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The World of Indigenous North America

Robert Warrior

Afro-Native Realities

Publication details https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9780203122280.ch26 Sharon P. Holland, Tiya Miles Published online on: 22 Dec 2014

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I N T R O D U C T I O N : T H E U R G E N C Y O F B E ( L O N G I N G )

The image of a little red book is imprinted on the minds of many a present-day scholar laboring in the field of Afro-/Native Studies. One of the co-authors of this essay first encountered the tome as a young woman visiting potential colleges with her mother in the late 1980s. In a small black-owned bookstore near Spelman and Morehouse Colleges in Atlanta, that little red book, Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage , was propped up and facing out on a top shelf. Its cover featured an African American man and Native American man standing shoulder to shoulder as they stared back at the camera, bodies stiff, faces alive with enigmatic expression. The bookstore owner explained that Black Indians , published in 1986, was a sleeper hit, popular especially with prisoners who wrote in to request copies by mail. Embraced by an African American reading public consisting of multiple sub-groups, historian William Loren Katz’s book met a more skeptical Native American and general audi- ence. Katz’s celebratory survey of African American and Native American historical relations (intended at first for a juvenile readership) was apparently viewed by many who encountered it as a contradiction in terms. Katz writes in a new preface to the 25th anniversary edition that one characteristic response to the book was: “There were not !”—a direct refusal to entertain the notion represented by his title. 1 “Black” and “Indian” were terms that seemed to cancel one another out in the minds of some potential readers. These two words and the conceptualizations that accompa- nied them appeared divorced to these critics—as areas of personal and community identity as well as fields of intertwined intellectual inquiry. “Black Indian” was therefore a category akin to ghost in the 1980s, barely visible, threatening yet incred- ible, haunting the edges of the American imaginary.

The incredulity of this public reaction was due in no small part to the logical establishment of separate historical literatures about Native Americans and African Americans since the turn toward production of scholarly work on black and native people in the 1960s. It was also due to the long tradition and ongoing tendency for major works in African American history and Native American history to analyze these groups in relation to white historical actors and the U.S. government rather

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

A F R O - N AT I V E R E A L I T I E S

Sharon P. Holland and Tiya Miles

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than in relation to other groups of color. Pernicious cultural definitions of race, too, structured this divide, as blackness has been capaciously defined by various state laws according to the legendary one-drop rule, while Indianness has been defined by the U.S. government according to the many buckets rule. While one drop of black blood makes a person black in American legal and commonsense culture, Indianness can only be demonstrated by an overwhelming amount of Indian blood, quantified in the formula of blood quantum. In real terms set forth by American officials, “Black” did, in fact, cancel “Indian” out. Anthropologist Circe Sturm has effectively described this difference between systems of racial categorization for blacks versus native people, writing: “The rules of hypodescent played out in such a way that people with any degree of African American blood were usually classified exclusively as Black.” In Sturm’s summary of the practical outcomes of this logic, a Black/Indian multiracial combination yields “Black,” while a White/Indian multiracial combination yields “Indian.” One of Sturm’s informants, a Cherokee freedmen descendant, put it even more succinctly: “This is America where being to any degree Black is the same thing as being to any degree pregnant.” 2

Within this charged racial context in which a black person could never be Indian, Katz’s bold, provocatively titled and fast-paced book made a significant splash. Black Indians was the first popular treatment of black-native interrelations and identities. It was not, however, the first important publication on this topic. Before Katz entered the field, and as early as the 1920s and 1930s, African American studies scholars and, later, Native American studies scholars, were delving into this subject area and producing substantial work. While this essay is not intended to be a comprehensive literature review, we do seek to briefly situate scholarship at the black-native nexus in the intellectual genealogy to which it belongs. 3

We locate the birth of a field in Afro-/Native studies in the Journal of Negro History , where towering historians Carter G. Woodson, Kenneth W. Porter, and James Hugo Johnston published a series of articles on black and native interconnec- tions. Carter G. Woodson’s “The Relations of Negroes and Indians in Massachusetts” (1920) produced the well-known quotation, “One of the longest unwritten chapters of the history of the United States is that treating of the relations of the Negroes and the Indians.” James Hugo Johnston’s wide-ranging “Documentary Evidence of the Relations of Negroes and Indians” (1929) offered a survey of key themes and extant primary sources. And Kenneth Wiggins Porter’s “Relations between Negroes and Indians within the Present Limits of the United States” (1932), as well as his “Notes Supplementary” to that article (1933), rounded out Johnston’s documentary project. 4 Historian Laura Lovett has argued that these early scholars investigated black and native ties as a means of disrupting the Eugenics movement and disprov- ing related claims about racial fixity and black inferiority. 5 In a move that would broaden the methods for Afro-/Native Studies to include an ethnohistorical approach, Laurence Foster then wrote an influential dissertation on Negro-Indian Relationships in the Southeast . Published in 1935, the work was based on historical research and anthropological interviews that Foster had conducted in Oklahoma, Texas, and Mexico. 6 Following in the same vein, Kenneth Wiggins Porter returned to this sub- ject area, reexamined Foster’s primary sources, and began to conduct interviews with descendants of the Black Seminoles in Texas, Oklahoma, and Mexico. Porter’s first Black Seminoles articles appeared in the 1940s in the Journal of Negro History .

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Porter’s scholarly contributions culminated with the posthumous publication, 15 years after his death, of Black Seminoles: History of a Freedom-Seeking People (1996). 7 During the same period that Porter was conducting interviews, pioneering black anthropologist William Shedrick Willis performed some of the first ethnographic research on the crossings of African and Native peoples. His scholarship during the late 1950s and early 1960s helped broaden the field of Afro-Native Studies with notable articles like “Divide and Rule: Red, White, and Black in the Southeast,” in the Journal of Negro History . 8 In the 1970s, historians and ethnographers began to publish a series of works looking at the confluence of black and Indian communities. In 1974, Gary B. Nash published Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early North America (1974), which has a long segment on black/Indian relations. In the late 1970s, three key texts focusing on Cherokee/black relations appeared: Rudy Halliburton Jr.’s Red Over Black: Black Slavery Among the Cherokee Indians (1977); Daniel F. Littlefield Jr.’s The Cherokee Freedmen: From Emancipation to American Citizenship (1978); and Theda Perdue’s Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540–1866 (1979). Other important works of the late 1970s and early 1980s included Karen I. Blu’s The Lumbee Problem: the Making of an American Indian People (1980), J. Leitch Wright’s The Only Land They Knew: the Tragic Story of the American Indians in the Old South (1981), and James Merrell’s “The Racial Education of the Catawba Indians,” published in the Journal of Southern History (1984). 9 In 1986, as the field continued to grow, William Loren Katz’s popular survey, Black Indians , appeared. Two years later, anthropologist Jack D. Forbes published a preliminary version of what would become the important work: Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples (1988, 1993). 10 Forbes’ study was a watershed moment for the field, as his exhaustive research into archives at “contact” proved that words like “mulatto/a,” “colored,” “black,” or even “Indian” didn’t often represent or reflect adequately the identities of the peoples who fell under the surveyor’s pen. More often than not, these words were used interchangeably and according to prevailing law and custom of the various Dutch, French, English, Spanish, or Portuguese colonial powers. Forbes’s work was followed by anthropologist Rebecca Bateman’s expansion of the field into the Caribbean, with her article “Africans and Indians: A Comparative Study of the Black Carib and Black Seminoles,” published in the journal Ethnohistory , as well as by Kevin Mulroy’s Freedom on the Border: The Seminole Maroons in Florida, the Indian Territory, Coahuila and Texas (1993), which sharpened the lens of previous work produced on Black Seminoles by Kenneth Porter and Daniel F. Littlefield. 11 Soon thereafter, Donal F. Lindsey produced the first educational history in the field, Indians at Hampton Institute, 1877–1923 (1995). After decades domi- nated by historical and anthropological approaches, literary analyses also began to appear, most notably in Sharon Holland’s early article “If You Know I Have a History, You Will Respect Me: A Perspective on Afro-Native Literatures,” Callaloo (1994). 12 This work was anthologized in Jonathan Brennan’s significant contribution, When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote: African-Native American Literature (2003).

