In 1907, the Indian Territory became the State of Oklahoma. To qualify for the payments and land allotments set aside for the Five Civilized Tribes, the former slaves of these nations had to apply for official enrollment, thus producing testimonies of imm

This story of a remarkable people, the Black Seminoles, and their charismatic leader, Chief John Horse, chronicles their heroic struggle for freedom. Beginning with the early 1800s, small groups of fugitive slaves living in Florida joined the Seminole Indians (an association that thrived for decades on reciprocal respect and affection). Kenneth Porter traces their fortunes and exploits as they moved across the country and attempted to live first beyond the law, then as loyal servants of it. He examines the Black Seminole role in the bloody Second Seminole War, when John Horse and his men distinguished themselves as fierce warriors, and their forced removal to the Oklahoma Indian Territory in the 1840s, where John's leadership ability emerged. The account includes the Black Seminole exodus in the 1850s to Mexico, their service as border troops for the Mexican government, and their return to Texas in the 1870s, where many of the men scouted for the U.S. Army. Members of their combat-tested unit, never numbering more than 50 men at a time, were awarded four of the sixteen Medals of Honor received by the several thousand Indian scouts in the West. Porter's interviews with John Horse's descendants and acquaintances in the 1940s and 1950s provide eyewitness accounts. When Alcione Amos and Thomas Senter took up the project in the 1980s, they incorporated new information that had since come to light about John Horse and his people. A powerful and stirring story, The Black Seminoles will appeal especially to readers interested in black history, Indian history, Florida history, and U.S. military history.

Indian freedmen and their descendants have garnered much public and scholarly attention, but women's roles have largely been absent from that discussion. Now a scholar who gained an insider's perspective into the Black Seminole community in Texas and Mexico offers a rare and vivid picture of these women and their contributions. In Dreaming with the Ancestors, Shirley Boteler Mock explores the role that Black Seminole women have played in shaping and perpetuating a culture born of African roots and shaped by southeastern Native American and Mexican influences. Mock reveals a unique maroon culture, forged from an eclectic mixture of religious beliefs and social practices. At its core is an amalgam of African-derived traditions kept alive by women. The author interweaves documentary research with extensive interviews she conducted with leading Black Seminole women to uncover their remarkable history. She tells how these women nourished their families and held fast to their Afro-Seminole language — even as they fled slavery, endured relocation, and eventually sought new lives in new lands. Of key importance were the "warrior women" — keepers of dreams and visions that bring to life age-old African customs. Featuring more than thirty illustrations and maps, including historic photographs never before published, Dreaming with the Ancestors combines scholarly analysis with human interest to open a new window on both African American and American Indian history and culture.

"An excellent case study of a little-studied and poorly known community experiencing the processes of identity formation and culture change."--Brent R. Weisman, University of South Florida This is the first full-length ethnography of a unique community within the African diaspora. Rosalyn Howard traces the history of the isolated "Red Bays" community of the Bahamas, from their escape from the plantations of the American South through their utilization of social memory in the construction of new identity and community. Some of the many African slaves escaping from southern plantations traveled to Florida and joined the Seminole Indians, intermarried, and came to call themselves Black Seminoles. In 1821, pursued and harassed by European Americans through the First Seminole War, approximately 200 members of this group fled to Andros Island, where they remained essentially isolated for nearly 150 years. Drawing on archival and secondary sources in the United States and the Bahamas as well as interviews with members of the present-day Black Seminole community on Andros Island, Howard reconstructs the story of the Red Bays people. She chronicles their struggles as they adapt to a new environment and forge a new identity in this insular community and analyzes the former slaves' relationship with their Native American companions. Black Seminoles in contemporary Red Bays number approximately 290, the majority of whom are descended directly from the original settlers. As part of her research, Howard lived for a year in this small community, recording its oral history and analyzing the ways in which that history informed the evolving identity of the people. Her treatment dispels the air of mystery surrounding the Black Seminoles of Andros and provides a foundation for further anthropological and historical investigations.

Popularly known as “Black Seminoles,” descendants of the Seminole freedmen of Indian Territory are a unique American cultural group. Now Kevin Mulroy examines the long history of these people to show that this label denies them their rightful distinctiveness. To correct misconceptions of the historical relationship between Africans and Seminole Indians, he traces the emergence of Seminole-black identity and community from their eighteenth-century Florida origins to the present day. Arguing that the Seminole freedmen are neither Seminoles, Africans, nor “black Indians,” Mulroy proposes that they are maroon descendants who inhabit their own racial and cultural category, which he calls “Seminole maroon.” Mulroy plumbs the historical record to show clearly that, although allied with the Seminoles, these maroons formed independent and autonomous communities that dealt with European American society differently than either Indians or African Americans did. Mulroy describes the freedmen’s experiences as runaways from southern plantations, slaves of American Indians, participants in the Seminole Wars, and emigrants to the West. He then recounts their history during the Civil War, Reconstruction, enrollment and allotment under the Dawes Act, and early Oklahoma statehood. He also considers freedmen relations with Seminoles in Oklahoma during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Although freedmen and Seminoles enjoy a partially shared past, this book shows that the freedmen’s history and culture are unique and entirely their own.

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