Written research and dated images/illustrations present concrete evidence of aboriginal Americans’ existence, historically referenced as the “copper-colored” people. However, the narrative we’ve always been taught is that “Black American Indians” were the sole byproduct of Africans procreating with the Natives (you’ll understand why I put that in quotes later). Though a logical consensus, I’m afraid that it doesn’t tell the complete story of our history.
There’s certainly truth to the fact that Natives and Africans “mixed” with each other during America’s slavery era, birthing a population of Afro-Indigenous peoples widely known today as the African-Americans. Natives were enslaved along with the Africans, partly explaining how the two were in contact with each other. There’s one blip (of many) in U.S. history that we need to correct, though.
Aboriginal Americans existed—in North America, South America, and the Caribbean nations—before Africans’ arrival during the transatlantic slave trade. Their bronze skin was distinctively darker than that of the paler, reddish-colored Native Americans who are often depicted in film, television, and pop culture. That’s right: aboriginals and Natives weren’t necessarily one and the same. The terms “Native” and “Indigenous” simply mean that you were born in a particular place, but it’s the aboriginals who occupied the land from the beginning. Not only that, but Native Indians come in all sorts of different shades.
The real questions that we should be asking are, who were the aboriginal Americans and what did they look like? How many aboriginal American tribes existed in total, and where did each tribe call home? What percentage of aboriginal Americans and their offspring survived the genocides that they faced at the hands of European settlers, along with the other American tribes who fought against them in brutal territory wars? As for the ones who survived and were likely sold into slavery, did they all stay in the Americas or were some shipped off/forced to migrate elsewhere in the world? Unfortunately, we may never find the answers to all, but historical literature gives us an idea of how they appeared.
Disclaimer: I don’t completely agree with all of Malcolm X’s statements featured toward the end of this video (specifically about Adam). I’m solely sharing it to show the reenactment clip from the film you see in the beginning. Since I’m unaware of the film’s name and couldn’t find the clip elsewhere, sharing this video was my only option.
What We Know About The Aboriginal Americans
Acknowledged as “natives of America” in the Websters Dictionary of 1828, the aboriginal Americans (or AMER’ICANS) discovered by settling Europeans were originally described as “copper-colored.” At that time, copper was much darker than how it looks today. Other recollections of aboriginal Americans, as told by the European settlers, were that they had small, dark eyes and long, black hair. They further described them as having broad noses and thick lips, both of which are features that are shared with many African tribes.
Chief Walt “Red Hawk” Brown, the elected chief of Southampton Country, Virginia’s Cheroenhaka-Nottoway Indian Tribe, was interviewed on WHRO’s Public Media show, “Another View.” One comment that he made was, “First Americans was a rich brown people. They were mahogany in color.” Now tell me, do the Red Native Americans we see depicted today have mahogany skin? Were their complexions copper-colored like the aboriginal Americans described by European settlers?
Brown’s comments were in reference to journals from English-born Virginia colonist William Byrd. In 1728, Byrd shared his perceptions of Virginia’s Cheroenhaka-Nottoway Indian Tribe in the William Byrd Papers, after a visit to their reserve. “The young men danced to the beat of a gourd drum, stretched tight with skin – the women wore Blue and Red Match Coats with their hair braided with Blue and White beads,” he stated. Now his next comment about the female tribal members is what really stood out (though disgusting). He stated, “These dark angels will make exceptional wives for the English planters. Their dark skin would bleach out in two generations.”
Could this explain why the main faces of today’s recognized Native tribes (i.e., those who meet blood quantum requirements) typically have paler skin than the aboriginal Americans? Did these reddish-hued Natives descend from aboriginal Americans who were forced to procreate with European settlers, birthing a Native American generation with more Euro-centric features? Is this why they were eventually pushed to the forefront and more socially accepted while darker-complexioned aboriginal Americans and their descendants were classified as negroes, held captive as slaves (except for free blacks), and further put through the wringer post-slavery?
Could this also explain society’s confusion as to who all counts as “true Native Americans,” and whether Black Americans have Indigenous roots? Allow me to clarify what caused this confusion in the first place, and why we may never get all the answers that we’re looking for.
From American Indian to Colored
Byrd had affiliations with the Colonial Council and the Commonwealth of Virginia, who were largely responsible for native-born Virginians’ experiences of treaty violations, economic suffrage, and colonial encroachment as told by the Cheroenhaka (Nottoway) Indian Nation. So basically, he walked so eugenicist Walter Ashby Plecker could run.
Plecker was the head of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics (sounds a lot like the Census Bureau, doesn’t it?). The Virginia-based Bureau was established in 1912 and brought on Plecker that same year, where he served as state registrar from 1912 to 1946.
Well, let me tell you what good ol’ Mr. Plecker (whose father was a Civil War-fighting slave owner) did during his reign of terror. He initiated a paper genocide against the native-born Indians of Virginia at that time, altering their birth certificates, marriage licenses, and other important documentation useful for identification purposes.
In 1924, Plecker took it upon himself to introduce the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, ruining every ounce of documented evidence verifying certain Virginia-based Indians’ existence. He did this by switching the documents’ racial categories to just black and white.
The more melanin-rich American Indians were reclassified as “Black” (by law) because of their deeper-pigmented complexions, becoming outsiders of their own tribes. In the form of written letters, Plecker also instructed census takers on how to classify “Black” Indians moving forward. He intentionally sought to cause confusion regarding who all belonged to the native race—on paper, at least.
