I am making this blog post and later a video on this info because of a grossly inaccurate misrepresentation of the history of slavery in Florida, which was posted on Facebook on December 7 2025, and found at Orlando Media Group, with a video clip of @hood_smart (Hood_smart_ on TikTok and hood_smart._ on Instagram), who says, “Slavery Never Existed In Florida.”
European Slavery has a 500-year-old history in Florida and North America
Indigenous Americans and Black Americans, while heavily themed with their struggles with injustice and loss of life or freedom, are not diminishing their endless fight for empowerment and survival. We should not just view these stories as linked to past people but understand their ancestors thrive today and deserve our admiration as survivors, not our pity limited to them as victims lost to time. By doing this, we shift the lens from historical sympathy to contemporary respect, honoring the agency and resilience inherent in the histories of Indigenous and Black Americans.
With some art by Damien
Taíno Chiefdoms
“The Taíno were the Indigenous peoples in most of the West Indies, in the Caribbean region of the Americas. Their culture has been continued today by their descendants and by Taíno revivalist communities. They were the first New World peoples encountered by non-Norse Europeans. Part of the Arawak group of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, the Taíno are also referred to as Island Arawaks or Antillean Arawaks. The Taíno historically spoke an Arawakan language. Taíno derives from the term nitaino or nitayno, which referred to an elite social class, not an ethnic group. The Taíno creation story says they emerged from caves in a sacred mountain on present-day Hispaniola. DNA studies have suggested that the historic Taíno descended from “a wave of pottery-making farmers” known as the Ceramic Age people, who entered the Caribbean from the northeastern coast of South America 2,500 years ago. As a symbol of his status, the cacique carried a guanín of South American origin, made of an alloy of gold and copper. This symbolized the first Taíno mythical cacique Anacacuya, whose name means “star of the center”, or “central spirit.” ref
“Extending from the Lucayan Archipelago of The Bahamas through the Greater Antilles of Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico to Guadeloupe in the northern Lesser Antilles, or the Leeward Islands, the Taíno historically lived in agricultural societies ruled by caciques with fixed settlements under a matrilineal system of kinship and inheritance, and a religion centered on the worship of zemis. At the time of European contact, they shared land with older Indigenous inhabitants, namely the Guanajatabeyes in Cuba, and the Ciguayos and the Macorix in Hispaniola, and they were engaged in conflict with the recent Carib settlers of the southern Lesser Antilles, or the Windward Islands. The Taíno founded settlements around villages and organized their chiefdoms, or cacicazgos, into a confederation. Individuals and kinship groups that previously had some prestige and rank in the tribe began to occupy the hierarchical position that would give way to the cacicazgo. Tribal groups settled in villages under a chieftain, known as cacique, or cacica if the ruler was a woman. Chiefs were chosen from the nitaínos and generally obtained power from belonging to a particular maternal line. The chiefs had both temporal and spiritual functions.” ref
“Columbus and the crew of his ship were the first Europeans to encounter the Taíno people, as they landed in The Bahamas on October 12, 1492. At this time, the neighbors of the Taíno were the Guanahatabeys in the western tip of Cuba, the Island-Caribs in the Lesser Antilles from Guadeloupe to Grenada, and the Calusa and Ais nations of Florida. On Columbus’ second voyage in 1493, he began to demand tribute from the Taíno in Hispaniola. According to Kirkpatrick Sale, each adult over 14 years of age was expected to deliver a hawk’s bell full of gold every three months, or when this was lacking, 25 pounds of spun cotton. If tribute was not brought, the Spanish cut off the hands of the Taíno and left them to bleed to death. These savage, cruel practices inspired many revolts by the Taíno and campaigns against the Spanish, some being successful, some not. Early population estimates of Hispaniola, thought to have likely been the most populous island inhabited by Taínos, range from 10,000 to 1,000,000 people. The maximum estimates for Jamaica and Puerto Rico are 600,000 people. In 30 years, between 80% and 90% of the Taíno population died.” ref
“The chiefdoms of Hispaniola (cacicazgo in Spanish) were the primary political units employed by the Indigenous inhabitants of Hispaniola (Taíno: Haití, Babeque, Bohío; Ciguayo: Quisqueya) in the early historical era, including the Taíno, the Ciguayos, and the Macorix. At the time of European contact in 1492, the island was divided into five Taíno chiefdoms (in Spanish, cacicazgos), each headed by a cacique or paramount chief. Below him were lesser caciques presiding over villages or districts and nitaínos, an elite class. In Hispaniola, a Taíno chieftain named Enriquillo mobilized more than 3,000 Taíno in a successful rebellion in the 1520s. These Taíno were accorded land and a charter from the royal administration. Despite the small Spanish military presence in the region, they often used diplomatic divisions and, with help from powerful Native allies, controlled most of the region. In exchange for a seasonal salary and religious and language education, the Taíno were forced to work for the Spanish and erroneously labeled “Indian” landowners. This system of labor was part of the encomienda.” ref, ref
Arawak Chiefdoms
“Arawak is an exonym used for various groups of Indigenous peoples in northern South America and the Caribbean. The term “Arawak” has been applied at different times to several Indigenous groups, including the Lokono of South America and the Taíno (“Island Arawaks”), who lived in the Greater Antilles and northern Lesser Antilles. These groups spoke related Arawakan languages, part of one of the most widespread Indigenous language families in the Americas. Historically, none of the peoples described by the term referred to themselves as “Arawak”. The term became widely used through the work of 19th-century linguists.” ref
“Island Arawak (Taíno and Carib): the Taíno classes: naboría (common people), nitaíno’ (sub-chiefs, or nobles), bohique, (shamans priests/healers), and the cacique (chieftains, or princes).” ref
“Historically, the Chief was the leader of the Kalinago/Carib. The Kalinago, also historically known by the exonyms Island Caribs or simply Caribs, are an Indigenous people of the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean. They may have been related to the Kalina of South America (historically called “Mainland Caribs”), but they spoke an unrelated language known as Kalinago or Island Carib. They also spoke a pidgin language associated with the Kalina.” ref, ref
“At some point, the Arawakan-speaking Taíno culture emerged in the Caribbean. Archaeological evidence shows early human presence in the Caribbean in Trinidad by about 6000 BCE and in Cuba by around 5000 BCE. Later migration from South America included Huecoids and Saladoids. Saladoid people had reached Puerto Rico by at least 430 BCE and later into Hispaniola. By around CE 400, these different groups formed the basis of a Caribbean culture. Two major models have been presented to account for the arrival of Taíno ancestors in the islands; the “Circum-Caribbean” model suggests an origin in the Colombian Andes connected to the Arhuaco people, while the Amazonian model supports an origin in the Amazon basin, where the Arawakan languages developed. The Taíno were among the first American people to encounter Europeans. Christopher Columbus visited multiple islands and chiefdoms on his first voyage in 1492, which was followed by the establishment of La Navidad that same year on the northeast coast of Hispaniola, the first Spanish settlement in the Americas.” ref
“With the establishment of a second settlement, La Isabella, and the discovery of gold deposits on the island, the Spanish settler population on Hispaniola started to grow substantially, while disease and conflict with the Spanish began to kill tens of thousands of Taíno every year. By 1504, the Spanish had overthrown the last of the Taíno cacique chiefdoms on Hispaniola, and firmly established the supreme authority of the Spanish colonists over the now-subjugated Taíno. Over the next decade, the Spanish colonists presided over a genocide of the remaining Taíno on Hispaniola, who suffered enslavement, massacres, or exposure to diseases. The population of Hispaniola at the point of first European contact is estimated at between several hundred thousand to over a million people, but by 1514, it had dropped to a mere 35,000. By 1509, the Spanish had successfully conquered Puerto Rico and subjugated the approximately 30,000 Taíno inhabitants.” ref
