After first contact
Black Indigenous history
The rest of this site looks at North America before any European arrived. This page is about what came after — the long, documented, deliberately buried history of Black and Native lives lived together on this continent.
Two things are true at once, and the second is often used to bury the first. Black Indigenous people and communities are real, numerous and old — many families can trace both lines for centuries. And the ancestors of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas reached this continent from northeast Asia by way of Beringia, which genetics, archaeology and language all agree on. The African thread in Native America begins with the Atlantic slave trade, not before it. Holding to that does not shrink the history on this page; it is what makes it impossible to wave away.
1526
The first recorded rebellion
At the short-lived Spanish colony of San Miguel de Gualdape, on the coast of present-day Georgia or South Carolina, enslaved Africans revolted and fled to live among the Indigenous people nearby. It is the earliest documented instance in what became the United States of Africans and Native people making common cause. The colony collapsed within months.
1600s–1700s
Maroon settlements
People escaping enslavement formed independent communities in swamps, mountains and borderlands — the Great Dismal Swamp on the Virginia–North Carolina line held such a community for generations. Many were mixed African and Native, joined by Indigenous people displaced by colonial war. They farmed, traded and defended themselves outside colonial reach.
1600s–1700s
Native people enslaved too
Colonists enslaved Indigenous people on a large scale, especially in the Carolinas, and shipped many to the Caribbean. Africans and Native people were held together, worked together and escaped together, and their children were born into both peoples. This shared bondage is a documented root of Black Indigenous kinship — and it is a colonial story, not a pre-contact one.
1700s–1858
The Black Seminoles
In Spanish Florida, people who escaped slavery in the British colonies allied with the Seminole. They lived in their own towns, kept their own leaders, paid tribute in crops and fought beside the Seminole through three wars against the United States. Abraham and John Horse are among the leaders whose names survive. Their resistance was one reason the United States pursued removal so hard.
1830s
Removal, and who walked
When the Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole were forced west, enslaved Black people owned by members of those nations, and free Black people living among them, walked the same trails. Black Indigenous families arrived in Indian Territory as part of those nations and helped rebuild them.
1866
The freedmen treaties
After the Civil War, treaties between the United States and the Five Tribes abolished slavery in Indian Territory and required that freedmen and their descendants be admitted to citizenship in those nations. The Dawes Rolls that followed listed people on separate 'by blood' and 'Freedmen' schedules — a paper division whose consequences are still being fought over.
1900s–today
Citizenship contested
Several nations later restricted or removed freedmen descendants from citizenship, and the disputes have run through tribal courts, federal courts and tribal elections for decades. In 2017 a federal court affirmed Cherokee Freedmen citizenship rights under the 1866 treaty. Other nations' cases remain unresolved.
Throughout
Written out
Census takers and clerks routinely recorded anyone with visible African ancestry as 'Negro' or 'colored' and nothing else, and Virginia's 1924 Racial Integrity Act made that erasure law — Native identity was struck from records outright. Families who knew exactly who they were lost the documents that would prove it, which is a large part of why this history is so little known today.
Each nation's own page carries a short section on its documented history with people of African descent, where one exists.