There were a total of three racial integrity laws passed from 1924 to 1930. In 1930, a bill was passed to amend a section in the Code of Virginia, 1887 (passed in 1910), in which the General Assembly defined anyone with one-sixteenth or more of “negro blood” as colored and one-fourth or more of “Indian blood” as Indian.
The amended bill passed in 1930 was intended to make things even more complicated, now stating that a person with any “negro” blood would be classified as colored and not “Indian” (though both could be true).
Additionally, all “non-colored individuals” with one-fourth of American Indian blood could keep the American Indian title and all Indian tribal members who already resided on reservations allotted by the Commonwealth of Virginia could remain as tribal Indians—just as long as they had one-fourth or more of Indian blood, less than one-sixteenth of negro blood, and were domiciled on those reservations.
This bill was conveniently passed after Plecker tampered with the native-born Virginians’ documents, and because the misclassifications were considered “legal,” American descendants of Europeans (and even certain Native American tribes) ran with the narrative that “Black Americans” have little-to-no Native blood.
Over the years, our titles have gone from negro to colored, Black to Afro-American, and finally African-American. This, my friends, was a foul act of systemic racism. Do you see how easy it is to rewrite history to push one’s personal agenda? I guess that’s why they say that the pen is mightier than the sword, and that “he who writes the history, controls the history.”
So as you can see, we can’t just flat-out say that all “Black Americans” are African-Americans or the descendants of African converts. Many “colored” American Indians were later reclassified as “Black” because of a color-struck man who was drunk on power, and wanted to establish dominance over a group of people that he deemed as inferior.
This is why I never trusted those mail-in ancestry DNA kits that sprung up out of nowhere. If there’s proof of inaccurate identification records in Virginia, then how can we 100% know that the provided DNA test results are accurate? If an aged eugenicist like Plecker can change a whole racial group’s documents to suit his agenda, then modern-day eugenicists (likely closeted, nowadays) can surely make up DNA results.
Do you see where I’m going with this? We just don’t know what’s real with the data being presented to the Black American people and what logic the science is based on (whether biased or unbiased).
On that note, we must always question the information that we’re given from individuals who don’t know us from a can of paint. I firmly believe that Plecker wasn’t the only “state registrar” messing with Black Americans’ papers. I can only assume that this reclassification agenda was widespread throughout our country and was happening in other states.
In the aftermath of this paper genocide, many Black Americans of today weren’t left with an accurate paper trail to verify where their ancestors originated from, explaining why we’re often rejected from joining native tribes (unless you’re a big name like Kyrie Irving). But what we surely know is this: The “copper-colored races” were alive and well, and we Black Americans who were told of our American Indian roots by our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents are not crazy. The establishment may be able to write us off on paper, but we know the truth, which is all that matters.
I Am Not your Negro
A majority of academic researchers and historians have since used the term “Black Indians” to describe a class of mixed-raced individuals of African and Native descent, or “African-Americans.” A prime example of this is a segment of NPR’s show, “Tell Me More,” which aired in 2010 during their month-long National Native American Heritage Month series.
The particular episode I’m referring to explored the similarities and now-distant relationship between “Black” and Native Americans, and how “Black” Native descendants of today have faced more rejection from the civilized Native American tribes than acceptance. One of the episode’s guests, William Katz, authored the book Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage. His conversations with the host included a back-and-forth dialogue on how the Black Indian race emerged. Similar to what’s documented in his book, Katz shared his belief that runaway African slaves initially fled to Native Reservations to find refuge.
He continued to say that Native Americans took runaways under their wings and assimilated them into their tribal communities. This led to some Native tribal members getting romantically involved with the runaways, hopping into interracial marriages and procreating Afro-Indigenous Americans in the aftermath. Though partially true, this narrative isn’t entirely inclusive of the AMER’ICAN aboriginals who were referenced in the Websters Dictionary of 1828, and occupied this land before the slave trade.
A multitude of tribes have called America their “home land” throughout time. Yet, only a fraction of those American tribes remain today. This includes Brazillian indigenous peoples who were labeled the negros da terra as early as the sixteenth century. British slave colonies in North America also referred to Native American slaves as negroes, so what does that tell you? This agenda to reclassify and deny melanated American Indians of their land and birthrights, and separate them from Euro-centric Natives has been happening for centuries.
Reclaiming Your Heritage
Upholders of this racist world system have truly done a disservice to the descendants of American Indians. As someone with ancestors of Cherokee and Blackfoot descent, I can only imagine how they were affected by the stripping of their heritages. There’s not much that I know about my heritage outside of the Native tribes they belonged to, how they looked, and their mannerisms. For many of us, all that’s left to go off are the stories of our great-great-grandparents and great-grandparents, shared by our grandparents to our parents—which still doesn’t seem to be enough to get the proper recognition deserved.
Those of the silent generation were afraid to make a fuss about anything, including their true heritage, for fear of being jailed or even killed. Many were also haunted by memories of traumatic events like the Black Wall Street massacre, further pushing them into becoming silent about the past. Those of us who are still here have a responsibility to get to the bottom of the truth so that it accurately gets told. So with that, I challenge you to question everything and take action to ensure that real American history gets out to the masses. This isn’t for us, but for our ancestors who couldn’t use their voices to tell their true stories.