“Mainland Arawak (South America): on the South American mainland, Arawak groups exhibited more decentralized village-based organizations, often led by councils of elders interconnecting communities through marriages and alliances rather than rigid paramount chiefdoms. These societies maintained social hierarchies with powerful local chiefs and subchiefs overseeing villages, some housing thousands, though less centralized than Caribbean counterparts. Arawak societies in the Caribbean, particularly the Taíno, were organized into hereditary chiefdoms known as cacicazgos, with at least five such polities documented on Hispaniola at the time of European contact around 1492. These ranged from simple two-level hierarchies to more complex paramount chiefdoms, governed by caciques who held authority over nobles called nitainos and commoners termed naborias. Archaeological evidence supports social stratification across Arawak groups, including differential burial treatments with elaborately ornamented urns and goods indicating elite status, as well as variations in settlement sizes and house structures reflecting hierarchical organization from the Osteonoid period onward (circa 600 CE). Such findings refute notions of purely egalitarian structures, demonstrating institutionalized inequality through material correlates of power and descent.” ref
“Around the year 1500, the Floridian indigenous people first encountered Spanish ships, which were spotted off the coast, and stories of brutal conquest were heard from the Taino people of the Caribbean, as many of whom sought refuge with the Calusa and other Florida groups.” ref
Spanish settlers enslaved the Taíno of Hispaniola
“Spain founded Santo Domingo, the first of many towns on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola (now the location of Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Spanish colonists forced the Native Taíno people, on pain of death, to perform almost all labor on the island. During the next four decades, slavery contributed to the deaths of 7 million Taíno. By 1535, the Taíno culture on Hispaniola was gone.” ref
“The Spanish controlled the island of Hispaniola from 1492 until the 17th century, when French pirates began establishing bases on the western side of the island, which resulted in the creation of the Saint-Domingue colony under the French Empire by 1659. In 1502, the first African slaves were taken to the New World (such as Hispaniola), and eight years later, Spanish King Ferdinand II approved the shipment of 250 additional slaves. The numbers continued to grow until they reached about 10,000 per year by the end of the 1530’s. When the French occupied the western part of the island in the mid-17th century, which had been abandoned by Spain following the Devastations of Osorio in 1605, they established a colonial plantation system based on the enslavement of Sub-Saharan Africans.” ref
“This colony, which became the most prosperous of the French empire in the Americas, was known as Saint-Domingue. The island remained a Spanish possession under the official name of Capitanía General de Santo Domingo (Captaincy General of Santo Domingo) before the occupation of the French. After the establishment of Saint-Domingue, the Captaincy General of Santo Domingo became the official name of the Spanish-controlled territory in eastern Hispaniola. In 1795, Spain ceded the Captaincy General of Santo Domingo to France by way of the Treaty of Basel during the French Revolutionary Wars. France annexed Spanish Santo Domingo into the French Saint-Domingue, uniting the island from 1795 to 1809 under the official name of Capitainerie générale de Santo Domingo or French Santo Domingo.” ref
“Following the period of the successful Haitian Revolution from 1791 to 1804, revolutionary leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines adopted the name of Haiti as the official name of the island, stating the Haitian Constitution of 1805 that “The people inhabiting the island formerly called St. Domingo, hereby agree to form themselves into a free state sovereign and independent of any other power in the universe, under the name of empire of Hayti.” From 1804 to 1806, the independent western side of Hispaniola was officially known as the Empire of Haiti. After the Haitian occupation of the territory from 1822 to 1844, the island became a unified country under the official name of the Republic of Haiti. As the Dominicans rebelled against Haitian rule during the Dominican War of Independence from 1844 to 1856, an independent country with the name of República Dominicana (Dominican Republic) was established in eastern Hispaniola.” ref
“The Haitian independence debt (French: Dette d’Indépendance Haïtienne) involves an 1825 agreement between Haiti and France that included France demanding an indemnity of 150 million francs in five annual payments of 30 million to be paid by Haiti in claims over property, including Haitian slaves, that was lost through the Haitian Revolution in return for diplomatic recognition. Haiti was forced to take a loan for the first 30 million, and in 1838, France agreed to reduce the remaining debt to 60 million to be paid over 30 years, with the final payment paid in 1883. However, according to a 2022 The New York Times analysis, because of other loans taken to pay off this loan, the final payment to debtors was actually made in 1947. They approximated that 112 million francs was actually paid in indemnity, which is equivalent to $560 million in 2022 after adjusting for inflation.” ref
Background of the movement of enslaved Africans to the Americas
“The transatlantic slave trade developed as a logical extension of earlier practices. Since the ninth century, Arab caravans had transported slaves across the Sahara for sale in Mediterranean markets. In 1444, Portuguese ships transported 235 black slaves from the Gulf of Guinea to southern Europe, where most of them were sold as domestic servants. Beginning in the 1470’s, Portuguese merchants operated a large slaving base on the fortified island of São Tomé. By the end of the century, more than thirty thousand African slaves had been shipped to Europe, and an additional seven or eight thousand had been taken to Portuguese plantations in the Cape Verde Islands, Madeira, and the Azores.” ref
“After Spain annexed the Canary Islands in 1479, Spanish planters also used slave labor on their sugar plantations. By 1500, the planters had imported about a thousand slaves from the African continent. Since explorer Christopher Columbus looked to the Portuguese and Spanish colonies of the eastern Atlantic as a model, he envisioned the use of slave labor in the colonies he hoped to establish in the western Atlantic. When he landed on the Caribbean islands in 1492, Columbus enthusiastically wrote to the Spanish monarchs that the Indies could provide as many slaves as might be needed. Three years later, he sent about five hundred Caribbean Indian slaves to Europe, the first west-to-east transatlantic slave shipment. Despite Queen Isabella I’s scruples about using as slaves people she saw as her vassals, she approved the enslavement of cannibals and any American Indians captured in “just wars,” which included wars aimed at converting pagans to Christianity.” ref
“In 1501, Isabella prohibited the transportation of outside slaves to the Indies for work in plantations and mines. Her government, however, permitted a few individuals to import privately owned house servants. In 1502, Juan de Córdoba, a Seville merchant and friend of Columbus, took an African slave to live and work on the island of Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Córdoba’s slave was the first known to have been transported across the Atlantic Ocean to labor in the New World. Later that year, the governor-general of the island, Nicolás de Ovando, also imported three or four African slaves. Soon after Isabella’s death in 1504, the ban on importing slaves ended, and at least seventeen were taken to Hispaniola in 1505. As Spanish settlers organized mines and large sugar plantations in the Indies, they quickly discovered that the slave labor of the indigenous people was less productive than that of Africans, who were more resistant to European diseases, more accustomed to working with horses, and less likely to escape.” ref
“In 1509, Governor Diego Columbus, son of the explorer, wrote to King Ferdinand II complaining of a labor shortage and requesting black slaves. Ferdinand, who was praised by Niccolò Machiavelli, was a pragmatic politician determined to expand his empire, and he saw no moral or legal reasons to oppose the expansion of slavery. His major adviser for imperial affairs, the bishop of Palencia, Juan Rodríguez de Fonseca, strongly supported Governor Columbus’s request. On January 22, 1510, the king instructed the Casa de Contratación, which managed Spanish maritime affairs, to allow 250 slaves (mostly Africans) to be transported to Hispaniola, with a hefty tax to be charged for each new slave.” ref
hood_smart._ -on Instagram (link to this video on Instagram)
hood_smart._ often shows “FBA” in his Instagram video titles. So what does he think this means?