Ten years after the publication of Katz’s and Forbes’ work, and perhaps not by coincidence, an eminent figure in Native American Studies gave a relevant keynote lecture on “The Future of American Indian Histories” as part of “Meeting Ground,” the 25th anniversary conference of the Newberry Library’s D’Arcy McNickle Center

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for American Indian History. Vine Deloria Jr., who himself had compared and con- trasted Native American and African American treatment and protest strategies in Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969) and in We Talk, You Listen (1970), declared in 1997 that Native American history should include extensive comparative work in the future. 13 After 2000 (and perhaps in response to a greater awareness of mixed-race identities spurred by the multiracial movement that sought a new census category for that year), a fourth generation of scholarly work on Afro- Native peoples and African-American and Native American crossings began to emerge in the form of edited collections: James F. Brooks’s Confounding the Color Line: the Indian-Black Experience in North America (2002), Jonathan Brennan’s When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote: African-Native American Literature (2003), Terri Straus’s Race, Roots, and Relations: Native and African Americans (2005) and Tiya Miles and Sharon Holland’s Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country (2006) appeared in rapid succession. 14 Literary treatments gathered momen- tum within these edited collections as well as in monographs such as Joanna Brooks’ American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures (2003). In 2004, research librarian Lisa Bier published her exhaustive annotated bibliography, American Indian and African American People, Communities, and Interactions , cataloging the multi-disciplinary contributions that were shaping a flourishing field. 15 The list of monographs published since 2000 is lengthy and robust, and includes the following notable works: Circe Sturm, Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma ; Rachel Buff, Immigration and the Political Economy of Home: West Indian Brooklyn and American Indian Minneapolis, 1945–1992 ; Rosalyn Howard, Black Seminoles in the Bahamas ; Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom ; Claudio Saunt, Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family ; Cynthia Cumfer, Separate Peoples, One Land: The Minds of Cherokees, Blacks, and Whites on the Tennessee Frontier ; Gary Zellar, African Creeks: Estelvste and the Creek Nation ; Celia Naylor, African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens ; Fay A. Yarbrough, Race and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century ; Kim Cary Warren, The Quest for Citizenship: African American and Native American Education in Kansas, 1880–1935 ; David A. Chang, The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832–1929 ; Malinda Maynor Lowery, Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation ; Brian Klopotek, Recognition Odysseys: Indigeneity, Race, and Federal Tribal Recognition Policy in Three Louisiana Indian Communities ; Angela Pulley Hudson, Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Making of the American South ; Barbara Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South . 16

This renaissance was furthered by an academic and community gathering in 2000 titled “Eating out of the Same Pot,” but known simply as “The Dartmouth Conference,” as well as by symposia that followed at the University of Kansas and the University of New Mexico, by a Red-Black Scholars listserv launched by a graduate student at Michigan State University, and by a documentary film, Black Indians: An American Story, that was largely recorded on site at the Dartmouth Conference. 17 Many of these studies have taken as their point of focus the so-called

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“Five Civilized Tribes” of the South—Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles—which engaged with the institution of black slavery and hence had sizeable black populations. Increasingly, scholars in the field are pushing past the geographical boundaries of the South, of Indian Territory, and even of the Caribbean, to study locations like New England, the Midwest, and the Rocky Mountain West.

Creative intersectional treatments of black-native histories and cultures are con- tinually being produced by emerging, as well as established, scholars in African American Studies, Native American Studies, American Studies, and Comparative Ethnic Studies. These scholars bring to their work a keen interest in questions of race, gender, class, sexual relations, land, tribe, nation, colonialism, and power inspired by critical cultural, racial, feminist, and colonial theories. Their composite projects advance a now undeniable field of inquiry in Afro-/Native Studies, which continues with gale force to probe a range of topics like Indian enslavement and slaveholding; gender and sexualities in black and native lives; family-making and adoption practices; recovered texts by writers of black and native descent; modern Afro-Native subjectivities; trade, economies, and economic interactions; Indians, Jim Crow, and white supremacy; black missionaries and educators in native communities; black and native intersecting intellectual histories, and so on.

Scholars who take up this comparative approach and extend it further into inter- relational and intersectional analyses see a logic and, indeed, an imperative for this work, given the historical reality of multiple and complex cross-cultural, cross-racial encounters in the Americas. Native American Studies shares common questions, then, with African American Studies, Latina/o Studies, Asian American and Pacific Islander American Studies, Women’s Gender, Sexuality and Disability Studies—questions about power and oppression, survival and resistance, creativity and love, on these Indigenous lands. There is rich and compelling work to be done at each of these intersections, at the same time that the red-black nexus holds a particular valence in American Studies. As Chicana feminist theorist Cherrie Moraga has put it, these groups were “the first” and “the forced” in processes of American racialization and settler colo- nialism. 18 Their interconnection—historically, theoretically, and politically—rests on a core relationship to the history of the U.S. as peoples whose combined labor and lands formed the literal groundwork of this nation.

In tandem with provocative new scholarship in history, ethnohistory, and literary criticism, a slate of university courses has appeared. The “Black Indian” or “Afro-/ Native” Studies classroom has become almost commonplace in Ethnic Studies and American Studies departments (with the question of what should be placed on syllabi dominating the Red-Black Scholars listserv for a time). It is satisfying, for those who think that American Studies should not be uniformly approached from a Euro- American standpoint, to see these courses on the books. And yet, the Afro-/Native Studies classroom is a vexed and complex space. If our experience is any indication, scholars attempting to produce nuanced work in the field meet, in the classroom, students on an urgent quest. Their quest often stems from a fierce longing for a sturdy, fulsome sense of identity in the face of scrutiny, denial, and exclusion in their families, communities, and campus student groups. They want to know who they are, where their families fit, and whether they belong. These students seeking iden- tity reinforcements are black and also Indian, black claiming Indian, and Indian with the keen recognition of the complexity and hybridity of their own racial and cultural

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makeup. They fill our classrooms to overflowing, searching for meaning and affirma- tion, hunting for stories and ancestors. These students’ raw desire for self- and group knowledge, and the moving, sometimes tense moments in which they express that desire in class mirror the articulations and performances that often occur in public spaces when scholars in Afro-/Native Studies present their research.

Four generations and many a scholarly book and article later, there is still a long- ing to belong, a need for visibility, a quest called tribe that is manifested among people who identify as both black and native. That longing is rooted in a history of erasure forced by colonialism, racialization, and enslavement; it is also shaped by equally forceful histories of black pride and native cultural recovery that insist upon policing authenticity and building protective walls. So what would we tell our stu- dents who seek but do not find? How would we characterize Afro-Native realities, looking both forward and back? In the introduction to Black, White and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family , the story of the two branches of a mixed-race Creek family, historian Claudio Saunt observes the following:

Though the subject is often underplayed in history books, race was a central element in the lives of southeastern Indians, not just as a marker of difference between natives and white newcomers but as a divisive and destructive force within Indian communities themselves. This book examines how and why race was such a powerful force in Indian lives. It argues that abiding by American’s racial hierarchy was a survival strategy—part cynical ploy, clever subterfuge, and painful compromise. 19

We cannot think of a better synopsis of the work we do in Afro-/Native Studies than Saunt’s redaction of what is at stake when marginalized peoples come into contact with one another, often making family across the generations in the com- promising context of pain and loss.

H I S T O R I C A L I N T E R S E C T I O N S : 4 0 A C R E S A N D A T O O L

Pain and loss. Slavery and land. These terms map onto and move through one another as perhaps the primary concepts in Afro-/Native Studies. Without a fertile land-base and free labor to work it, the U.S. would not have developed into the prosperous empire that it became. Land was usurped from Indigenous Americans, labor extracted from people of African as well as native descent. For nearly two centuries in early America, Indians and Africans were enslaved together. Historians J. Leitch Wright, Alan Gallay, Christina Snyder, and others have documented the capture, sale, and enslavement of tens of thousands of Native Americans in English and Spanish colo- nies. 20 Even as an African diaspora was being formed through the dispersal of enslaved blacks across the Atlantic Ocean, an “American diaspora,” in the words of anthro- pologist Jack Forbes, was shaped through the dispersal of enslaved Indigenous Americans. 21 Many of these native slaves were traded to the Caribbean and Europe; some were sold to New England and the upper South. The urban center of Charles Town, South Carolina, was the main locus for the sale of both black and Indian slaves, who stood on the same auction blocks, traveled across the Atlantic on the same ships, and finally ended up in the same urban households or rural plantations.

