BLACK/INDIAN RELATIONS

Dr. Daniel F. Littlefield Jr.:


I formulated some more general kinds of statements about the first question, and I was looking at the nature of the relationship between African Americans and American Indians in the long scope of history and I came up with five generalized points that I would like to make and than we can pursue these later in the "question and answer" if you want that in more detail.

The first thing I would point out is that this relationship is longstanding. As the historical record suggests, from the first contact with Spanish in the western hemisphere there was contact between African-Americans and American Indian people. It became a factor, that relation, became a factor in tribal politics and international relations and intertribal relations as early as the eighteenth century. And from that point on to the present, it has remained an issue in American Indian affairs.

Secondly, I would say that that relationship was shaped by the characteristics of slavery as it was practiced by individual tribes. I was asked by the Smithsonian Institution to write a chapter for the last volume of the Handbook on American Indians that it is putting together, on African-Indian relations, and I refused to do that because I didn't think it could be done in an overall essay, it needs to be done on a tribal basis. Because the practice of slavery varied widely among the tribes in the Southeast, from something that approximated chattel slavery among some of the Cherokees, Choctaws and Chickasaws to a kind of loose coalition that existed in the Seminole and Creek Nations. Also, as Willard mentioned, there was a military alliance that existed for many decades between the Seminoles and African people, people of African descent, in Florida, before removal to the West, and the military officials in Florida who were fighting that war determined early that it was not an Indian war but "a Negro war," in their words.

The relationship among those five tribes was legalized in the treaty in 1866 and then again in the agreement that the tribes came to with the Dawes Commission. And in enrolling the tribes for allotments, the Dawes Commission made a roll of the Freedmen members of all of those tribes. The treaties required that the tribes adopt their former slaves and free blacks as members of the Nations. The Cherokees, Creeks and Seminoles adopted theirs immediately, the Chickasaws never did, and the Choctaws did reluctantly in 1885. And those processes of adoptions under the treaties in late 1866 put a particular slant on the day to day lifestyle of people of African descent within those tribal nations.

How all the freedmen fared under the tribal governments varied widely.

As Willard has indicated, the Seminoles created two tribal bands for the Freedmen. They had equal representation in the National Council along with the twelve Seminole bands. In the Creek nation there were three tribal towns created for the former slaves and free blacks, they had one representative in the House of Kings and then one representative in the house of Warriors, the lower house of the National Council, plus another member of the National Council for every 200 people in the tribal towns. There was less representation in the Cherokee Nation because the Cherokees elected their members of the National Council at large from the legislative district. So the difference in political power that was wielded within the tribes by Freedmen members varied considerably. In the Chickasaw Nation they had no rights whatsoever, legal, civil, educational. In the Choctaw Nation (they had) very little participation in tribal governmental affairs after adoption in 1885.

The relationship between people of African descent and the tribal nations in the twentieth century has been marked by the racism that has informed our society in the twentieth century. The federal government built into its structures in Oklahoma, when the tribes were dissolved, a racial factor. The legislature in Oklahoma declared Indians white by law and then of course the first two bills passed by the state legislature in Oklahoma, (were) Jim Crow bills, that segregated people of African descent. This meant that tribal Freedmen who were admitted under the treaty of 1866 fell under the segregation laws. So the two groups were on a different track throughout the 20th century and even here today, I think, we have been hearing the results of that.

Chief Mankiller:

Thank you Daniel. Daniel Littlefield wrote a number of very important books on the subject and we hope to post on the NCAI website, after the conference, his suggested reading and films that you can see.

I would like to turn next to Dr. David Wilkins-- he is a Lumbee, and an authority on federal recognition processes. He is an Associate Professor of Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota, a political scientist, and a specialist on the Lumbee Nation. And most of you know the Lumbees had been trying to get federal recognition for a very long time. I don't think I am one of those people that sees racism in everything that goes on in this country--I try to have a good mind about that, and be open-- but I believe that to some extent that part of their battle, their struggle to receive federal recognition, has to do with the fact that a lot of the Lumbee people are tribal people who intermarried with African Americans and other people, so this has made their struggle more difficult.