The FBA Claim: “Foundational Black Americans (FBA) are the proud descendants of the Black men and women who endured and survived one of the greatest atrocities in human history—American slavery. These resilient ancestors built the United States from the ground up, laying the foundation for the nation’s economic, political, and cultural development. However, the rich history of FBA did not begin in 1619 with the arrival of enslaved Black people in Virginia. It began nearly a century earlier. In 1526, Spanish colonizer Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón brought the first documented enslaved Black people to the shores of what is now the South Carolina and Georgia coastline. Shortly after their arrival, these enslaved Black people courageously revolted against their captors, leading to the collapse of the Spanish settlement. The surviving Spaniards retreated to the Caribbean, leaving behind the liberated Black people. These freed Black people integrated with local Native American societies, marking a pivotal and often overlooked chapter in the lineage and cultural evolution of Foundational Black Americans. Since that defining moment in 1526, the culture and identity of Foundational Black Americans have been deeply rooted in building, resilience, resistance, and an unwavering fight for justice. This spirit of perseverance and ingenuity has shaped every aspect of American society, from infrastructure and agriculture to music, art, and political activism. FBA are an exceptional people whose enduring legacy continues to inspire generations. It is important to clarify that Foundational Black Americans (FBA) is not a group or an organization, and there is no designated leader of FBA. FBA is a lineage-based designation that specifically refers to the over 43 million Black Americans who are direct descendants of the Freedmen—the formerly enslaved Black people who were emancipated in the United States. This lineage represents a unique and unbroken connection to the foundational builders of this nation.” ref
However, according to the New Georgia Project Action Fund (NGPAF): “Foundational Black Americans (FBA) have been a rising trend within online spaces, particularly due to their hardline stances on a myriad of social issues and their tactics that potentially result in disengaging Black Americans from the voting process. Along with other Black identity groups such as American Descendants of Slaves (ADOS), Black First (B1), and Freedmen, FBA positions their ideology to be solely concerned with the needs of Black Americans, with owed reparations to Black Americans for the horrors of slavery being at the helm of their goals. They tend to present themselves as nonpartisan and outside of the two-party system. However, based on our research, their tactics tend to suggest a lean toward conservative ideology, much like what was identified in the Mueller report, where Russians infiltrated Black spaces to promote Black voter apathy and weaken their support for the Democratic Party. Similarly, FBA seems intent on breaking off Black American support of left-wing politics by making unbalanced arguments on their flaws and omitting the flaws of right-wing politics. Our overall research focus aims to test the influence these Black identity groups have on Black voter behavior overall and compare them to the precedent of foreign adversaries and right-wing political players using similar tactics. Focusing largely on prevailing “leaders” of FBA on their platforms on Twitter and YouTube and their reach through popular Black celebrities and influencers, we plan to also highlight their salient prominence in political discourse to better illustrate the need to invest in continuing to learn about FBA’s reach and possible influence on Black voter apathy. The first foray into this larger question of the impact of FBA within the larger disinformation landscape and on Black communities was diving into if, in fact, FBA rhetoric is in line with right-wing conservative talking points, particularly those that are the center of disinformation narratives. Between July 2022 and May 2023, we monitored and tracked FBA-affiliated accounts on Twitter and YouTube, collected both content data and trend data, and attended a reparationist meeting with FBA-affiliated attendants. We analyzed their talking points against both progressive and conservative ideology to determine if their ideology was in line with one or both of the two major political affiliations. Our analysis resulted in clear amplification of disinformation veiled as cynicism and disillusionment with the current political system that is in line with right-wing, and particularly alt-right, talking points.” ref
Check out the article: The Myth of a Foundational Black American; “This article examines the rise of the Foundational Black American identity and argues that its framework echoes exclusionary ideology rather than collective Black liberation. A new cultural identifier has more in common with white supremacy than pro-Blackness.” –
FBA seems similar to the pseudohistorical myth that Black Americans are the original, indigenous population of the Americas prior to Christopher Columbus. Genetic science, archaeology, and historical records confirm that the ancestry of Native Americans is rooted in ancient Siberian migrations, while the vast majority of Black Americans descend from African populations and the transatlantic slave trade.
“Black Indians are Native American people of African American heritage, or person of African American descent with strong cultural ties to Native American communities. Historically, certain Native American tribes have had close relations with African Americans, especially in regions where slavery was prevalent or where free people of color have historically resided. Members of the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee and Seminole) participated in holding enslaved African Americans in the Southeast and some enslaved or formerly enslaved people migrated with them to the West on the Trail of Tears in 1830 and later during the period of Indian Removal. Black ancestry is also common among some federally recognized tribes in the Northeast, including the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe, the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, the Narragansett Indian Tribe, the Shinnecock Indian Nation, and the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head.” ref
“In controversial actions, since the late 20th century, the Cherokee Nation, Choctaw Nation, Muscogee Nation, and Seminole Nation of Oklahoma tightened their rules for membership and at times excluded Freedmen who did not have at least one ancestor listed as Native American by blood on the early 20th-century Dawes Rolls. This exclusion was later appealed in the courts, both because of the treaty conditions and in some cases because of possible inaccuracies in some of the Rolls. The Chickasaw Nation never extended citizenship to Chickasaw Freedmen. Until recently, historic relations between Native Americans and African Americans were relatively neglected in mainstream United States history studies. Over time, Africans had varying degrees of contact with Native Americans, although they did not live together in as great number as with Europeans. Enslaved Africans brought to the United States, as well as their descendants, have had a history of cultural exchange and intermarriage with Native Americans, as well as with other enslaved mixed-race persons who had some Native American and European ancestry.” ref
Encomienda Labor System
“With the ousting of Christopher Columbus in 1498, the Spanish Crown had him replaced with Francisco de Bobadilla. Bobadilla was succeeded by a royal governor, Fray Nicolás de Ovando, who established the formal encomienda system. In many cases, natives were forced to do hard labor and subjected to extreme punishment and death if they resisted. The encomienda system traveled to America with the implementation of Castilian law in Spanish territories. In the New World, the Crown granted conquistadores the status of encomenderos, which is the right to extract labor and tribute from natives who were under Spanish rule. In 1501, Isabella I of Castile declared Native Americans subjects to the Crown, and so, as Castilians and legal equals to Spanish Castilians. This implied that enslaving them was illegal except under very specific conditions.” ref
“It also allowed the establishment of encomiendas, since the encomienda bond was a right reserved for full subjects to the crown. Each reducción had a native chief responsible for keeping track of the laborers in his community. The encomienda system did not grant people land, but it indirectly aided in the settlers’ acquisition of land. The encomienda system was established on the island of Hispaniola by Nicolás de Ovando, the third governor of the Spanish colony, in 1502. In 1503, the crown began to formally grant encomiendas to conquistadors and officials as rewards for service to the crown. The system of encomiendas was aided by the crown’s organization of the Indigenous into settlements known as reducciones, with the intent of establishing new towns and populations.” ref
“The encomienda was a 16th-century (CE 1501 to 1600) Spanish labor system that rewarded Spain’s conquistadors with the labor of conquered non-Christian peoples. In theory, the conquerors would provide the laborers with benefits, including military protection and education. In practice, the conquered were subject to conditions that closely resembled instances of forced labor and outright slavery. The encomienda was first established in Spain following the Christian Reconquista, and it was applied on a much larger scale during the Spanish colonization of the Americas and the Spanish East Indies. Conquered peoples were considered vassals of the Spanish monarch. The Crown awarded an encomienda as a grant to a particular individual. In the conquest era of the early sixteenth century, the grants were considered a monopoly on the labor of particular groups of Indigenous peoples, held in perpetuity by the grant holder, called the encomendero; starting from the New Laws of 1542, the encomienda ended upon the death of the encomendero, and was replaced by the repartimiento.” ref
Repartimiento Labor System
