ROOTS AFRICAN OR AMERICAN? II

For most of my life I had been taught that the reason so many Black people had “Indian blood” or that one family member or the other was full blood Cherokee, was because the Black African slaves ran away from the plantation to live amongst the Indians. I remember a bitter argument I had with my previous wife when she told me her father’s mother (her paternal grandmother) was full blooded Blackfoot Indian. I argued her down that there was no such Indian “tribe” as Blackfoot. I argued that she must have meant Blackfeet, because there was no such people as Blackfoot. I came to learn she was in fact correct in speaking of a Blackfoot nation of people and that I was dead wrong!

Rev. Amen Ra elucidated ,that history documents the primary Trans Atlantic slave trade began when, Columbus, over a short period of years, shipped over 1500 “Indians” from the island of Ayiti to Spain and eventually other parts of Europe before one African was ever shipped as chattel property to the west. She theorized that since, no where on the planet Earth, the aboriginal people were ever non Black, that the same had to hold true for the Americas.

She opened another lane of thought in my mind about the reality of slavery in the Americas and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Upon her suggestions we should all study and not just take her word as the gospel truth on the subject.

Of course the person that I am, I went for it. I studied the slave trade and began to analyze the most often told stories, dissected them , reassembled them to gain an understanding about what was being told to us. I wondered how could people walk for more than 500 miles (as from the Congo to Ghana), be placed in a dungeon, packed onto a slaving ship, to be transported on a 2-3 month voyage across the Atlantic.?

Sacagawea. Photo Michael Haynes

I reasoned that people were dying, vomiting, defecating, menstruating and urinating within these packed compartments on board the heavily loaded ship. This would result in the deaths of many, but for different reasons than we had been taught. But, I also considered the fact that those that did make it would probably be emaciated, ill and I’m sure many died upon arrival or shortly there after. Senseless if one is attempting to sell these humans for a profit.

The huge Trans-Atlantic slave trade became more and more unreal to me. You see ,we still have to consider insurance cost, and transportation cost factored into a slave shipped from Africa, where as there were ample Black people here in the Americas. I do believe there were Africans transported to the Americas to become slaves, but not to the magnitude that has been taught to us. One hundred million, I disagree.

With my new found belief pattern I had to re-arrange how I pictured the so called Indian of the Americas. This was a tough process since television, books, television news shows and movies reinforce the image of the “noble Indian” as someone that looks like Lou Diamond Phillips, or Leonard Peltier rather than Godfather of Soul James Brown or Jimi Hendrix. I had to teach myself that Black people that looked like the latter rather than the former two Americans were the actual Native Americans. For so long I believed that the often portrayed Pochahontas was the real American Indian and not my great grandfather “Papa.”

In the essay All my slaves whether Negroes, Indians, Mustees or Molattoes… Patrick Neal Minges quotes Andrew Bryan, Pioneer Baptist, speaking of Henry Francis in a letter to authorities speaks of Henry Francis, who, according to Minges was often known as the “black pastor” who is reported to have no known African ancestry

“…Henry Francis, lately a slave to the widow of the late Colonel Leroy Hammond, of Augusta, has been purchased by a few humane gentlemen of this place, and liberated to exercise the handsome ministerial gifts he possesses amongst us, and teach our youth to read and write. He is a strong man about forty-nine years of age, whose mother was white and whose father was an Indian.”

I began to read, and I began by reading Black Indians; A hidden heritage William Lorenz Katz. Mr. Katz stayed with the previously held belief of runaway slaves intermarrying with the commonly accepted looking Indian (Pochahontas) making this his reasoning for the Natives with heavier melanin. But, it was a good read and opened my eyes to things I hadn’t studied or read before. Another interesting read is The Only Land They Knew Indians in the Old South by J Leitch Wright and most of all the book On Sex and Race Vol. 3 by Joel Augustus Rogers. Mr. Rogers one of the greatest archeologist and historians of our time. This search has opened my world to much much more. Bob Marley once sang “…half that story has never been told…” I now believe that ¾’s of that story has never been told.

Once I ingested this new thought pattern, let it digest I was then able to manifest visual images of Rosa Parks when I hear the words Native American and not Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce.  Learning to accept the fact that the Nez Perce, Crow, Seminole, Tuscarora, Taino or Arawak of today only represents one phenotype of the Americas not all. This is the most crucial point. To begin to imagine “We people who are darker than blue…” when we hear the words Native American. The Dawes Rolls did much to change who was classified as Native American versus Black/Negro. Next time my take on why this is a hidden heritage and how it can be used as a tool for our uplift.

Photo 1-Yuisa Aldea Cacique (chief) of Borinken/Puerto Rico

Photo 2 Sacagawea and son Jean Baptiste a Shoshone woman

Photo 3 A Wampanoag woman of Massachusetts

Links for further reading;

http://www.fiaah.org/content/view/106/91/

http://www.stewartsynopsis.com/washitaw.htm

http://etext.virginia.edu/journals/EH/EH36/poole1.html

http://are.as.wvu.edu/minges.htm