Dr. David Wilkins:

Thank you Wilma. It is my pleasure to be on this august panel, really, and to see the left side of the room fill up! [laughter]--it is nice to have some folks on the left, and to have them be young people makes it all the better-- to discuss this long ignored, really stealth subject, if you will--the relation between African-Americans and American Indians. I didn't feel too bad when I heard that my name had been left off the program, when I discovered that some of the conference doings were taking place in an auditorium named for Roy Wilkins, no relation, but, he was a powerful and very important African American civil rights leader. I don't know whether it was a coincidence, or fate, or what. Either way, I think it is most appropriate that we are talking about Black and Indian relations, and that there are now two Wilkins on the formal agenda, one a noted civil rights leader, and the other a relatively unknown Lumbee professor.

In response to the first question, and the others as well, I can only speak from my own Nation's perspective, the Lumbee, and then only from an indirect impressionistic perspective, because I am no scholar on this field.

My area is federal Indian policy and law and tribal government, and I have only come to the subject indirectly as I have done my research on my tribe's quest for recognition.

But, here is where I think my tribe's historical relationship with African Americans, while not exactly comparable with the other Eastern tribes, can nevertheless teach us something about the larger dynamics of Black and Indian relations. And, it is this: one of the primary reasons the Lumbees have been denied federal recognition is that we are said, very quietly these days, to exhibit too much of an ad-mixture of non-Indian racial characteristics, with an emphasis being placed almost exclusively on our perceived, and real, mixtures with African-Americans. This is interesting, since the documentary and oral evidence of my people points to the Lumbees having intermarried actually more with whites than with African-Americans.

But, as Wilma noted in her comments, Indian white intermarriage or "hanky-panky," if you will, has been acceptable historically while Indian black involvement, or "hanky-panky," was deemed to dilute or to corrupt the tribe's cultural and genetic identity. This is a perverse form of racism, folks, and I think we can all agree upon that!

I must say that this is an extremely touchy subject among the Lumbee as well as in other North and South Carolina and Virginia tribes and those in other Mid-Atlantic and Eastern states. Now, Oklahoma is a whole different world and we have to talk to Dr. Littlefield about that. No one, to my knowledge, has engaged in any sort of social scientific study about the Lumbee or other non-recognized mid-Atlantic tribes to ascertain, if it is even possible, what the actual level of Indian-black interaction has been across time. People just make these grand statements without ever having the research to support it.

All we have, in fact, are dangerous guesstimates of some "Anthros" and historians who tend to lump the Lumbee and other tribes into a "tri-racial-isolate" category. That's the major concept that filtered throughout the Southeast. I don't know if (that applies) in southern Oklahoma or not. How weird! People make generalized and unsubstantiated statements like: "the Lumbee have a long history of intermarrying with people of European and African origin. "How many tribes, I wonder, have not had a history of intermarrying with other people, regardless of race, ethnicity or national origin. The Southwest-- my wife is Navajo -- is a tri-racial isolate of Spanish, Indian and white. Here in the Great Lakes -- French, English and Indian. And, you can mix that up depending on what region of the country you are in. Neither of these allegedly scholarly observations did the Lumbee or other quasi-recognized tribes much good, and they are not very good social science either, since they rarely are backed by empirical data. Such categorical statements tend rather to reinforce existing stereotypes about the Lumbee and other small eastern tribes who always struggled in a legal wonderland, as Indian people denied recognition as such because of existing federal and state policies that historically only recognized two races, black or white, or dealt only with certain tribes, like the Cherokee in North Carolina, because of their territorial location, military capability, and treaty position.

In short, the nature of the connection is that of a complicated beast, although it varies from tribe to tribe, region to region and people to people. Thank you.