“The Repartimiento was a colonial labor system imposed upon the Indigenous population of Spanish America and the Philippines. With the New Laws of 1542, the repartimiento was instituted to substitute the encomienda system that had come to be seen as abusive and promoting unethical behavior. The Spanish Crown aimed to remove control of the Indigenous population, now considered subjects of the Crown, from the hands of the encomenderos, who had become a politically influential and wealthy class, with the shift away from both the encomienda system and the enslavement of the native groups. The repartimiento was not slavery, in that the worker is not owned outright—being free in various respects other than in the dispensation of his or her labor—and the work was intermittent. However, it created slavery-like conditions in certain areas, most notoriously in the silver mines of 16th-century Peru under the draft labor system known as mita, influenced in part by a similar draft labor system the Inca used, also called mit’a.” ref
“In New Spain, the collapse of Indigenous populations from conquest and disease led to a shift from the encomienda system to pueblos de indios, as the encomienda system no longer made economic sense since there were not enough Amerindians remaining. They needed to consolidate labor, which they did in a process known as reducciones. The encomienda system was replaced by “two parallel yet separate ‘republics’.” The república de españoles “included Spaniards, who lived in Spanish cities and obeyed Spanish law,” and the república de indios “included natives, who resided in native communities, where native law and native authorities (as long as they did not contradict Spanish norms) prevailed.” It was in this second domain where the pueblos de indios resided. Amerindians who lived in the pueblos de indios had ownership over their land, but, deemed subjects of the Spanish Crown, they had to pay tribute. The decline of rotational draft labor in New Spain paved the way for one of the first capitalist societies in the world, as Amerindian laborers who left their pueblos de indios were landless and instead sold their labor to purchase food and housing.” ref
“The first African slave probably arrived in Puerto Rico in 1513. A ship set off from Hispaniola to capture Indian slaves along the southern coast of North America in 1521 and found attractive areas for settlement in what is now South Carolina. The first African slaves to be brought to the continental United States were brought by the Spanish in 1526 as part of the first attempt at European settlement in what is now the continental United States. In 1526, families were brought from Spain with the intent of forming a colony and laying claim to North America’s shores north of Florida for Spain. A group of African slaves accompanied the settlers.” ref “1526 was the FIRST NORTH AMERICAN SLAVE REVOLT in North America, in the Spanish Carolinas.” ref
“The Roanoke Colony on the island off North Carolina, was the site of two attempts by Sir Walter Raleigh to found the first permanent English settlement in North America. The first colony was established at Roanoke Island in 1585 as a military outpost and was evacuated in 1586. According to Spanish intelligence and some modern historians, Sir Francis Drake did indeed bring roughly 250 enslaved Africans (pillaged from the Spanish Caribbean) to the Roanoke settlement in 1586. His intent was to leave them at the fort with the English colonists to provide forced labor.” ref, ref
“England’s first successful settlement in North America was Jamestown, established by the Virginia Company of London in 1607. Early British slavery in Jamestown began in August 1619 when “20 and odd Negroes” Angolans kidnapped by the Portuguese, arrived in the British colony of Virginia and were then bought by English colonists. Scholars note that the arrivals were technically sold as indentured servants. Indentured servants agreed, or in many cases were forced, to work with no pay for a set amount of time, often to pay off a debt, and could legally expect to become free at the end of the contract. Many Europeans who arrived in the Americas came as indentured servants. Despite this classification—and records which indicate that some of them did eventually obtain their freedom—it is clear that the Africans arriving at Point Comfort in 1619 were forced into servitude and that they fit the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ definition of enslaved peoples.” ref, ref
Indentured servitude
“Between one-half and two-thirds of European immigrants to the American Colonies between the 1630s and the American Revolution came under indentures. However, while almost half the European immigrants to the Thirteen Colonies were indentured servants, at any one time, they were outnumbered by workers who had never been indentured, or whose indenture had expired, and thus, free wage labor was the more prevalent for Europeans in the colonies. Until the late 18th century, indentured servitude was common in British America. It was often a way for Europeans to migrate to the American colonies: they signed an indenture in return for a costly passage. Several instances of kidnapping for transportation to the Americas are recorded, such as that of Peter Williamson (1730–1799). Historian Richard Hofstadter pointed out that.” ref
“Although efforts were made to regulate or check their activities, and they diminished in importance in the eighteenth century, it remains true that a certain small part of the European colonial population of America was brought by force, and a much larger portion came in response to deceit and misrepresentation on the part of the spirits [recruiting agents].” One “spirit” named William Thiene was known to have spirited away 840 people from Britain to the colonies in a singleyear. Historian Lerone Bennett Jr. notes that “Masters given to flogging often did not care whether their victims were black or white. Indentured servants could not marry without the permission of their master, were frequently subject to physical punishment, and did not receive legal protection from the courts. Female indentured servants, in particular, might be raped and/or sexually abused by their masters. If children were produced, the labor would be extended by two years.” ref
“In Virginia during much of the early 17th century, the supply of English indentured servants was such that finding workers was not a problem. Many people in England were unemployed or underemployed and wanted the opportunity to come to the colonies. Indentured servants signed a contract to work for a certain number of years in exchange for their passage to the colonies. After their contract ended, some indentured servants acquired their own land and servants. As the demand for labor increased, especially for tobacco growing, planters began enslaving African people and holding them for life. English people were also less willing to come to Virginia as indentured servants. This began the system of slavery in Virginia.” ref
“Starting in 1662, the colony of Virginia and then other English colonies established that the legal status of a slave was inherited through the mother. As a result, the children of enslaved women legally became slaves. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, European and American slave merchants purchased enslaved Africans who were transported to the Americas and forced into slavery in the American colonies and exploited to work in the production of crops such as tobacco, wheat, indigo, rice, sugar, and cotton. Enslaved men and women also performed work in northern cities such as Boston and New York, and in southern cities such as Charleston, Richmond, and Baltimore.” ref
“By the 1660s, there was a clear demand for African people, and ships carrying enslaved people began to arrive in Virginia more frequently. From the 1660s through the 1680s, laws were passed by the Virginia General Assembly that further codified slavery in the colony. Codifying enslavement changed relationships between the English and African people. Another change occurring in the late 1670s had great implications for the African American culture, which gradually developed from its beginnings at Jamestown. Prior to this time, the enslaved African people had come to Virginia from the area we know today as Angola in West Central Africa. By the 1670s, Europeans were forcing people into enslavement from different parts of the African continent and the Caribbean.” ref
“The Atlantic slave trading of Africans began in 1441 with two Portuguese explorers, Nuno Tristão and António Gonçalves. By 1500, Portugal had taken 50,000 West Africans. The Africans worked as domestic servants, artisans, and farmers. Other Africans were taken to work the sugar plantations on the Azores, Madeira, Canary, and Cape Verde islands. Europeans participated in African enslavement because of their desire for labor, profit, and religious motives. Upon discovering new lands, European colonizers soon began to migrate to and settle in lands outside their native continent. The Portuguese, in the 16th century, were the first to transport slaves across the Atlantic. In 1526, they completed the first transatlantic slave voyage to Brazil. The Atlantic slave trade was the result of, among other things, labor shortage, which in turn was created by the desire of colonists to exploit New World land and resources for profit. Native peoples were at first utilized as slave labor by Europeans until a large number died from overwork and Old World diseases.” ref
“Other Europeans soon followed. Shipowners regarded the slaves as cargo to be transported to the Americas as quickly and cheaply as possible, there to be sold to work on coffee, tobacco, cocoa, sugar, and cotton plantations, gold and silver mines, rice fields, the construction industry, cutting timber for ships, as skilled labor, and as domestic servants. The first enslaved Africans sent to the English colonies were classified as indentured servants, with legal standing similar to that of contract-based workers coming from Britain and Ireland. By the middle of the 17th century, slavery had hardened as a racial caste, with African slaves and their future offspring being legally the property of their owners, as children born to slave mothers were also slaves (partus sequitur ventrem). As property, the people were considered merchandise or units of labor, and were sold at markets with other goods and services.” ref
History of slavery in Florida
