The Indian connection - African American and Native American racial mixing

American Visions,  August-Sept, 1996  
By Mary A. Dempsey

A simple question about her father's red hair led Deborah Tucker to her American Indian ancestry. It also launched two decades of detective work into the little-explored subject of racial mixing between African Americans and American Indians, in the process raising the controversial "m" word - miscegenation.

"Few of us are pure Africans," says Tucker, one of the country's leading researchers into the historical links between two peoples who suffered at the hands of Euro-Americans. "You hear a lot about the mixing of blacks and whites. You hear a lot about whites and Native Americans. But the interactions between Native Americans and African Americans have been sadly neglected in U.S. history."

Tucker's fascination with the bond between red and black was sparked in 1976, when she quizzed her grandmother about her father's red hair. The whispered answer began with a story of Irish ancestry but spun into the revelation that her paternal great-grandmother might have been full-blooded Indian, probably Cherokee. Tucker already had inklings of some Indian lineage on her mother's side.

So the former journalist began a decade of informal probing into her family's history. Then, for a 1986 graduate-school class at Detroit's Wayne State University, Tucker prepared a bibliographic essay on Native American and African American links. Her professor urged her to write a book on the subject. The book simmers on the back burner, but Tucker's research forges ahead - as her Detroit apartment, stacked with piles of pictures, photocopied materials and letters, attests.

Her job as multicultural librarian at Wayne State University's Purdy Library keeps Tucker on the crest of new publications about miscegenation. But while Tucker is enthusiastic about her finds, which run the gamut from anecdotal tidbits bits trawled from letters to newly unearthed historical documents, she admits that tracing the genealogy of African Americans with Native American ancestry is a tangled process.

"There is little primary source material ... because slaves were forbidden to learn to read and write, and most Native Americans didn't speak English, let alone read or write it," she explains. Moreover, the bulk of recorded data about slaves concerns those held on plantations who never escaped to freedom, or it details the lives of those who fled to free territory in the North. Complicating the formula further is the fact that some African Americans trace their Native American heritage more indirectly: through their white ancestors who were mixed-race.

So Tucker looks beyond family lineage, energetically tracking anthropological, socioeconomic and even linguistic clues. She has scrutinized thousands of escaped-slave notices, looking for notes such as "the said Negroes have been seen lately in Georgia, taken up by the Creek Indians" or studying the ads' references to physical appearance and speech patterns. She pores over centuries-old journals left by missionaries, trappers and government agents. She collects documents about nonwhite schools where blacks and Indians studied under the same roof. And she collects old family photographs in which physical features suggest that one spouse was of Native American origin and the other, African.

Tucker presents the fruits of this research in a sound-and-slide show to civic groups, university classes, genealogical organizations and high-school classes. Included in her presentation is a slide of people sporting African braids, Native American headgear and European clothes. Another photograph depicts a Seminole bride and groom. Their facial features clearly hint at an African ancestry - and the border design on the woman's skirt and blouse looks vaguely African. "I'd like to take time to study the pattern of the fabrics to see which have African influence," Tucker says.

History may have woven Native Americans and African Americans together, but sorting through those braided lives is a genealogical challenge that demands cross-country research and multiple sources. For anyone rising to the test, Tucker recommends delving into African-American archives and Native American history and government documents (although she cautions that census reports have limited value because race is not consistently defined). Tracing a family's geographic origins is a key factor in unraveling Native American ancestry.

"Look at the counties where families are from; then look to see what Native American groups were there," Tucker says. "If you know your ancestors are Cherokee, you're in good shape because the Cherokees have some of the best records."
However, she cautions, don't always expect cooperation from people - including family member - with pertinent genealogical information. Tucker's grandmother would only leak secrets in whispers, and others have told of family elders who simply refuse to discuss their Native American ancestry. Even the word "miscegenation" makes people bristle. For one of Tucker's presentations in Michigan, the host library removed the word from promotional material, claiming it might offend the audience.

"A lot of Native Americans don't want to be associated with African Americans; they don't want to, be mixed with anyone," Tucker says. "And a lot of people do not like to talk about the mixing of races, period. Black, white, or Native American."
Still, interest in the topic has ballooned in recent years, with several new books surfacing on the subject and a Detroit conference on African American and Native American issues planned for 1998. Nor does all this interest stem from academics, genealogists and African Americans. During a meeting last October, Wilma Mankiller, the former principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, asked Tucker to help organize a national memorial for blacks who were caught up in the government's forced removal during the 1830s and '40s of Native Americans living east of the Mississippi. Among the Cherokees alone, an estimated 15,000 people made the 1,200-mile journey to the Indian Territory (Oklahoma); of those, as many as 4,000 died on the Trail of Tear - and Tucker estimates that up to a third of those who perished from white violence, cold, hunger and disease during the trek were escaped slaves, free Africans or black Indians.

© 1996 Heritage Information Holdings, Inc.