1619 Might Not Be the Right Year: 6 Shocking Facts About Slavery, Natives and African Americans
The Joseph Jenkins Roberts Center at Norfolk State University (NSU) held a conference called 1619: The Making of America in September of 2013. That year is historically significant because it was the first year Africans were brought to the colonies, slavery was born and it was the year America’s first legislative body was founded.
In an admirable gesture to honor all of the cultural relations happening in the America’s in 1619, NSU hosted several Native speakers and those familiar with Native history to address many issues not often covered in today’s classrooms. During these sessions, many little known facts about African Americans, Native Americans and slavery were addressed in the years following 1619.
The Term Negro May Have Been Meant For American Indians
During the session Native Americans at 1619
Dr. Arica Coleman, an assistant professor at the University of Delaware
who is of Rappahannock and African American descent, discussed how the
term negro might actually be referring to an American Indian.
According to her 2013 book, That the Blood Stay Pure,
the term’s origins can be traced to medieval Italy where it was a
classification of a skin color, not race. Additionally, Europeans often
referred to indigenous populations of their communities as negroes. In
the Portuguese colony of Brazil, Indians were called negros da terra meaning negroes of the land.
Coleman
pointed out during the conference that the early Virginia legislature
identified Moors and negroes separately. There is also documentation in
which individuals were described as “Negro African.” Coleman questioned
why the two words would be used to describe an African person and
suggested the Native meaning as a strong possibility.
1619 Might Not Be the Right Year
Dr.
Coleman also asserts the year 1619 isn’t entirely correct regarding the
first arrival of blacks to America. She notes “negroes” accompanied
Spanish North American expeditions a century before the English arrived
in Virginia.
She also
cites evidence of cohabitation with aborigines in the early 17th
century. She says that in 1603, seven negroes escaped from St.
Augustine, maintained their freedom and married Indian women.
1600s Law Said the Closest Indians Were Guilty—of Murder
Chief Lynette Allston, of the Nottoway Indian Tribe of Virginia, discussed Native America on the Hit List: Traditions, Culture, and Identity at the conference.
Allston
shared that in October of 1665, according to Hening’s Statutes at
Large—the laws of Virginia—if an Englishman was murdered, the closest
Indian town would be held accountable for the crime.
When
authorities in 1680 assumed Nansiatticos had committed a murder, they
reenacted Hening’s Statutes and ordered all children under 12 be
indentured to the English as servants until the age of 24. The Indians
were forbidden to return home, or they “shall be Transported beyond Sea to England or Some of the Islands and there bound or Sold for Seaven Years….”
Natives in Virginia Were Part African, Exported Cotton and Were Valued Members of Society
Vouching
for the legitimacy of the Nottoway Tribe, Dr. Buck Woodard, a cultural
anthropologist who at the time was director of the American Indian
Initiative for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and Historic
Jamestowne, spoke about the “Nottoway Kinship, Marriage and Peoplehood
in Southampton County, Virginia.”
Woodard
said many Nottoway moved to New York with the Tuscarora in the 18th
century, but some stayed in Southampton and intermarried with whites,
and “free colored people.” The Nottoway town of Antebellum, he said,
“became a series of ‘reservation farms’ in Virginia’s developing
agro-industrial society, contributing to cotton, swine and vegetable
markets of the region.”
He said some Nottoway owned slaves and traded slave labor with neighboring white and free black farmers.
Native Americans Contributed to Literary History
Dr.
Rebecca Hooker, assistant professor of English at Virginia Wesleyan
College, who is of African American, English and Creek descent, spoke
about how the racial mix of authors entering America affected literary
culture. In the midst of contributions of African and European literary
voices, a Native author came forward. He was a Tuscarora named David
Cusick whose mission was to present the history of Six Nations’ people
from their own perspective.
Cusick claimed he wrote his book Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations, (1827): An Iroquois Origin Story and A Challenge to the Western Historical Timeline
because he “found the history involved with fables.” In his text,
Cusick describes historical moments with specific dates that occur
before recorded American history.
“Cusick
was an author who inserted himself into the literary conversation in
order to insist on the authority of Native nations to know their own
history, and his writing challenges the idea that events not
‘discovered’ by whites and documented by independent observation or
experimentation cannot be true,” Hooker said.
Indians Got Poison Not Peace at 1623 Negotiations
Allston
also discussed a poisoning that took place at a meeting convened for the
purpose of peace negotiations. The event is considered so historically
egregious, it is now marked with a Virginia Department of Historic
Resources Highway Marker near West Point.
The marker reads as follows: “In May 1623, Capt. William Tucker led soldiers from Jamestown to meet with Indian leaders here in Pamunkey Territory. The Indians were returning English prisoners taken in March 1622 during war leader Opechancanough’s orchestrated attacks on encroaching English settlements along the James River. At the meeting, the English called for a toast to seal the agreement, gave the Indians poisoned wine, and then fired upon them, injuring as many as 150, including Opechancanough and the chief of the Kiskiack. The English had hoped to assassinate Opechancanough, who was erroneously reported as having been slain: they succeeded in 1646.”
According
to Allston, “When negotiations and more diplomatic methods failed, 17th
century methods of control were through—religion, education, advanced
weaponry, chemical and biological warfare, servitude and slavery.”
Comments