“Enslavement predates the period of European colonization and was practiced by various Indigenous peoples. Before European colonization, the indigenous peoples of the Americas had developed customs for dealing with captives. Depending on the region, captives could either be killed, tortured, kept alive and assimilated into the tribe, or enslaved. Under the Spanish, enslaved workers had rights: to marry, to own property, to buy their own freedom. They were not chattel. Free Blacks, as long as they accepted Catholicism, were not subject to legal discrimination. No one was born into slavery.” ref, ref
“The first European known to have explored the coasts of Florida was the Spanish explorer and governor of Puerto Rico, Juan Ponce de León, who likely ventured in 1513 as far north as the vicinity of the future St. Augustine, naming the peninsula he believed to be an island “La Florida” and claiming it for the Spanish crown. It is likely that slaves were included in the voyage, but they were not recorded. The slave trade — Florida Indians were taken as slaves as early as 1520 — also helped kill off the aboriginal population. In 1528, a slave named Estevanico (“Little Steven”) was brought to the area as part of the Narváez expedition, which then continued on to Texas. More African slaves arrived in Florida in 1539 with Hernando de Soto.” ref, ref
“Slavery was found throughout European colonization in the Americas. From 1526, during the early colonial period, it was practiced in what became Britain’s colonies, including the Thirteen Colonies that formed the United States. Under the law, children were born into slavery, and an enslaved person was treated as property that could be bought, sold, or given away. The legal institution of human chattel slavery, comprising the enslavement primarily of Africans and African Americans, was prevalent in the United States of America from its founding in 1776 until 1865, predominantly in the South.” ref
“When the Spanish founded the colonial settlement of San Agustín in 1565, the site already had enslaved Native Americans, whose ancestors had migrated from Cuba. The Spaniards did not bring many slaves to Florida as there was no work for them to do—no mines and no plantations. For the same reason very few Spaniards came to Florida; there were only three towns in the colony, supporting military/naval outposts: St. Augustine, St. Marks, and what is today Pensacola. Under Spanish colonial rule, the enslaved in Florida had rights. They could marry, own property, and purchase their own freedom. Free blacks, as long as they were Catholic, were not subject to legal discrimination. No one was born into slavery. Mixed “race” marriages were not illegal, and mixed “race” children could inherit property.” ref
Free and Enslaved Africans in Colonial Spanish Florida and St. Augustine
“While slavery in the Spanish colonies was considered an accident of fate rather than a perpetual or preordained condition, and Spanish slave code and social practice made it possible for a significant free Black class to exist in both Spain and the New World, Blacks were not free from racial prejudice. When the Moors, who had ruled Spain for seven centuries, were driven out in 1492, those who remained were relegated to the bottom of the social status/hierarchy. This was to remain the norm for centuries, although a person could climb the social ladder through marriage, the accumulation of wealth, military service, or the sponsorship of a person of higher status. Although the majority of Africans married others of African descent, a number of them married white Europeans, Native Americans, and mixed-blood spouses, and a multi-racial and multi-ethnic society developed throughout the Americas and the Caribbean. The Spanish developed a highly organized system for identifying the precise genetic heritage of an individual. Full-blood Africans were known as morenos. People of mixed African-European-Indian ancestry were known as castas, with other nomenclature depending on their heritage. For example, if a Spaniard married a morena woman, their children would be mulattos. If a mulatto married a Spaniard, their children would be known as moriscos. The children of Spaniards and Native Americans were called mestizos.” ref
“The institution of slavery in Spain was different from that of other European nations. Spanish slave laws, granting enslaved people certain rights and protections, were derived from ancient Roman traditions and had been incorporated into the Castilian code of law known as the Siete Partidas in the thirteenth century. These laws were not based on race, and Africans joined slaves of other races and ethnicities who had been captured in “just wars,” been condemned, or had sold themselves into slavery. The Siete Partidas held that slavery was an unnatural condition, for God had created man free, and it established ways in which enslaved people could become free. This philosophy was held in the context of a country steeped in the Catholic religion. All men, both free and enslaved, were brothers in Christ, and it was the responsibility of masters and the Church to teach them the rudiments of the faith so that they might be admitted into the Church and enjoy all its sacraments. Since these sacraments include marriage, the sanctity of the family was protected by requirements that family members not be separated. Brotherhood in the Church sometimes served to tie enslaved people to those who owned them in intricate kinship arrangements, such as the owner serving as godparents and marriage sponsors.” ref
“As Spaniards conquered and colonized in the Americas, they were charged with a dual purpose: to bring wealth to the Spanish Crown, and to bring souls to the Catholic Church. They established mission systems across all the lands they claimed, Christianizing the Native Americans and creating an extensive network of farms and information-gathering sources in the process. Africans, both free and enslaved, were part of Spanish armed forces both in Europe and in their first expeditions across the Atlantic. When Pedro Menéndez de Avilés established St. Augustine in 1565, he was accompanied by free and enslaved Africans. They worked on early fortifications, sawed timber, and built several structures, including a church, a blacksmith shop, and an artillery platform. They also cleared land for planting and harvested the crops.” ref
“In October 1687, the first recorded fugitive slaves from Carolina arrived in St. Augustine. Governor Diego de Quiroga dutifully reported to Spain that eight men, two women, and a three-year-old nursing child had made good their escape in a boat. Six of the men were put to work on the new Castillo de San Marcos, but two others were assigned to work with the blacksmith, a possible indication that they already had skills in that area. The women became domestics in the house of the governor. All were reportedly paid for their labor. When an English official arrived the next fall to claim them, Governor Quiroga refused to release them on the grounds that they had been converted to Catholicism, had married in the town, and were usefully employed. Thus, a fugitive slave policy began to evolve in the Florida colony. In 1693, King Charles II issued the first official position on the runaways, “giving liberty to all…the men as well as the women…so that by their example and by my liberality others will do the same.” ref
“In the decades following the king’s decree, many more enslaved Africans escaped from the Carolinas and found refuge in Spanish Florida, prompting additional royal decrees in 1733 reinforcing the offer of freedom, prohibiting the reimbursement of the English for escaped slaves, and requiring four years of service to the Crown in order to become free. So many freedom seekers came to Florida that in 1738, Governor Manuel de Montiano granted them a plot of land about two miles north of St. Augustine where they could build their own settlement and fort. The people became Catholics and adopted Spanish names and Spanish culture with an African flavor. This settlement, Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, or Fort Mose, (mo-say) became the first legally-established free African settlement in North America. The original fort was described as an earthen-walled fort with Indian-type thatched huts. The community housed thirty-eight men and their families with an estimated population of about one hundred people. The men were required to serve in the militia, and the would be called on to defend St. Augustine in times of attack.” ref
“A Spanish officer was nominally in charge of the settlement, but the militia captain, an African veteran of the 1715 Yamasee Wars named Francisco Menéndez, was truly the community’s leader. When British forces from Georgia attacked St. Augustine in 1740, Montiano ordered the people of Mose to abandon their settlement and fall back to St. Augustine for safety. Fort Mose was captured by the British and used as a base of operations; Spanish soldiers and the Mose militia regained it in a suprise attack that devastated the British forces, but the fort was destroyed. Over the next decade, the people of Mose lived within the community of St. Augustine, until Governor García de Solís insisted they return and rebuild the settlement in 1752. When Florida was transferred to British hands by treaty in 1763, these African settlers evacuated to Cuba with the rest of the Spanish from St. Augustine.” ref
“In the early 1700s, Spanish Florida was a hotbed for the raiding Native Americans from the northern Carolina and Georgia areas. Though they were left alone for the most part by one of the original raiding groups, the Westos, Spanish Florida was heavily targeted by the later raiding groups, the Yamasee and Creek. These raids, in which villages were destroyed and local Native Americans were either killed or captured to be later sold as slaves to English colonists. The raids were so frequent that there were few natives left to capture, and so the Yamasee and the Creek began bringing fewer and fewer slaves to the Carolina colonies and were unable to effectively continue the trade.” ref
