Many, if not most, African Americans are believed to be of partial Native American ancestry. William Loren Katz in Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage explored the roots of this Black and Native American admixture. Black contact with Native Americans goes back long before the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth. In 1526, a large expedition left the Spanish settlement of Santo Domingo on the island of Hispanola, and landed in coastal South Carolina along the Pee Dee River. Within a short time, however, the few Spaniards not felled by disease and infighting, sailed back to Santo Domingo leaving the enslaved Africans they had brought with them. These had no problem living, and eventually blending in, with the Native Americans.

The pattern continued for centuries as Europeans set up ever expanding settlements along the east coast of what would become the United States. Time and again enslaved Africans ran away to the interior and made common cause with the locals. They understood the language and ways of the Europeans. The Native Americans knew the land and how to thrive upon it. Together they often forcibly resisted encroaching white settlements. The most spectacular example was the Seminole War, the longest conflict in American history. It raged on and off through Floridathe-making-of-america-cropped-2014 for more than 40 years (1815 – 1858).

However, at times Blacks joined whites in exploiting the indigenous peoples. For example, Bacon’s Rebellion, the uprising of Black and white poor in 1676 in Virginia and Maryland, was actually sparked by the planters refusal to allow them to expand into Native American lands. And the Buffalo Soldiers, Black US cavalrymen who patrolled the far West after the Civil War, many of partial Native American ancestry, at various times protected or fought against the indigenous peoples as their white commanders directed.

In the midwest and far west, long before sustained European settlement, Blacks were trading, interacting and intermarrying with Native Americans. For example, Jean Baptiste pont du Sable, whose trading post blossomed into the city of Chicago, was a Black Indian. Other famous Black Indians include Crispus Attucks, first person to die in the Revolutionary War, the abolitionist Frederick Douglas and author Langston Hughes.