Both groups insisted on holding on to the culture and customs, resisting the white men's ways. The two groups were both forced to collaborate and practice "conflict resolution" before this was a buzz word.

· However, both had tribes amongst them who believed that warfare was a noble pursuit.

The parallels are just so many, I could go on and on, but an interesting fact that I think a lot of people are not aware of is that both groups were often educated together, as Wilma mentioned. At the Hampton Institute, in Virginia, between 1883 and 1902, over 1388 Indians from 55 different tribes attended the black school in Hampton Virginia.