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The shared circumstances of their enslavement led to the intersection of black and native lives. Historian Peter H. Wood observed this merging in his classic study of blacks in South Carolina, writing: “during the proprietary era several thousand Indian slaves still shared the same tasks and the same quarters with Africans from over- seas.” 22 In the North as well as the South, black and native people formed intimate sexual and familial relationships. Historian Daniel Mandell has shown in his histories of New England that dynamics of the slave trade favored the possession of African men over women at the same time that native men lost numbers due to warfare and mobile work; the result was a trend of intermarriage between black men and Indian women. 23 Examples of black and native couplings have been documented across regions, but many more of these relationships cannot be documented by extant writ- ten records. Although interracial intimacy continued within the slave population, enslaved Indians became less visible over time, likely due to the misclassification of slaveowners, who reduced mixed-race slaves to the catch-all category “Negro.” This extensive period of spatial and social overlap in the crucible of slavery would form the foundation of an interconnected future despite a separation to come.

By the late eighteenth century, the enslavement of Native Americans had fallen out of fashion in colonial practice and law. Enlightenment thought, the image of the noble savage, and the rhetoric of the American Revolution combined to snuff out the practice. At the same time, the importation of African slaves increased, an ideol- ogy of racial difference took hold, and a subset of influential Native Americans in the South began to own black slaves. Many, but not all, Indian slaveholders were the mixed-race children of native mothers and white fathers. They were political leaders of their nations who complied with U.S. government dictates to adopt large- scale farming and American “implements of husbandry,” or tools. 24 These leading men sought to increase agricultural productivity and demonstrate their people’s level of “civilization” to an encroaching U.S. government that made acculturation the price of protection from U.S. settlers. To do so, they increased their reliance on black slave labor. This was a survival strategy that aimed to prove native rights to land and self-government through capitalistic enterprise and Euro-American principles. And yet the execution of this strategy came at the great expense of black human rights as well as native traditional kinship practices. This was the period in which some native people began to adopt American-influenced notions of racial hierarchy and black inferiority. Native and black histories would seem to have split violently apart by 1800, the year marked by historian James Merrell as a turning point when anti-black prejudice was evident in expressions of the Catawba people of the Carolinas, and Catawbas began to disavow previous marriages and kinship ties with blacks. 25 Nevertheless, close relations persisted between individual black and native people even throughout the period of Indian participation in black chattel slavery. This closeness was, to a large extent, the ugly physical and emotional intimacy shared by master and slave, but also the connection that resulted from the acceptance of some black runaways into native communities, particularly the Seminole nation. When native survival strategies backfired and the U.S. government and settler populace forced Indigenous people off their lands in the era of Indian removal, black and native lives again converged.

A longtime and vehement proponent of Indian relocation, President Andrew Jackson’s first State of the Union address in December of 1829 outlined a plan for

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“removal” of Indians east of the Mississippi and urged Congress to adopt it. In Jackson’s view, the removal of eastern Indians to a region west of the Mississippi was “not only liberal, but generous.” 26 Historian Mary Hershberger has observed that slavery played a role in the successful passage of the Removal Act, since the 3/5 clause of the U.S. Constitution (which apportioned additional representation in Congress for numbers of slaves owned) increased the voting power of southern whites who craved Indian land. 27 The Indian Removal period, formally launched by the Indian Removal Act (yet informally advanced across U.S. administrations dating back to Thomas Jefferson’s presidency), did more than open southern and midwest- ern lands to white settlement. In the South, the ousting of native people cleared fertile land for an expanding plantation economy that would run on slave labor and produce the lucrative cotton kingdom. Indian land and black labor were tightly interlocked in this nineteenth-century moment of U.S. national (and domestic impe- rial) expansion. The forced migration of African American slaves occurred in tandem with the expulsion of Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles. At the same time that blacks owned by whites were moved from the Upper South into the Deep South to work these newly opened lands, blacks owned by Native Americans were compelled to move west to Indian Territory with their native owners.

In the Cherokee Nation in particular, the largest slaveholding Indian group, black experience of the Trail of Tears represents an additional layer of meaning and poi- gnancy in this conjoined history: 1,652 people of African descent lived in the Cherokee Nation just prior to removal, comprising 10 percent of the Cherokee populace. 28 Former Cherokee Principal Chief Wilma Mankiller captured the gravitas of this interconnected past in her memoir, where she wrote: “It should be remembered that hundreds of people of African ancestry also walked the Trail of Tears with the Cherokees during the forced removal of 1838–1839. Although we know about the terrible human suffering of our native people and the members of the other tribes during the removal, we rarely hear of those black people who also suffered.” 29 Despite the lack of attention to black experience in removal records, it is possible to piece together parts of this submerged history. The first Cherokees to leave the Southeast in the aftermath of the ratification of the Treaty of New Echota were affluent, slaveholding political leaders who had signed the agreement. Wealthy families like the Ridges and the Vanns emigrated before 1838, choosing the most fertile sites on which to rebuild their plantations. Black slaves who traveled with these families made the journey mainly by water, arriving in time to clear the land and plant the seeds of their masters’ new fortunes. A Cherokee freedwoman named Chaney McNair, who had been owned by three Cherokee families, including the prominent Cherokee statesman William Penn Adair, traced her family line to the removal experience. McNair related to a WPA interviewer: “My parents came from Georgia with the Cherokees. They came by boat I spect.” 30 Joseph Vann’s dramatic transport of his slaves to Webbers Falls made an impression on the memories of Oklahoma residents interviewed by historian Marguerite McFadden in the early 1900s. 31 McFadden reported:

It was quite a sight for the people around the falls when Joe Vann’s property arrived by steamboat . . . There were looks of astonishment and shouts of sur- prise as boat after boat came into view, some towing barges filled with men,

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women and children. As the boats drew near the shore the onlookers saw the barges were filled with black people, too many to count. 32

The first tasks for Vann’s enslaved blacks were to clear, plow, and build a replica of Vann’s stately, southern manor house. 33 The compulsory sacrifice of black bondspeo- ple’s labor made it possible for wealthy Cherokees to rebuild their lives in the West.

Blacks held by non-wealthy Cherokees walked the journey along with their own- ers. Many of these bondspeople were compelled to go by the legal and social struc- tures linking them to their masters. Religious historian Patrick Minges has argued in “Beneath the Underdog: Race, Religion and the Trail of Tears” that other slaves may have preferred to leave with their Cherokee owners rather than remaining in a region now controlled by whites. 34 A single case in the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Slave Narratives indicates that blacks not originally belonging to Cherokees may also have ended up on the trail. Cherokee freedman Milton Starr, who claimed that his master, Jerry Starr, was his father, explained that his mother was wrongfully stolen by Cherokees on the walk. Starr said: “My mother was . . . a slave girl picked up by the Starrs when they left that country with the rest of the Cherokee Indians. My mother wasn’t bought, but was stole by the Indians.” 35

In addition to bearing the physical and emotional hardships of the journey, enslaved blacks were enlisted to labor for Cherokees along the way. They hunted, nursed the

Figure 26.1 Slave house near Talala, Indian Territory, 1900. B. Heye Foundation Collection. Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society, photo no. 14864.