Chief Mankiller:

Thank you. I think I will go now to Dr. Patrick Minges. My Goodness, everybody is a "Dr. " except me! OK. He is a religious historian, the Director of Publications of the Human Rights Watch, a specialist on the Keetoowah Society and on Cherokee history.

Dr. Patrick Minges:

I guess I am kind of lucky to be up here, but one reason why I am up here is that I was reading a book [by Chief Mankiller] called "The Chief and Her People" and as I was going through this book, it talked about Africans on the "Trail of Tears." This piqued my interest, and so I went on to research it, and spent about ten years on that. One of the places where I ended up was called "The Slave Narratives. "In the late 1930s, as part of the [U. S. Federal Government’s] Works Project Administration, they sent researchers to interview people who were formerly slaves, and a certain number of these ex-slaves came from what was called "Indian Territory. "As I got to studying these narratives, it opened a whole new world for me, and if I may, I would like to read sections from these Slave Narratives. It is going to be in the vernacular language, from the 19th century, so I'm asking you to forgive me on this.

The first is from Jane Gillespie, from the Arkansas rights project:

"My grandparents were Gillespie...my grandmother was an Indian woman. She was sold off the reservation, her and her daughter. The daughter was about twelve years old and big enough to wait tables. Both of them were full-blooded Cherokee Indians. My grandma married a slave, and when she grows up, my mother married a slave. But, my mother's parents were both Indians. And one of my parents from my father's side was white. So, you see I am about three-fourths of something else. But, when they were stolen, they were made slaves. And that's what I am. "

Here is another person, Richard Franklin, from the Oklahoma Writers Project:

"I was born into the Creek Nation, March first, 1856. My mother was named Seymour Franklin. She was one-forth Creek Indian, and was married to a Negro slave, Fred Franklin, who was the slave of James Yargee of the Creek Nation. I am one-eighth Creek Indian, and seven-eighths Negro. My father was born in the Creek Nation and he, with nine other slaves, worked on the farm of Yargee in the Creek Nation until 1867, when the Civil War was over. "

And, here is that of Patricia Harriman, taken by the Oklahoma Writers Project.

"My mother had always been Mistress Judy Taylor. She was the only mother my mama ever had. Likely, she is the only one she remembers, for her own mother died when she was three years old. She was raised by the Indians and could talk Cherokee. My brother Louis married a full-blooded Indian woman and they got lots of Indian children on their farm in the old Cherokee country around Caney Creek. He is just like an Indian, he has been with them so much. He talks the Cherokee language, and he don't even know that he is Negro. "

This last one is from Robert Soloman, another person from Arkansas.

"My mother (and once, again, remember these are slaves, and this story is from the slave narratives) was a pure-blood Indian. She was born near that Lookout Mountain in Tennessee, on a river in a log hut. They lives in houses, and her father was the Indian Chief. His name was Red Bird. They belonged to the Choctaw tribe. The white people was trying to drive them out, in uprising with the whites, and all my mother's folks were killed, but her. The white folks took her and gave her to Dr. Durney (?) She was big enough to know there was fighting and was trying to drive them out. Her mother's name was Marthy. She remembers they used to have Green Corn Dances. They cooked all their stuff together in a big pot, green corn, butter beans and rabbit and any other animal they killed. And they all eat, and they have a big dance around the pot and they call it the Green Corn Dance. "

I guess the point I am trying to make is that we have these ideas of this discrete group of "Indians," as you have the idea of "Africans," and there is the idea that Indians owned Africans. There is not the idea, that even into the nineteenth century, there were Native Americans who were enslaved, who lived their lives in these "slave communities. " And one of the things that I'm thinking of doing with these narratives is to (help us) realize the complex nature of these people that we call "Freedmen," and with all its associations. I'm working on this, and I am not here to plug the website, but I have put up about a hundred and fifty of these on a website and it is searchable, and you can go to it and read them. I think that they are really important because they teach not only about what these "slaves’" lives were like, but what life was like in general in the Indian Territory in the nineteenth century. I think it is a very, very valuable asset.

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