“Since 1688, Spanish Florida had attracted numerous fugitive slaves who escaped from the British North American colonies. Once the slaves reached Florida, the Spanish freed them if they converted to Roman Catholicism; males of age had to complete a military obligation. Many settled in Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, the first settlement of free blacks in North America, near St. Augustine. Former slaves also found refuge among the Creek and Seminole, Native Americans who had established settlements in Florida at the invitation of the Spanish government. In 1771, Governor John Moultrie wrote to the Board of Trade that “It has been a practice for a good while past, for negroes to run away from their Masters, and get into the Indian towns, from whence it proved very difficult to get them back.” When British colonial officials in Florida pressured the Native Americans to return the fugitive slaves, they replied that they had “merely given hungry people food, and invited the slaveholders to catch the runaways themselves.” ref
“Florida became an organized territory of the United States on February 22, 1821. (See Adams–Onís Treaty.) Slavery continued to be permitted; however, Spanish racial policies were replaced with a rigid set of laws that assumed that all Black persons, slave or free, were uncivilized and inferior to whites, and suitable only for slavery. The free Blacks and Indian slaves, Black Seminoles, living near St. Augustine, fled to Havana, Cuba, to avoid coming under US control. Some Seminole also abandoned their settlements and moved further south. Hundreds of Black Seminoles and fugitive slaves escaped in the early nineteenth century from Cape Florida to the Bahamas, where they settled on Andros Island, founding Nicholls Town [sic], named for the Anglo-Irish commander and abolitionist who fostered their escape, Edward Nicolls [sic] .” ref
“In 1827 free negros were prohibited from entering Florida, and in 1828 those already there were prohibited from assembling in public. In antebellum Florida, “Southerners came to believe that the only successful means of removing the threat of free Negroes was to expel them from the southern states or to change their status from free persons to… slaves.” Free Negroes were perceived as “an evil of no ordinary magnitude,” undermining the system of slavery. Slaves had to be shown that there was no advantage in being free; thus, free negroes became victims of the slaveholders’ fears. Legislation became more forceful; the free negro had to accept his new role or leave the state, as in fact half the black population of Pensacola and St. Augustine immediately did (they left the country) .” ref
“Some citizens of Leon County, Florida, Florida’s most populous and wealthiest county, which wealth was because Leon County had more slaves than any other county in Florida, petitioned the General Assembly to have all free negroes removed from the state. Legislation passed in 1847 required all free Negroes to have a white person as legal guardian; in 1855, an act was passed which prevented free Negroes from entering the state. “In 1861, an act was passed requiring all free Negroes in Florida to register with the judge of probate in whose county they resided. The Negro, when registering, had to give his name, age, color, sex, and occupation, and had to pay one dollar to register…. All Negroes over twelve years of age had to have a guardian approved by the probate judge…. The guardian could be sued for any crime committed by the Negro; the Negro could not be sued. Under the new law, any free Negro or mulatto who did not register with the nearest probate judge was classified as a slave and became the lawful property of any white person who claimed possession.” In 1830, free Blacks were 5.2% of Florida’s African-American population; by 1860 they had declined to 1.5%.” ref
“Kingsley Plantation” of 1797/1798 was 23 miles from Jacksonville, Florida
“Kingsley Plantation (also known as the Zephaniah Kingsley Plantation Home and Buildings) is the site of a former estate on Fort George Island, in Duval County, Florida, that was named for its developer and most famous owner, Zephaniah Kingsley, who spent 25 years there. The most prominent features of Kingsley Plantation are the owner’s house—a structure of architectural significance built probably between 1797 and 1798 that is cited as being the oldest surviving plantation house in the state—and an attached kitchen house, barn, and remains of 25 anthropologically valuable slave cabins that endured beyond the U.S. Civil War (1861–1865). The foundations of the house, kitchen, barn, and the slave quarters were constructed of durable tabby concrete. Archeological evidence found in and around the slave cabins has given researchers insight into African traditions among slaves who had recently arrived in North America. Kingsley used the plantation as his slave trading headquarters, training slaves for specific tasks to increase their value at sale.” ref
“Kingsley’s plantations, first at Laurel Grove and then at Fort George, were the headquarters of his slave trading business. Kingsley owned a fleet of slave schooners, some built at a shipyard on the plantation, using white artisans that Kingsley hired for the purpose. We know the name of only one, his schooner “North Carolina”. This task system of slavery was common among sea island plantations in the Southeastern United States. In contrast, cotton and tobacco plantations in Virginia and other parts of the South practiced the gang system, where an overseer who was also a slave drove slaves to work the entire day. Slaves on Fort George Island were African or first generation African American. Records and archeological information show they were Igbo and Calabari from Nigeria, and others from the area around what is today Guinea, and a few from Zanzibar.” ref
“Zephaniah Kingsley wrote a defense of slavery and the three-tier social system that acknowledged the rights of free people of color that existed in Florida under Spanish rule. Kingsley briefly served on the Florida Territorial Council. Kingsley Plantation was not Kingsley’s only or even his primary plantation. His plantation on Drayton Island has not been studied. “At the other end of Fort George, now Batten Island, he built himself a house of some size, which is now [1878] in ruins; there lived Flora, his black mistress. Under British rule in 1765, a plantation was established that cycled through several owners while Florida was transferred back to Spain and then the United States. The longest span of ownership was under Kingsley and his family, a polygamous and multiracial household controlled by and resistant to the issues of race and slavery.” ref
“Marriages between white plantation owners and African women were common in East Florida. The Spanish government provided for a separate class of free people of color, and encouraged slaves to purchase their freedom. Slavery under Spain in Florida was not considered a lifelong condition, and free blacks were involved in the economic development of the region, many of them owning their own slaves. Anna oversaw 60 slaves at Fort George Island, who grew sea island cotton, citrus, corn, sugarcane, beans, and potatoes. John Maxwell, the fourth child, was born in 1824 when Kingsley and Anna lived on Fort George Island. Kingsley also maintained relationships with three other African women who acted as co-wives or concubines: Flora H., Sarah M.; and Munsilna McGundo. Anna Jai remained the matriarch in the polygamous family. Historian Daniel Schafer posits that Anna Jai would have been familiar with the concepts of polygamy and marrying a slave master to acquire one’s freedom.” ref
“After the American Revolution, slaves from the State of Georgia and the South Carolina Low Country continued to escape to Florida. By 1814, the black population, both free and enslaved, of Florida had risen to 57%, compared to 27% in 1786. The U.S. Army led increasingly frequent incursions into Spanish territory, including the 1817–1818 campaign by Andrew Jackson that became known as the First Seminole War. The United States afterwards effectively controlled East Florida. The Crown decided to cede the territory to the United States. It accomplished this through the Adams–Onís Treaty of 1819, which took effect in 1821.” ref
“The Florida Territorial Council passed laws that forbade interracial marriage and the inheriting of property by free blacks or mixed race descendants. To avoid difficulties with the new government in what he termed its “spirit of intolerant prejudice”, Kingsley sent his wives, children, and a few slaves to Haiti, by that time a free black republic. Kingsley started a plantation in Haiti that was worked by former Fort George Island slaves, who had become indentured servants; slavery was not allowed in Haiti. They were to earn their freedom in nine years. In 1842 Kingsley gave an interview to the abolitionist Lydia Child. When she asked him if he was aware that his occupation as a slave trader might be perceived as being akin to piracy, he responded “Yes; and I am glad of it. They will look upon a slaveholder just so, by and by. Slave trading was a very respectable business when I was young. The first merchants in England and America were engaged in it. Some people hide things which they think other people don’t like. I never conceal anything.” ref
Florida Constitution of 1838
“The General Assembly shall, in the year one thousand eight hundred and forty-five, and every tenth year thereafter, cause an enumeration to be made of all the inhabitants of the state, and to the whole number of free white inhabitants shall be added three-fifths of the number of slaves. The General Assembly shall have no power to pass laws for the emancipation of slaves. They shall have no power to prevent emigrants to this State, from bringing with them, such persons as may be deemed slaves, by the laws of any one of the United States: Provided, they shall have power to enact laws to prevent the introduction of any slaves who may have committed crimes in other States. The General Assembly shall have power to pass laws to prevent free negroes, mulattoes, and other persons of color, from emigrating to this State, or from being discharged from on board any vessel, in any of the ports of Florida. That the free white men of this State shall have the right to keep and to bear arms, for their common defense. Every free white male person of the age of twenty-one years and upwards, and who shall be at the time of offering to vote a citizen of the United States; and who shall have resided, and had his habitation, domicil, home, and place of permanent abode in Florida for two years next preceding the election at which he shall offer to vote.” ref