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sick, prepared the meals, guarded the camps at night, and hiked ahead to remove obstructions and ensure the usability of roads. 36 One Cherokee man, Nathaniel Willis, remembered that “My grandparents were helped and protected by very faith- ful Negro slaves who . . . went ahead of the wagons and killed any wild beast who came along.” 37 Missionary Daniel Butrick also recorded in his journal the labors and deaths of a handful of blacks in his detachment. One elderly black woman, whose children had recently purchased her freedom, “died in the camps.” Her son, Peter, and his wife were then sold to slave speculators. Along the trail, one black man “cut some wood for the night,” and a black woman: “our kind Nancy” was “employed . . . to wash and [dry] our clothes in the evening by the fire.” An unnamed black man died on a February day that also took four Cherokee lives. Butrick wrote: “During this time five individuals have died, viz. one old Cherokee woman, one black man, and three Cherokee children, making in all since we crossed the Tennessee River 26 deaths.” 38

Nearly 4,000 Cherokees died during the eviction, and demographer Russell Thornton has argued that taking into account the decline in the birthrate results in an even larger estimate: a total population loss of 10,090 people. 39 Black slaves and free Afro-Cherokees were among those who lost their lives. Their numbers were smaller than that of the Cherokee non-black population, but their suffering was commensurate. As one former slave of Cherokees, Eliza Whitmire, said in her descrip- tion of the event: “The weeks that followed General Scott’s order to remove the Cherokees were filled with horror and suffering for the unfortunate Cherokees and their slaves.” 40

In addition to experiencing removal as co-sufferers, black slaves helped to record the event as witnesses. Two WPA Oklahoma interviewees who had been owned by whites recalled details about the time the Cherokees passed through. Nannie Gordon remembered that “Master Berry’s place was on the Ohio river at Berry’s Ferry . . . They said when the Georgia (Cherokee) Indians come out to this country . . . that lots of them Indians was ferried across the river at the master’s place. My father and grandfather helped to tow them over.” 41 And Carrie Davis, whose own family was sold apart by their white master, articulated her moral judgment on the govern- ment’s treatment of the Cherokees: “When they was sending the Indians to Oklahoma, I had to stay at the train and serve coffee. I made fifty gallons . . . They give Oklahoma to the Indians and now they taking it. The Indians have no rights now.” 42

Blacks and Cherokees were joined in the midst of this tragedy by a series of overlapping trials: the physical realities and hardships of relocation, the necessity of adjusting to a new land, the ideology of white supremacy that rationalized the vio- lation of both native and black human rights, and the linkage of slavery and removal in the U.S. political economy. After the Removal Act had been enforced, white southerners in particular and the American nation as a whole benefited enormously at the expense of displaced native people. The expulsion of Cherokees and other Indian nations cleared the way for the expansion of slavery, a variety of which far surpassed Indian slaveholding in intensity and extent. What had been a “society with slaves” in the native South would become, after the Indians’ ouster, a “slave society.” To borrow the characterization of historians David and Jeanne Heidler, the institu- tion of American slavery and the event of Indian Removal were, in both cause and effect, “twin evils.” 43

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In the aftermath of removal and a devastating American Civil War in which the leadership of slaveholding tribes sided (not without internal conflict) with the Confederacy, U.S. officials punished those nations with the seizure of more land, the imposition of railroads, and the proscription that former slaves had to be adopted as tribal citizens. It was after that same war, of course, that African American ex- slaves in the sea island South were promised the infamous “40 acres and a mule” that never materialized. Land was too valuable to assign to blacks, members of a degraded, racialized labor force. Land was also too valuable to be left in the hands of Indians, also racialized, also marginalized, despite their designation as “domestic dependent nations.” Relentless in the pursuit of Indigenous land, the U.S. government soon turned to the policy of allotment, which forced the division of remaining native- held common lands into individual homesteads of 40 acres within larger 160-acre plots. In a telling irony of black and native intersections in U.S. history—blacks were denied the 40 acres of land that Indians were reduced to accepting in the allotment process. In order to distribute these lands, the Congressional Commission headed by Senator Henry Dawes mandated a census of native people. The infamous Dawes rolls categorized Indians by blood quantum, formally inscribing a racial definition of Indianness into U.S. law and tribal government practice. “Excess” lands were then distributed to whites, and a race-based system dominated in which “mixed-blood” Indians could control their own landholdings and “full-blood” Indians were deemed

Figure 26.2 Freedpeople operated a store (pictured) during enrollment before the Dawes Commission at Fort Gibson, Indian Territory, c. 1899–1901. Aylesworth Album Collection.

Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society, photo no. 15805.

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wards in an economic free for all that let loose land speculators throughout Indian Territory. Remaining Indian landholdings dwindled. Native national governments were disbanded and did not begin to recover until the early twentieth century. The road to recovery from colonial oppression is long, rough, and continues unending for Indigenous people. It is the roughness of this road, the toughness of American race ideology, and the painful cost of compromise for both blacks and Native Americans that shapes the persistent suspicion of Afro-Native mixed-race people as well as their urge for belonging. The work of unwriting separate historical narratives and imagining into our awareness the reality of these conjoined pasts as well as the possibilities of an interconnected presence and future is taking place most fruitfully in the arenas of literary and visual culture production.

L I T E R A RY P R O D U C T I O N : A M B I G U O U S S U B J E C T I V I T I E S

One of the most astute critics of an African-Native literature literary genre is Jonathan Brennan, who notes that it is not easy to categorize the genre because “[it] represents an amalgamation of Native American and African American writ- ing traditions, these literatures can be critically examined within at least four dif- ferent frameworks: as mixed-race literatures, native American literatures, African

Figure 26.3 Captain Archibald S. McKennon interviewing freedmen at Fort Gibson, Indian Territory during the Dawes Commission’s enrollment of members of the Cherokee Nation,

circa 1899–1901. Aylesworth Album Collection. Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Soci- ety, photo no. 15813.

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American literatures, and African-Native American literatures. 44 How should we then go about the business of introducing the wider public to a literature—a liter- ary tradition—fraught with contradiction, often imbued with the cloying presence of the romantic image, and resistant to categorization? From Paul Cuffe to John Horse, histories of black Indian contributions to American letters have just begun to be remade in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Scholars now recognize Cuffe (Pequot) as a black Indian subject and contemporary of such Indian writers as Hendrick Aupaumut (M0hican), William Apess (Pequot), Black Hawk (Sauk) and George Copway (Ojibwa), who all wrote autobiographies in the mid- nineteenth century. 45 As scholars look more closely at the discrepancy among evi- dentiary claims for racial belonging, personal statements about family lineage and narrative approaches to subjectivity embedded in literature from autobiography to memoir, from short story to novel tradition, they find more ambiguity than solid ground. 46 We turn to one very good example of the shift from African-American to African-Native subjectivity through the example of one nineteenth century sub- ject: Elleanor Eldridge.

Although she did not produce an autobiography of her own, Elleanor Eldridge’s story was one of the most read throughout the nineteenth century and her tale is an interesting counterpart to that of her male contemporaries. Until recently, Eldridge was considered an African-American woman and domestic worker, but as with other tales of identity in the nineteenth century, Eldridge’s life needs to be contextualized in light of the fact that her maternal grandmother was Narragansett. Like Cuffe, Eldridge “struggled repeatedly over [her] rights as an African American and a Native American.” 47 The publication of the Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge in 1838 marked a significant moment. Written by distinguished Rhode Island resident Frances Harriet Whipple Green MacDougall (1805–1878), the text chronicles the life, toils, and legal wranglings of one Elleanor Eldridge (1784–?1865), 48 a black and native freewoman who was a white washer, weaver, dairymaid, and entrepreneur. 49 Fifteen years Eldridge’s junior, Frances Whipple

identified with her subject at some psychological level, despite their difference in color and class. Each of them lost a parent early in life and was forced by adverse circumstances to earn her own livelihood. In girlhood, both Frances and Elleanor worked very hard and were recognized as high achievers. As adults, they supported themselves as independent single women during an age when women’s ordained social position was considered to be one of dependency on men. 50

Indeed, there were eight editions of the Memoirs published between 1838 and 1847. 51 During the various publication cycles of the narrative, Whipple would marry (1842) and divorce (1847) her first husband, Charles Green, making her an anomaly in the “Victorian” society of Rhode Island. Despite the paucity of critical attention to Eldridge’s narrative, both the Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge (1838) and Elleanor’s Second Book (1839) were reprinted and widely read in the mid-nineteenth century. The first and only scholar to write a full-length biography of Whipple, O’Dowd notes that the text of Eldridge’s Memoirs “can be read not only as a biographical narrative, but also as a literary text.” 52 The particulars of the literary text are indeed

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intriguing, if only because their drama is so dependent upon one detail of her Memoir that intrigues the contemporary Whipple and piques the interest of her twenty-first century explicators.

