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Black - Indian Black - Indian History |
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Western Lands of the Five Civilized Tribes, 1860 |
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Throughout American history, the longest and most consistent contact between American Indians and peoples of African descent occurred among those tribes that the federal government designated as the Five Civilized Tribes--the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles. The relations between and among these peoples have generated scholarly interest since the early decades of this century, as the first generation of scholars represented by Laurence Foster was succeeded by the next by Kenneth Wiggins Porter, and that generation by the next, represented by J. Leitch Wright, Jr., Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr., and Theda Perdue. Today finds not only a newer generation of scholars concerned with the history and the literature of African-Indian contact but also a growing number of individuals interested in Black-Indian family histories.
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This bibliography is a representative--no means comprehensive--list of Black-Indian resources for the so-called Five Civilized Tribes. The three archival repositories represented are those holding the vast majority of records relating to those tribes: the Oklahoma Historical Society, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; the National Archives-Southwest Region, Fort Worth, Texas; and the National Archives, Washington, D. C. Because of aggressive microfilming by all three, many of the resources cited are available in microform. Researchers should contact those institutions regarding inventories of their holdings and up-to-date lists of materials available in microform.
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The American Native Press Archives holds many of the resources cited below in either hard copy or microform. In addition, the Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr., research collection of materials related to people of African descent among the Five Civilized Tribes is available for use at the Archives. It is one of the nation's largest collections of material concerning this aspect of these tribes' history. |
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Black, American Indian Scholars Correct History Books At “State of the Black Union 2007”
By Cassie M. Chew
Feb 13, 2007, 08:06
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WILLIAMSBURG, Va.
On May 13, 1607, three small English ships approached Jamestown Island in Virginia carrying about 100 men and boys. King James I had granted a group of London businessmen a charter to set up an English settlement in North America —”the New World.” The company expected them to develop industries and return a profit for the settlement’s investors. |
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The settlement the group founded on the banks of what they called the James River would become known as Jamestown. Instead of finding gold and riches, the English met with hard living. The settlement stood on swampy, mosquito-infested land, and they became sick from the river’s salty water.
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Without the help of the American Indians who gave them food, and later a group of West Africans, who provided labor to tend the growing tobacco fields, the settlement, which marked the beginning of the United States of America, would not have survived, said Karenne Wood, who serves on the Tribal Council of the Monacan Indian Nation and is the director of the Virginia Indian Heritage Program, and Dr. Cornel West, author of Race Matters and a professor of Religion at Princeton University.
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This year’s marking of the 400th anniversary of the settlement at Jamestown gives America the chance to revisit and correct stories about the relationships between these three groups, the pillaging of American Indian villages, the enslavement of Africans and the impact these events continue to have in 2007, Wood, West and a group of seven other academics said Friday on the campus of the College of William and Mary, in Williamsburg, Va., about 10 miles from the original settlement. Talk show host and author Travis Smiley convened the group as part of “State of the Black Union 2007,” an annual discussion he has held since 2000.
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Most history textbooks site the arrival of a group of English settlers who arrived in 1620 to Plymouth County, Mass. aboard the Mayflower as the birth of the nation. The group, known as the Pilgrims, had fled England in search of religious freedom, and history books tell the stories of their friendship with American Indians marked by a Thanksgiving celebration. |
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“But before the Pilgrims, you had the Jamestown Africans,” Smiley said at the start of the discussion.
“If we go back to Jamestown, there is no cotton, there is no Deep South, there is no Christianity,” said Dr. Ira Berlin, a professor at the University of Maryland. “There are different people from different nations. It is a very poor and open society.”
Berlin also noted that most of the 100 English settlers were “caught up in indentured servitude.” The settlers were there to provide a profit for the Virginia Company of London, which gave them clothing and food with the expectation that they develop businesses that would profit the shareholders. As indentured servants, the early colonists were to work for seven to 10 years in exchange for passage, food, protection and land ownership. |
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