1845 – Florida Joins the Union as a Slavery-Sanctioning State
“In March 1845, the Territory of Florida officially became the State of Florida, making it the 27th state to join the Union (now the United States). Congress’ Iowa-Florida Act allowed for this, as it enabled the United States to maintain its power balance of slavery-sanctioning states and free states. Thus, Florida chose to be admitted as a slavery-sanctioning state and Iowa as a free state.” ref
“Concurrently, Florida amended its territorial constitution to carry the slavery-sanctioning provisions through to its 1845 state laws. These policies viewed Black Floridians as property and profit-builders, not people with families and dreams. For example, state lawmakers charged enslavers a tax of 50 cents for enslaved people, whom they referred to as “species of property.” Florida lawmakers also banned the migration of free Black people into the state, arguing in their statehood request to Congress that free Black Americans would “destroy their peace” by inciting rebellion among enslaved Floridians.” ref
“Furthermore, Florida lawmakers doubled down on the U.S. Constitution’s three-fifths clause by choosing to count enslaved Floridians as only three-fifths of a person in the state’s own laws. Because enslaved Floridians were equated with property, allowing enslavers to partially count those they enslaved in the Census gave white pro-slavery Floridians greater representation in the Legislature.” ref
“Not only was this something almost no other state had done, but Florida was the only state to apply this ratio to representation in both the Senate and House chambers. This, combined with the tax assessor narrowing its count of free Black Floridians to those between ages 21 and 60, meant the 1845 Census was inflated, showing 53 percent of residents were white. This consolidation of power and wealth by white enslavers created a foundation of policymaking that would underrepresent and ignore the needs of Floridians of color for years to come.” ref
Florida was a slave state (1845–1861)
“American settlers began to establish cotton plantations in northern Florida, which required numerous laborers, which they supplied by buying slaves in the domestic market. On March 3, 1845, Florida became a slave state of the United States. Almost half the state’s population were enslaved African Americans working on large cotton and sugar plantations, between the Apalachicola and Suwannee Rivers in the north-central part of the state. Like the people who owned them, many slaves had come from the coastal areas of Georgia and The Carolinas; they were part of the Gullah-Geechee culture of the South Carolina Lowcountry. Others were enslaved African Americans from the Upper South, who had been sold to traders taking slaves to the Deep South. By 1860, Florida had 140,424 people, of whom 44% were enslaved, and fewer than 1,000 free people of color. Their labor accounted for 85% of the state’s cotton production. The 1860 Census also indicated that in Leon County, which was the center both of the Florida slave trade and of their plantation industry (see Plantations of Leon County), slaves constituted 73% of the population. As elsewhere, their value was greater than all the land of the county put together.” ref
Florida secedes over the right to keep slavery (1861)
“At the South, and with our People of course, slavery is the element of all value, and a destruction of that destroys all that is property.” —President John C. McGehee, Florida Secession Convention John C. McGehee declared on January 5, 1861. As President of Florida’s secession convention, he believed remaining in the Union meant allowing rule by those who were “sectional, irresponsible to us, and driven on by an infuriated fanatical madness that defies all opposition” and who would “destroy every vestige of right growing out of property in slaves. The controversy over slavery was not new to the United States. Between 1820 and 1859, several key turning points in the struggle over slavery brought the issue to a boiling point. Then, in November 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the next president of the United States. His victory triggered cries of disunion across the South. McGehee owned 100 enslaved people. It was the foundation of his wealth and power was from slavery. In 1860, enslaved people were valued at $3 billion, or more than all the farmland in the South, and were only gaining value. In Florida, 44% of the population were not citizens but property. The secession convention had 69 delegates representing Florida’s 36 counties. Every delegate was a white male owning, on average, at least 10 enslaved people.” ref
Florida secedes and becomes a Confederate state (1861–1865)
“In January 1861, nearly all delegates in the Florida Legislature approved an ordinance of secession, declaring Florida to be “a sovereign and independent nation”—an apparent reassertion to the preamble in Florida’s Constitution of 1838, in which Florida agreed with Congress to be a “Free and Independent State.” Protecting slavery was the reason for Florida’s secession and for the creation of the Confederacy.” ref
Confederate authorities used slaves as teamsters to transport supplies and as laborers in salt works and fisheries. Many Florida slaves working in these coastal industries escaped to the relative safety of Union-controlled enclaves during the American Civil War. Beginning in 1862, Union military activity in East and West Florida encouraged slaves in plantation areas to flee their owners in search of freedom. Some worked on Union ships and, beginning in 1863, with the Emancipation Proclamation, more than a thousand enlisted as soldiers and sailors in the United States Colored Troops of the military.” ref
Escaped and freed slaves provided Union commanders with valuable intelligence about Confederate troop movements. They also passed back news of Union advances to the men and women who remained enslaved in Confederate-controlled Florida. Planters’ fears of slave uprisings increased as the war went on. In May 1865, Federal control was re-established, and slavery was abolished.” ref
“Throughout its first incarnation as a permanent colony during the First Spanish Period (1565-1763), Spanish Florida was first and foremost a military outpost, directly financed by the Spanish Crown in order to maintain a foothold on the Florida peninsula as protection for the fleets returning to Spain from the Havana rendezvous point. Far from being a productive colonial enterprise, the Florida colony was a money sink for Spain, never producing profits in excess of its regular annual stipend, but it was nonetheless maintained for nearly two full centuries by garrisoned settlements known as presidios. Surrounded by indigenous chiefdoms with tens of thousands of Native American inhabitants, most of the nearest of which were ultimately assimilated into mission provinces that served as a pool of labor and staple foods, Florida’s presidios were central to Spain’s colonial enterprise in southeastern North America.” ref
“When European ships first landed on Florida in the 16th century, the area was well populated by the Indigenous peoples of the Timucua, Apalachee, Ais, Tekesta, and Calusa.” ref
Basically, all Major Indigenous Groups in Florida were Chiefdoms
“A chiefdom is a political organization of people represented or governed by a chief. Chiefdoms have been discussed, depending on their scope, as a stateless, state analog, or early state system or institution. Usually, a chief’s position is based on kinship/clans, which is often monopolized by the legitimate senior members of select families or ‘houses’. These elites can form a political-ideological aristocracy relative to the general group.” ref
“Chiefdoms and chiefs are sometimes identified as the same as kingdoms and kings, and therefore understood as monarchies, particularly when they are understood as not necessarily states, but having monarchic representation or government. Chiefdoms have been described as intermediate between tribes and states. A chief’s status is based on kinship, so it is inherited or ascribed, in contrast to the achieved status of Big Man leaders of tribes.” ref
“A paramount chief is the English-language designation for a king or queen or the highest-level political leader in a regional or local polity or country administered politically with a chief-based system. This term is used occasionally in anthropological and archaeological theory to refer to the rulers of multiple chiefdoms or the rulers of exceptionally powerful chiefdoms that have subordinated others. Paramount chief was a formal title created by British colonial administrators in the British Empire and applied in Britain’s colonies in Asia and Africa. They used it as a substitute for the word “king” to ensure that only the British monarch held that title. Here are some well-known groups with a paramount chief in North America: Cahokia, Cofitachequi, Coosa, Etowah, Moundville, Ocute, Piscataway Confederacy, Tsenacommacah.” ref
Ais Chiefdom
“The Ais or Ays were a Native American people of eastern Florida. The Ais chiefdom consisted of a number of towns, each led by a chief who was subordinate to the paramount chief of Ais. The Spanish recorded the name of the people, province, chief town, and lagoon by Jonathan Dickinson, who, along with his fellow shipwreck survivors, was held at the chief town for a month in 1697. They made burial mounds, some middens, a few mounds held circular or “wheel-spoke” burials, with heads pointing towards the center of the mound. They made also terraced ridges and platforms at some sites, including some ramps. One burial mound, used by the Ais tribe for 500 to 1,000 years rises about twenty feet.” ref
“In 1605, Governor Pedro de Ibarra sent a soldier, Álvaro Mexía, on a diplomatic mission to the Ais nation. The mission was a success; the Ais agreed to care for shipwrecked sailors for a ransom, and Mexía completed a map of the Indian River area with their help. Numerous European artifacts from shipwrecks have been found in Ais settlements. When the Dickinson party reached the town, there was already in Jece another group of English from a shipwreck. European and African survivors of shipwrecks were fairly common along the coast. Shortly after 1700, settlers in the Province of Carolina and their Indian allies started raiding the Ais, killing some and carrying captives to Charles Town to be sold as slaves. The Ais disappear from area records after 1760.” ref