Early in the account of Eldridge’s life, Whipple reports that “[h]er maternal grandmother, Mary Fuller, was a native Indian, belonging to the small tribe, or clan, called the Fuller family; which was probably a portion of the Narragansett tribe. Certain it is that this tribe, or family, once held great possessions in large tracts of land; with a portion of which Mary Fuller purchased her husband Thomas Prophet; who, until his marriage, had been a slave.” 53 This detail about Eldridge’s mixed heritage not only fuels Whipple’s scripting of Eldridge’s life, but also pro- vides the nexus for further investigation. 54 Was Eldridge, heralded as one of Rhode Island’s most notable African-American citizens, 55 also of native descent? This question posed additional queries for us: How to speak to the life of someone who acknowledged, at least to Whipple, her dual heritage? What shape would such an exploration take? How to conduct such research without falling into the quagmire of racial and ethnic authenticity, without justifying ideologies such as blood quantum? 56

Black and Indian passages in New England have been painstakingly articulated in the work of scholars such as Jean O’Brien, Daniel R. Mandell, and Ann McMullen. In particular, McMullen reads C. Matthew Snipps’s catalogue of Census data and concludes that “descent [in the twentieth century] may be more important than tribal membership for many” 57 who identify as American Indian. 58 In other words, an investigation of Eldridge’s communication to Whipple and Whipple’s interpretation of her ancestry recalls ongoing debates in contemporary scholarship on multicultural, ethnic, cultural, and racial communities. McMullen writes that “[i]ntermarriage has reduced the importance of blood quantum somewhat, and being Indian is now more often seen as a matter of descent and community par- ticipation, or blood and culture.” 59 Mandell’s research indicates that the contem- porary perception of “Indianness” had its complicated and complicating precedent in attitudes among those who intermarried in southern New England between 1760 and 1880—the period in which Eldridge’s African grandfather and Indian grand- father saw their grandchildren move into the nineteenth century. Moreover, Mandell’s research exposes the “fundamental flaws of a bichromatic view of racial relations in American history” by offering complicated readings of changing rela- tions among intimately inter-related people such as the Narragansett, the Irish and African-Americans. 60

This work on Eldridge’s life and narrative has its counterpart in the fictional world of African-Native American characters. In the literary tradition, authors like Michael Doris ( Yellow Raft in Blue Water , 1987), Alice Walker ( Temple of My Familiar , 1989), Nettie Jones ( Mischief Maker, 1989), Leslie Marmon Silko ( Almanac of the Dead, 1991), Toni Morrison ( Paradise , 1998), Percival Everett ( Watershed , 2003), Sherman Alexie ( Reservation Blues , 2005), and Zelda Lockhart ( Cold Running Creek , 2007) either focus upon Afro-Native characters or cultural and familial intersections to make a point about our ideas of history, heritage, and place. Their characterizations of African and Native American peoples provide a snapshot of the thorny territory of mixed-race heritage. But most importantly, what they remind us of, and what some critics often miss, is that Afro-Native subjectivity is not just about

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mixed-race identity, but is further complicated by the presence of the nation-state. These peoples are not just mixed-bloods, or “cross bloods” to use Gerald Vizenor’s term, but they spring from many nations within a nation. The issues of sovereignty, self-determination, and nation-status become crucially important when recognizing what these characters are attempting to mark in what we have come to call the “historical.”

Questioned about the America revealed in Mischief Makers , Jones replies that she attempts to portray this country as “a true ethnic melting pot whose temperature is perpetually near the boiling point because most Americans refuse to recognize the beauty in the beast.” 61 Blackness is a public secret in the text and Indianness is defined in contradistinction to it. The relationship between the main character Raphael (who can pass for “white”) and Mishe, a full-blood Chippewa from northeastern Michigan, is weighted with sensuality and tension. Jones’s Mishe is little more than a caricature, whose body is so often oversexualized that he becomes almost mythic and at one point in Raphael’s dream appears as a centaur rather than as human. What is also more disturbing is that Raphael, a talented nurse and self-assured woman, after marrying Mishe becomes tied to their domestic life—birthing children, raising them, and sleeping with her husband. But between Mishe and Raphael the tension is most prominently placed in their evaluations of history, and it is evident that in this exchange Jones is searching for the right vocabulary to think through cross blood identity. During what Jones calls Mishe’s “Chippewa version of history,” Raphael thinks:

She loved her husband’s history lessons amost as much as she loved her daddy’s version. She promised herself that one day she was going to tell them about aunt Rosebud, who went to Alaska during the gold rush days. It was her strike that provided the money for her only nephew, Raphael’s father, to receive medical training. Aunt Rosebud’s money bought a lot of land for him too. Otherwise a lot of Detroit Negroes would not have had use of a hospital. She’d save all of that. For later. 62

Imparted to Raphael earlier in the text is her father’s account of his Potawatomie and Pawnee blood, his service in the Spanish-American War, and the thievery of robber barons accused of swindling Native peoples in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to secure the land’s resource of lumber. Here, Raphael equates Mishe’s story with her “daddy’s version,” creating a continuity between histories, implying that each is a strand from the same lock. In this story, the “rush” is reflected as part of African- American success, despite its impact upon native peoples (Nisenan among them) in the region and the doctrine of manifest destiny which helped the encroaching settler culture. Jones indicates that this complex narrative that includes a blackness that needs to be hidden and an Indianness that can rarely be imagined outside of the romantic, somehow shifts in the next generation. Lilly, the daughter of Mishe and Raphael, discovers that she is “[p]artly Negro, partly white, partly Indian,” and concludes: “I like being parts of all those people. Makes me a partly of everyone— American.” 63

The idea of contesting what is real and what is romance in fiction about African and Native American crossings is taken to another level altogether in Leslie

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Marmon Silko’s masterpiece, Almanac of the Dead . Silko dissolves the efficacy of borders and univocal identities by reaching beyond Laguna Pueblo and back again with an epic novel where death is the principal character of a violent popular culture. Almanac centers itself both within and without various com- munities, as technocrats and corrupt officials meander through the text, as Silko explores the depravity and utter disconnectedness of a contemporary society where irrationality is the dominant narrative. Ultimately, the novel is her attempt to deconstruct Western notions of binary oppositions and to create a space of simultaneity—a process supported by both the way events are told in the text and by Silko’s narrative structure, where each story is not a “new” beginning but is meant to be laid beside the others in the text. In a chapter entitled “First Black Indian,” we meet Clinton, a homeless Vietnam veteran, who “didn’t bow and scrape for no Arizona honkie-trash crackers . . . [and] lives alone in a Sears gar- den shed he bought for himself.” 64 After the revolution of black and brown peoples, the obsessively paranoid Clinton plans the next step. Silko writes: “Clinton’s first broadcast in the reborn United States was going to be dedicated to the children born to escaped African slaves who married Carib Indian survivors. The first broadcast would be dedicated to them—the first African-Native Americans.” 65 If we are to understand Clinton’s particular form of “outrage” as legitimate rather than hysterical, then we have to view his diatribes against and attempts to correct history as an attempt to give voice to cross blood existence denied to most in the continual historical recounting of colonial rule and this thing called “conquest.” Clinton understands the Vietnam war as a governmental conspiracy; he “had seen how many dark American faces had been in the Asian war. Clinton had seen the white toads, Lyndon Johnson, and his generals, smack- ing their lips at all the splattered brains and guts of black and brown men. Forces sent to destroy Indigenous populations were themselves composed of ‘expend- ables.’ ” 66 This picture of war is not unlike the status of the Buffalo Soldiers sent to “protect” land in Oklahoma’s Indian Territory from invasion by greedy settlers. Clinton achieves agency and a move toward sovereignty because he can see him- self in solidarity and relationship with other oppressed peoples. With his revision of history he is able to create a landscape and a sense of place from a reconfigured geography and historical record of the Americas. The landscape of reality that Clinton builds serves as a temporary repository of his sovereign narrative—a space constantly in flux.

