Black Indians: From Concept to Birth
William Loren Katz
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I was forever learning something new about my topic. Around the time I began my writing, some old friends taught me something about the personal impact of the issue for people of color, particularly those who considered themselves African Americans. Before we left for a winter vacation, my future wife, Laurie, and I invited friends to a small party at our apartment. When someone asked what project I was working on, I mentioned Black Indians . All of my African American friends present, whom I had known for years, revealed something new: their family trees had Indian branches. As people who grew up during the era of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, they were proudly African American. They described how talk of the Indian connection was not trumpeted to the general public and usually confined to family gatherings. I began to hear this response from so many friends, and others who shared this dual lineage, that I decided the book should mention it:

Children of the black awareness of the 1960s have rarely cared to mention an Indian ancestry because this might be seen as a denial of their African origins and the value of blackness. (p. 18)

The Publication of Black Indians
Black Indians first appeared in 1986 bearing a cover featuring a photograph of John Taylor and a Ute friend, and a back cover featuring a Brady photograph of Etla and Lone Wolf, who were Kiowa. In the discussion leading up to this choice, I had requested the two covers be reversed, and Etla (who reminded me of my dear friend Nellie, whom I had known as a friend and fellow teacher for many years, and attended her wedding) and Lone Wolf appear on the cover. However, the publisher overrode my suggestion, stating it unwise (in 1986) to feature a woman prominently on a cover for a general children's book.

In 1986 black history, despite belated recognition as a part of United States growth and development, was still struggling for more than a token place in the school curriculum, textbooks, movies, and the public consciousness. Except for those who shared this biracial lineage, few scholars knew much about the book's subject, and few teachers had heard about African and Indian mixtures or alliances. Dr. Carter G. Woodson studied the topic in his Journal of Negro History as early as 1920 and for decades had published articles by Professor Porter, and other scholars (including himself), but white academics showed little interest. There was no discernable black Indian presence in textbooks or Hollywood movies. My goal was to break this barrier and show how two peoples of color were able to join in families, to defy white "divide and rule" tactics, and to unite as our first freedom fighters. My book was intended to show that in many locales and sometimes for decades, Africans and Indians were able to defeat European armies and halt the invaders' triumphant march across the Americas.

Though I had to operate within the ban on footnotes, I wanted to persuade readers that this was a well-documented American story, and that required more than my word as a narrator. I began Black Indians with a frontispiece citing three historic quotations:   Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835, Carter G. Woodson in 1920, and Black Seminole Joe Phillips in 1930. Within the text I indicated where readers could locate my sources, for example, on page 88 a document by John Horse of the Seminoles cites the files of the National Archives. I also used my large collection of historic prints and rare photographs as part of my evidence. Along with the annotated bibliography, I hoped these would inform interested readers that here was an historically accurate work based on documents from several centuries. However, some critics feigned unawareness of the dictates of young-adult publishing policy and used the absence of footnotes to question the book's veracity and conclusions.

Many people found the book's title controversial or problematic. Black Indians made more sense to me than other possibilities such as "Africans and Indians." Although many of the contacts were between the two people of color, I felt the mixture of two peoples through family and blood was the book's most significant contribution. White critics, and scholars in particular, criticized the title.  My rejection of a host of commonly accepted US history terms, such as "tribe," and particularly my definition of black Indians caused sparks among people devoted to racial purity: "I have defined Black Indians as people who have a dual ancestry or black people who have lived for some time with Native Americans" (p. 7).

As a believer in national self-determination, I also concluded that each individual in a racist society had a right to define, deny, or distort his or her racial category, since both survival and success might be at stake. Our racial language and hierarchy are derived from European imports of the 1500s and have been used to oppress people of color in a variety of ways for 500 years. Most Americans have tended to accept their society's odd, arbitrary, definitions about race though their original intent was to replicate how Europeans regulate "others." We have to tried to live with prejudicial and flawed terms such as "racial purity," "full blood," and "mixed blood," offered us by authorities including census takers and politicians, as well as   Hollywood epics. Today these classifications are still used to justify dehumanization and/or disfranchisement of people of color.

Americans have been trained by an educational system so mired in racialist fears and anger that children learn a harmful worldview of various people. One significant result is a weak or damaging assessment of the contributions of people of color that "hide a heritage worth exploring" and "divide people today who could benefit from unity" (p. 7). For the book's many partisans, I soon found, the title and the book's key definition became a vehicle that connected their family to a history few knew but were eager to grasp.

The Introduction to Black Indians cited (p. 5) Carter G. Woodson's statement that "relations of the Negroes and the Indians" constitute "one the longest unwritten chapters in the history of the United States," and declared the author's intention to "tackle the chapter." And it conceded (p. 8), "This is a subject that deserves further investigation and synthesis and far greater study."

Though the publisher saw this volume as aimed at young adults and schools, privately I hoped it might also find its way into adult hands and challenge common public perceptions of early US history. My previous books on African Americans charged into this contested territory and in the late 1960s were used in schools and colleges. Black Indians sought to explore early racial relations from a fresh perspective, to explode the view of New World slavery as monoracial, to cast new light on the multiracial fight for liberty, and to reveal how Africans and Indians together braved the advance of European "civilization" since the time of Columbus.

I hoped Black Indians would help lead to a needed revaluation of the complexities of race so clearly stated in 1988 by Professor Jack D. Forbes, a brilliant, early authority:

Long ago, when first working with my own Powhatan-Renape people of Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and surrounding areas, I discovered that the meaning of racial terms was a controversial issue. "As the reader will see, there is hardly a racial term which has a clear and consistent meaning over time (and space)." —Jack D. Forbes, Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples , Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993, p. 2.

The ancestors of Black Indians often created—or died in the attempt—an American sisterhood and brotherhood we have tried to attain. They did this under terrible circumstances and in the face of armed opposition. Had we paid attention to their unique model of friendship and loyalty, our common American history, from Hudson Bay to Cape Horn, might have been different, more peaceful. Our problems might have been more easily solved. Even at this late date we owe ourselves a rereading of this fascinating legacy. Perhaps we can still act on its lessons.

Black Indians appeared in late 1986 and almost immediately stirred debate and controversy. But this is another chapter of its story.

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