But the news of his Indian ancestry is also in this mix. As Clinton remembers:

[He] had not got over the shock and wonder of it. He and the rest of his family had been direct descendants of wealthy, slave-owning Cherokee Indians. That had been before Georgia white trash and President Andrew Jackson had defied the U.S. Supreme Court to round up all the Indians and herd them west . . . That was why a people had to know their history, even the embarrassments when bad judgement had got them slaughtered by the millions. 67

In his rather comic way, Clinton understands, interprets, and holds onto his own personal history, no matter how brutal or contradictory. In Clinton, Silko paints the portrait of a new ethnic American, one with a fair amount of anger directed at settler

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and white culture, but also one capable of seeing how the confluence of history, memory, and circumstance create the collective racial narrative that is African-Native life in letters.

V I S U A L C U LT U R E : S E E I N G A C I R C L E U N B R O K E N

In 2005, Chicago artist Bernard Williams’s solo exhibition, “Legendary Tales,” opened in Chicago at the G.R. N’Namdi Gallery in the West Loop. Painted in sweeping brushstrokes, reminiscent of Picasso’s abstract art, but figurative nonetheless, the images Williams captured were intended to depict the era of the Buffalo Soldiers, a group of African American mercenaries dispatched to Indian country to quell upris- ings in the era of manifest destiny’s intensification. In fact, if you ask most Americans what they know of black/Indian subjects, they will most likely refer to these men. Williams’s own description of the black West is telling:

[t]he Buffalo Soldier images also speak to the complex role that blacks have played in shaping the country. The soldiers were instrumental to ending some of the last Native American resistance to the European conquest of the west. I paint these characters as individuals in turmoil. They are not happy but are proud. Their burden is great. They serve gallantly in the brutal system, only to be cast aside, historically guttered.” 68

The soldier’s relationship to Indian nations demonstrates the kind of tension that arises when black and Indian bodies meet, cohabit, and make family. Williams’s images of black soldiers and bodies in Indian country arises from the deep and enmeshed histories of slavery and sovereignty in what would come to be the United States.

The artistic and literary rendering of this relationship is equally complex. One particular painting of Williams’s is entitled Black Indian . What strikes any viewer when looking at this painting is the contrast between its bold strokes and its soft hues. The painting’s subject is genderless—neither male nor female, but decidedly African in visage. Unlike most of the other paintings in the series, Black Indian has no racialized labels painted into its landscape. But the connections “among slavery, western expansion, imperialism and contemporary Africans [appear] as a circle unbroken.” 69 This desire to maintain the connectedness of lives, to imagine a “circle unbroken,” is the chief ideology that subtends creative, artistic, and literary endeav- ors to speak to African and Native American intersections.

In another contemporary manifestation of Black-Indian subjectivity, the character of Otis in John Sayles’s Lone Star (1996) keeps a small museum (“Black Seminole Museum”) in the back of his bar. Sayles’s film is ostensibly about the confluence of black, white, Indian, and Mexican peoples in a border town in Rio County Texas and the plot is driven by the discovery of a badge in the desert which leads local law enforcement to puzzle through and eventually solve a 40-year-old murder. We soon find out that race has as much to do with law enforcement as it does with family. Toward the end of the film, Otis gives a tour of his museum to his grandson Chet and we are introduced to John Horse, the black Seminole who negotiated with the Spanish in Florida.

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OTIS : That’s John Horse. Spanish down in Florida called him Juan Caballo. John Horse. 70

CHET : He a black man or an Indian? OTIS : Both. He was part of the Seminole Nation, got pushed down into the Ev-

erglades in pioneer days. African People who run off from the slaveholders hooked up with them, married up, had children. When the Spanish give up Florida, the U.S. Army come down to move all them Indian peoples off to Oklahoma.

CHET : The Trail of Tears. OTIS : They teaching that now? Good.

What Otis does not recall is that John Horse was a slave who obtained his freedom sometime in the mid- to late 1840s when he moved into Mexico. Otis’s “hobby” points toward the importance of shared history, even though that history might conjure romantic images of black/Indian unity and freedom during Jacksonian democ- racy. Moreover, Otis marks the fact that his grandson knows about the Trail of Tears, indicating that he is more than pleased that the American history is inching toward some measure of diversity in its telling. The linked images of buffalo soldiers, a black Seminole warrior, and the black Indian portrait noted above indicate a fas- cination with black and Indian bodies—a fascination that seems to want to locate itself in a time of war. Such images are often romanticized, as is the Indian subject in Julie Dash’s film Daughters of the Dust who rides in on horseback to rescue his African American intended from her family’s attempt to abandon the Gullah Island and culture for the larger world beyond its shores.

In yet another American independent movie, an Indian presence (called Nobody) shows up in two of Jim Jarmusch’s films: Dead Man (1995) and Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai (1999). The recurring Indian figure is ghost-like in both films, but particularly in the latter. In Ghost Dog , Forest Whitaker is Ghost Dog the lone warrior and Mafia assassin self-schooled in the Japanese art of the sword; he is also an urban legend who practices his martial art on his rooftop among the pigeons cared for by the Indian, Nobody, played by Gary Farmer (Cayuga). In one particular scene, gangsters ascend to the rooftop looking for Ghost Dog and encoun- ter Nobody among the pigeons.

MAFIA GUY #1 : So what are you, Puerto Rican? [Nobody does not respond] MAFIA GUY #2 : I think he’s some sort of an Indian or something. MAFIA GUY #1 : Yo! What the hell are you? Nobody: Cayuga. MAFIA GUY #1 : Cayuga? What the fuck is Cayuga? MAFIA GUY #1 : Puerto Rican, Indian, nigger . . . same thing! I think we should waste

him anyway just to be sure.

In a dialogue that attempts to get at the intersection of American ideas of race and racial confusion, the two aging mobsters in the film lump Indian identity with other non-white peoples. Jarmusch’s dialogue points toward the necessity for scholars and creative producers to rethink long-held notions about racial formation in the United

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States. In addition, the aging Mafia men are clearly angry at Nobody’s attempt to become somebody other than what they want him to be. The use of profanity in the scene and the racial confusion all indicate that claiming an Indian self, let alone mixed identity, is always hazardous in a national conversation that articulates itself in black and white parts.

C O N C L U S I O N : V I S I B I L I T Y A N D R E A L I T Y

The articulations and apparitions of these Afro-Native literary and visual culture treatments consistently return to the past, troubled though it is. Seeking out the historical seems to be a means of binding the various strands of this multivalent experience, of bridging the gaps between personal identity, community definition, and racial categorization. It is perhaps fitting, then, that the most significant cultural project in Afro-Native Studies to date has taken the form of an exhibit that visu- ally narrates the past, intimating links to the present. In 2004 in response to the query of a museum visitor, Fred Nahwoosky and others at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) formed a working group to begin exploring the topic of African American and Native American lives. As the collaborative effort gathered strength, NMAI joined together with the National Museum of African American History and Culture to launch the exhibit: IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas , along with a compan- ion book bearing the same title. 71 Coordinated by an interdisciplinary, multiracial team of curators and consultants led by Piscataway scholar Gabrielle Tayac, the exhibit collected and assembled a vast array of family snapshots, historical photo- graphs, historical documents, government documents, and family, as well as national, stories from the U.S. and Latin America. Described in the preface to the compan- ion book as a means of acknowledging “the histories and contemporary lives of our African-Native American brothers and sisters,” the aim of the project is indi- cated by its dualistic (and optimistic) title: IndiVisible. The brainchild of Afro- Choctaw anthropologist Robert Keith Collins, this title suggests the need to illuminate the longstanding merger of black and native lives in response to the cultural invisibility of that experience. Recognition is the object here, and in this the project concurs with early observations made by Vine Deloria Jr., who argued in Custer Died for Your Sins that contemporary Indians lack visibility on the American scene. Black Indians, a group doubly marked and also doubly marginal- ized, are rendered all the more invisible, even within Native (and African) America. The multiple large-scale banners and digital personal testimonies that make up the IndiVisible traveling exhibit vividly capture myriad Afro-Native experiences in the past and present, highlighting the essential presence of these peoples, their social ties, as well as tensions.

The exhibit is studded with images of people who appear to be “black” or “mixed race” behaving and dressing in ways that appear to be “Indian”—seeking, it seems, to prove through the visual realm the existence of legitimized Afro-Native people. The exhibit succeeds stunningly with the sheer volume and quality of its visual representations, and yet the very nature of those images framed as evidence of iden- tity evokes a conundrum that a student raised in an Afro-Native Studies class at the University of Michigan. Is it satisfying, in the end, she wondered, to view photographs

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of Afro-Native individuals and families in this exhibit when we know that visual expectations of “Black” and “Indian” have played a large role in submerging the existence of Afro-Native people? How can the visual ever prove the existence of a people when the reality of their marginalization rests in the trap of racial strictures, shaped, in part, by image and phenotype? Does not reliance on the visual, on “Indian” looks and ways, reinforce set expectations of what a native person should be? Questions like these from younger generations comprise the future work of Afro- Native Studies scholars and cultural producers. The preface to the IndiVisible essay collection calls that remarkable project “a beginning.” It is indeed one among many beginnings, twists, turns and setbacks in the long, unpredictable journey of black and native relations. We stand on a hill looking forward to the next plateau; forward not down. That is a good thing.

N O T E S 1 William Loren Katz, Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage 1986; reprint, New York: Atheneum,

2012), xi. 2 Sturm, “Blood Politics, Racial Classifi cation, and Cherokee National Identity: The Trials

and Tribulations of the Cherokee Freedmen,” in James Brooks (ed.), Confounding the Color Line: The Indian-Black Experience in North America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 223–257, 241.

3 For historiographical treatments of Afro-Native history, see Barbara Krauthamer, “African Americans and Native Americans.” Black Studies Center, Schomburg, 1–34, http://gateway.proquest.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/openurl?url_ver=z39.88-2004&res_ dat=xri:bsc:&rft_dat=xri:bsc:ft:essay:10KRAU , October 22, 2007; Tiya Miles and Barbara Krauthamer, “Africans and Native Americans,” in Alton Hornsby (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to African American History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004); Tiya Miles and Celia E. Naylor, “African-Americans in Indian Societies,” in Raymond Fogelson (ed.), Handbook of North American Indians , vol. 14, Southeast, Washington DC: Smithsonian, 2004).

4 C. G. Woodson, “The Relations of Negroes and Indians in Massachusetts,” Journal of Negro History 5(1) (January 1920): 45; J. H. Johnston, “Documentary Evidence of the Relations of Negroes and Indians,” Journal of Negro History 14(1) (January 1929): 21–43; Kenneth Wiggins Porter, “Relations between Negroes and Indians within the Present Limits of the United States. Contacts as Allies” Journal of Negro History 17(3) (January 1932): 287–367; Kenneth Wiggins Porter, “Notes Supplementary to “Relations between Negroes and Indians,” Journal of Negro History 18(3) (July 1933): 282–321.

5 Lovett, “African and Cherokee by Choice,” in James Brooks (ed.), Confounding the Color Line: The Indian-Black Experience in North America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 192–222, 207–210.

6 Laurence Foster, “Negro-Indian Relationships in the Southeast,” Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1935.

7 Kenneth Wiggins Porter, The Black Seminoles: History of a Freedom-seeking People, ed. Alcione M. Amos and Thomas P. Senter (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996).

8 William S. Willis, “Divide and Rule: Red, White, and Black in the Southeast,” Journal of Negro History 48(3) (July 1963): 157–176.

9 Gary B. Nash, Red, White, and Black: the Peoples of Early America (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974). Rudy Halliburton Jr., Red Over Black: Black Slavery Among the Cherokee Indians (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977); Daniel F. Littlefi eld Jr.,

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The Cherokee Freedmen: From Emancipation to American Citizenship (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978); Theda Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540–1866 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979); Karen I. Blu, The Lumbee Problem: the Making of an American Indian People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); J. Leitch Wright, The Only Land They Knew: The Tragic Story of the American Indians in the Old South (New York: Free Press, 1981); James H. Merrell, “The Racial Education of the Catawba Indians,” Journal of Southern History 50(3) (August 1984): 363–384.

10 Jack D. Forbes, Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Jack D. Forbes, Black Africans and Native Americans: Color, Race, and Caste in the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples (New York: Blackwell, 1988).

11 Rebecca B. Bateman, “Africans and Indians: A Comparative Study of the Black Carib and Black Seminole,” Ethnohistory 37(1) (Winter, 1990): 1–24. Kevin Mulroy, Freedom on the Border: The Seminole Maroons in Florida, the Indian Territory, Coahuila and Texas (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1993); Daniel F. Littlefi eld, Africans and Seminoles: From Removal to Emancipation (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1977).

12 Donal F. Lindsey, Indians at Hampton Institute, 1877–1923 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995); Sharon P. Holland, “ ‘If You Know I Have a History, You Will Respect Me’: A Perspective on Afro-Native Literatures,” Callaloo 17(1) (Winter, 1994): 334–350.

13 Vine Deloria Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto ([New York]: Macmillan, 1969), and We Talk, You Listen: New Tribes, New Turf ([New York]: Macmillan, 1970).

14 James F. Brooks (ed.), Confounding the Color Line: The Indian-Black Experience in North America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002); Jonathan Brennan, When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote: African-Native American Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003); Terri Straus (ed.), Race, Roots, and Relations: Native and African Americans ([Chicago]: Albatross Press, 2005); Tiya Miles and Sharon P. Holland (eds.), Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).

15 Joanna Brooks, American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Lisa Bier, American Indian and African American People, Communities, and Interactions: An Annotated Bibliography (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004).

16 Circe Sturm, Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Rachel Buff, Immigration and the Political Economy of Home: West Indian Brooklyn and American Indian Minneapolis, 1945–1992 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Rosalyn Howard, Black Seminoles in the Bahamas (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002); Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Claudio Saunt, Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Cynthia Cumfer, Separate Peoples, One Land: The Minds of Cherokees, Blacks, and Whites on the Tennessee Frontier (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Gary Zellar, African Creeks: Estelvste and the Creek Nation (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007); Celia Naylor, African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Fay A. Yarbrough, Race and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Kim Cary Warren, The Quest for Citizenship: African American and Native American Education in Kansas, 1880–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); David A. Chang, The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the

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Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832–1929 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Malinda Maynor Lowery, Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Brian Klopotek, Recognition Odysseys: Indigeneity, Race, and Federal Tribal Recognition Policy in Three Louisiana Indian Communities (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Angela Pulley Hudson, Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Making of the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Barbara Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).

17 Black Indians: An American Story, directed by Chip Richie (Dallas, TX: Rich-Heape Films, 2000), DVD.

18 Cherrie L. Moraga, Foreword, in Cherrie L. Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldua (eds.), This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981; reprint, Saline, MI: Third Woman Press, 2002), xv–xxxiii, xvi.

19 Saunt, Black, White, and Indian , 4; second emphasis added. 20 Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire In the American

South, 1670–1717 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); Wright, Jr., The Only Land They Knew. Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).

21 Jack D. Forbes, Africans and Native Americans , 47, 64. 22 Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through

the Stono Rebellion (New York: Norton, 1974), 115. 23 Daniel R. Mandell, “The Saga of Sarah Muckamugg: Indian and African American

Intermarriage in Colonial New England,” in Martha Hodes (ed.), Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 72–90; Wright, Jr., The Only Land They Knew , 148.

24 Treaty with the Cherokee 1791, Article 14, the Avalon Project at Yale University Law School: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/chr1791.asp. (April 13, 2013) Also quoted in Miles, Ties that Bind , 35.

25 James Merrell, “Racial Education,” 363–384. 26 Andrew Jackson, State of the Union Address, December 6, 1830, in Theda Perdue and

Michael D. Green (eds.), The Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents , 2nd edition (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2005), 119–120, 120.

27 Mary Hershberger, “Mobilizing Women, Anticipating Abolition: The Struggle Against Indian Removal in the 1830s, Journal of American History (June, 1999): 1, www.history cooperative.org/journals/jah/86.1/hershberger.html December 10, 2005), 10.

28 William G. McLoughlin and Walter H. Conser, Jr. “The Cherokee Censuses of 1809, 1825, and 1835,” in William G. McLoughlin, The Cherokee Ghost Dance: Essays on the Southeastern Indians 1789–1861 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1984), 240, 234.

29 Wilma Mankiller and Michael Wallis, Mankiller: A Chief of Her People (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 94.

30 T. Lindsay Baker and Julie P. Baker (eds.), The WPA Oklahoma Slave Narratives (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), 274.

31 Census Roll, 1835, of the Cherokee Indians East of the Mississippi and Index to the Roll , National Archives and Records Administration, micro fi lm T496: roll 1 (Washington, DC, 1960), 3.

32 Marguerite McFadden, “The Saga of ‘Rich Joe’ Vann,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 61(1) (1983): 68–79, 73. We fi rst saw this description of Joseph Vann’s slaves displayed on the wall at the Chief Vann House State Historic Site; We wish to thank Chief Interpretive Ranger Julia Autry for providing a copy of the source.

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33 McFadden, 68, 73. 34 Patrick Minges, “’Beneath the Underdog’: Race, Religion and the Trail of Tears,” American

Indian Quarterly 25(3) (Summer 2001): 453–479, 467. 35 Baker and Baker, 408. 36 Theda Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540–1766 (Knoxville:

University of Tennessee Press, 1979), 71. 37 Nathaniel Willis, Indian Pioneer Papers, quoted in Minges, “Underdog,” 467. 38 Daniel Butrick, The Journal of Rev. Daniel S. Butrick, May 19, 1838–April 1, 1839,

Monograph One (1839; reprint, Park Hill, OK: Trail of Tears Association Oklahoma Chapter, 1998), 32–33, 54, 61, 58.

39 Russell Thornton, “The Demography of the Trail of Tears Period: A New Estimate of Cherokee Population Losses,” in William Anderson (ed.), Cherokee Removal: Before and After (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), 75–95, 91. The number of blacks who died along the Trail of Tears has not been estimated.

40 Eliza Whitmire, in Minges (ed.), Black Indian Slave Narratives ; also quoted in Minges, “Underdog,” 466; italics added.

41 Baker and Baker, 170. 42 Baker and Baker, 104. 43 David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler, Indian Removal: A Norton Casebook (New York:

W.W. Norton & Company, 2007), 30. 44 Jonathan Brennan, When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote: African-Native American Literature

(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 43. 45 See Laura L. Mielke, “’Native to the Question’: William Apess, Black Hawk, and the

Sentimental Context of Early Native American Autobiography,” American Indian Quarterly 26(2) (Spring, 2002): 246–270.

46 See Emily Donaldson Field’s discussion of literary scholars and their approaches to his narrative in “’Excepting Himself’: Olaudah Equiano, Native Americans, and the Civilizing Mission,” Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 34(4) (Winter, 2009): 15–38.

47 Jonathan Brennan, When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote: African-Native American Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 21.

48 Whipple recalls that “During her mother’s life, it had often been her practice to follow washing, at the house of Mr. Joseph Baker, of Warwick; a daughter of whom, Miss Elleanor Baker, gave her own name to the little one she often carried with her” (21). Vital Records for Warwick indicate that Elleanor Baker married William Tillinghast on March 12, 1797—about the time that Whipple reports the young mistress to whom Eldridge was fi rst indentured left the household. Although both Whipple and then O’Dowd note that Eleanor Eldridge lived to be almost 80, the date of 1845 is still reiterated in popular encyclopedic entries and scholarly essays.

49 Frances Harriet Whipple Green McDougall (hereafter noted as Frances Whipple) wrote the fi rst appeal for Eldridge in 1838, modestly titled Memoirs of Eleanor Eldridge . Frances Whipple was quite the iconoclast; she hailed from one of the fi rst families of Rhode Island (the Whipples) and spent much of her life championing the rights of ordinary labor- ers. FHWGM was familiar with Eldridge because the latter was employed by many of Providence’s most prominent citizens—the Greens and the Bakers, to name only two. Eldridge went to work as an indentured servant for the Baker family at the age of 10, and worked at various occupations until her death—exact dates of her death are unknown, as Providence records dating back to 1836 indicate that “Eleanor Eldridge/Eleanor Eldredge” did live at 22 Spring Street at least until 1853. Spellings of Eldridge’s name vary in both court and informal documents. We have decided to use “Eldridge,” since this is the spell- ing that previous scholars have utilized. For a more detailed account of Frances Whipple’s

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life, see Sarah C. O’Dowd, A Rhode Island Original: Frances Harriet Whipple Green McDougall (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2004).

50 O’Dowd, Sarah C., 21. 51 O’Dowd, 19 (see note 1). 52 O’Dowd, 19, 21. While several encyclopedic collections mention the work and life of

Elleanor Eldridge, there are few scholarly treatments of her narrative or her history. See note 12.

53 O’Dowd, 20. 54 We are aware that our investigation of Eldridge’s Indian ancestry might convey a bias on

our part, as the inquiry into her grandfather’s ancestry appears to be under-valued. In essence, we are aware that the assumption works both ways. A search of Providence and Warwick Vital Records indicates that Prophets did indeed live in both towns, as the name appears as early as 1745 and as late as 1852. In his 1883 memoirs, William J. Brown notes that he descends from the Prophet line, a well-known African American family in Providence throughout the nineteenth century (phone interview with Rosalind Wiggins, May 2004). Ironically enough, Brown also mentions that his Narragansett grandmother bought her African-American husband around 1770, “in order to change her mode of living” (quoted in Mandell, 184, from The Life of William J. Brown (Providence, 1883). Likewise, Sarah Muckamugg moved to Providence where she married Aaron Whipple, “a Negro servant” (quoted in Mandell, 189).

55 O’Dowd notes that Eldridge’s name was one of the fi rst of 35 women who were proposed to the Rhode Island legislature for statues honoring their contributions (19).

56 The exhaustive research of Jack D. Forbes has been invaluable to scholars researching the early lives and narratives of people of African and Indian descent in the Americas. In particular, his explication of early court records, census data, ledgers, and ship logs reveals that terms such as “black,” “Negro,” “colored,” and “mulatto/a” did not often correspond accurately to the peoples such terms sought to defi ne. As Forbes concludes, “[t]his is a mat- ter of considerable signifi cance for the scholar seeking to understand the actual ethnic or racial identity of non-white persons in the slave trade, in the American colonies and in the United States over the centuries” ( Africans and Native Americans, 91).

57 McMullen, 269. 58 See C. Michael Snipp, American Indians: The First of This Land (New York: Russell Sage

Foundation, 1989). 59 McMullen, 269. 60 Daniel R. Mandell, “Shifting Boundaries of Race and Ethnicity: Indian-Black Intermarriage

in Southern New England, 1760–1880,” Journal of American History (September 1998): 466. This is a superb article that treats complex issues of property, race, gender, and genera- tion in the socio-geo-political context of colonial America. He notes the larger hardening of racial difference with the incursion of Enlightenment thought and shifts in a patriarchal notion of property law and citizenship.

61 Caryn James, “Mischievous Women and Skin-Deep Relationships,” review of Mischief Makers , by Nettie Jones, New York Times , March 1, 1989.

62 Nettie Jones, Mischief Makers (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989), 15. 63 Jones, 69–70. 64 Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 404. 65 Silko, 410. 66 Silko, 407. 67 Silko, 415. 68 Bernard Williams, “The Black West,” exhibition catalogue, Bernard Williams: Legendary

Tales , G.R. N’Namdi Gallery (New York/Chicago, 2005), 7.

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69 Kimberly N. Pinder, “Buffalo Soldier Stories: Bernard Williams Paintings of the West,” in Williams, Legendary Tales , 4.

70 John Horse also appears in Alice Walker’s novel The Temple of My Familiar . 71 Gabrielle Tayac (ed.), IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas

(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2009). For more about the genesis of this proj- ect, see Tayac’s introduction to the book.