Apalachee Chiefdom
“The Apalachee were an Indigenous people of the Southeastern Woodlands, specifically an Indigenous people of Florida, who lived in the Florida Panhandle until the early 18th century. They spoke a Muskogean language called Apalachee, which is now extinct. The hierarchical settlement patterns suggests the area may have had one or more paramount chiefdoms. The densely populated Apalachee had a complex, highly stratified society of regional chiefdoms. They were one of the Mississippian cultures and part of an expansive trade network reaching to the Great Lakes.” ref, ref
“The Apalachee occupied the site of Velda Mound starting about 1450 CE, but they had mostly abandoned it when Spanish started settlements in the 17th century. They first encountered Spanish explorers in 1528, when the Narváez expedition arrived. Their tribal enemies, European diseases, and European encroachment severely reduced their population. Warfare from 1701 to 1704 devastated the Apalachee, and they abandoned their homelands by 1704, fleeing north to the Carolinas, Georgia, and Alabama.” ref
“The Apalachee are thought to be part of Fort Walton Culture, a Florida culture influenced by the Mississippian culture. The Fort Walton culture by approximately 1000 to 1200 CE began adapting and adopting intensive maize agriculture, the building of platform mounds for ceremonial, political and religious purposes and making a new variety of ceramics, changes likely influenced by contact with the major Mississippian culture centers to the north and west.” ref
“The Apalachee were horticulturalists with stratified chiefdoms and sedentary towns and villages. Like many other Southeastern tribes, they have an alternating dual governmental system with a war chief and a peace chief. Leadership was hereditary and matrilinear. The Apalachee operated under a centralized political structure led by hereditary chiefs, with each town maintaining its own council and ceremonial center. Their society was matrilineal, and leaders often inherited power through the maternal line.Religious life revolved around large temple mounds, where elites conducted rituals tied to agriculture, warfare, and celestial events.” ref
“In the 1670s, tribes north and west of the Apalachee (including Chiscas, Apalachicolas, Yamasees and other groups within the Muscogee Confederacy) raided Apalachee missions and seized captives. They traded the captives to the British colony of Carolina, where they were sold as slaves to Carolinian colonists. That being said, the Apalachee were not passive victims through this endeavor. Spanish sources document Apalachee individuals fleeing into the interior, forging alliances, and actively resisting capture through negotiation and subversion.” ref
“When Queen Anne’s War (the North American theater of the War of Spanish Succession) started in 1702, England and Spain were officially at war, and raids by English colonists and their Indian allies against the Spanish and the Mission Indians in Florida and southeastern Georgia accelerated. In early 1704, Carolina Militia Colonel James Moore led 50 colonists and 1,000 Apalachicolas and other Creeks in a series of raids on Spanish missions in Florida. Some villages surrendered without a fight, while others were destroyed. Moore returned to Carolina with 1,300 Apalachees who had surrendered and another 1,000 taken as slaves.” ref
Calusa Chiefdom
“The Calusa were a powerful and complex maritime chiefdom in Southwest Florida. The Calusa represented a highly stratified chiefdom and may have been emerging as a state. At the time of European contact in the 16th and 17th centuries, the historic Calusa were the people of the Caloosahatchee culture. They developed a complex culture based on estuarine fisheries rather than agriculture. Their principal city of Calos was probably at Mound Key, and their territory reached at least from Charlotte Harbor to Marco Island. Evidence shows that the Calusa buried their dead in mounds. Calusa influence may have also extended to the Ais tribe on the central east coast of Florida. European contact caused their extinction, through disease and violence.” ref, ref
“Carlos, also known as Calos or King Calusa (died 1567), was king or paramount chief of the Calusa people of Southwest Florida from about 1556 until his death. As his father, the preceding king, was also known as Carlos, he is sometimes called Carlos II. Carlos ruled over one of the most powerful and prosperous chiefdoms in the region at the time, controlling the coastal areas of southwest Florida and wielding influence throughout the southern peninsula. Contemporary Europeans recognized “Carlos” or “King Calusa” as the most powerful chief, paramount chieftain, or king in Florida.” ref
“Carlos was chief at the time of contact with the Spanish under Pedro Menéndez de Avilés in 1566. At this time, Carlos faced internal political pressure from Felipe as well as war with external enemies, most notably the Tocobaga around Tampa Bay. As a result, he initially sought an alliance with the Spanish. The alliance soon failed due to the conflicting aims of the two parties, and the relationship between the Calusa and the Spanish turned violent. Eventually Carlos was captured and executed by Spanish officers. Felipe succeeded him as chief.” ref
“The Caloosahatchee culture region lasted from 500 BCE to 1750, and at the time of first European contact, the Caloosahatchee culture region formed the core of the Calusa domain. The people of the Caloosahatchee culture built mounds. Some of the mounds in Caloosahatchee settlements were undisturbed shell middens, but other were constructed from midden and earth materials. The hundreds of sites identified range from simple small middens to complex sites with earthwork platform mounds, plazas, “water courts”, causeways, and canals.” ref
“Early Spanish and French sources referred to the tribe, its chief town, and its chief as Calos, Calus, Caalus, and Carlos. Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda, a Spaniard held captive by the Calusa in the 16th century, recorded that Calusa meant “fierce people” in their language. By about 500 BCE, the Archaic culture, which had been fairly uniform across Florida, shifted into more distinct regional cultures. Some Archaic artifacts have been found in the region later occupied by the Calusa. In 1564, according to a Spanish source, the priest was the chief’s father and the military leader was his cousin. The Spanish documented four cases of known succession to the position of paramount chief, recording most names in Spanish form.” ref
“The Calusa had a stratified society, consisting of “commoners” and “nobles” in Spanish terms. While no evidence shows that the Calusa had institutionalized slavery, studies show they used captives for work or even sacrifice. A few leaders governed the tribe. They were supported by the labor of the majority of the Calusa. The leaders included the paramount chief or “king”, a military leader (capitán general in Spanish), and a chief priest. The capital of the Calusa, and from where the rulers administered, was Mound Key, near present day Estero, Florida. An eyewitness account from 1566 mentioned a “king’s house” on Mound Key that was large enough for “2,000 people to stand inside.” ref
“Salvaged goods and survivors from wrecked Spanish ships reached the Calusa during the 1540s and 1550s. The best information about the Calusa comes from the Memoir of Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda, one of these survivors. Although many others survived the shipwreck, only Fontaneda was spared by the tribe in whose territory they landed. Warriors killed all the adult men. Fontaneda lived with various tribes in southern Florida for the next 17 years before being found by the Menendez de Avilés expedition.” ref
“The surviving crew and passengers were captured by the Calusa, who enslaved them and eventually sacrificed most of them, including Escalante Fontaneda’s brother. Escalante Fontaneda apparently escaped death by correctly interpreting their commands to sing and dance for them. He spent the next 17 years living among the Calusa and other tribes, learning several languages and travelling extensively through Florida. Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda (c. 1536 – after 1575, dates uncertain) was a Spanish shipwreck survivor who lived among the Native Americans of Florida for 17 years. His circa 1575 memoir, Memoria de las cosas y costa y indios de la Florida, is one of the most valuable contemporary accounts of American Indian life from that period.” ref
“After the outbreak of war between Spain and England in 1702, slaving raids by Uchise Creek and Yamasee Indians allied with the Province of Carolina began reaching far down the Florida peninsula. The Carolinan colonists supplied firearms to the Creek and Yemasee, but the Calusa, who had isolated themselves from Europeans, had none. Ravaged by new infectious diseases introduced to the Americas by European contact and by the slaving raids, the surviving Calusa retreated south and east. After Spain ceded Florida to the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1763, the remaining tribes of South Florida were relocated to Cuba by the Spanish, completing their removal from the region. While a few Calusa individuals may have stayed behind and been absorbed into the Seminole, no documentation supports that.” ref
Did Pre-Columbian Indigenous Floridians Seafare as far as Cuba?
“Living along the coastline, the Calusa utilized the bountiful waters for survival. They were adept sea-farers, traveling as far as Cuba in their dug-out canoes. These canoes allowed them to venture offshore for large species to eat, like sharks, rays, and sea turtles, but they would often fish in the nearshore estuaries, utilizing nets created with palm fibers to maximize their catches. They would also harvest the bountiful amounts of crustaceans, snails, and shellfish.” ref
“The Calusa also journeyed to Cuba and other Caribbean islands, trading in fish, skins, and amber. During the 16th century, they defended their shores from a succession of Spanish explorers. Some research indicates that they may have immigrated to Cuba during the 18th century as a result of recurring invasions by the Creek and the English, while other work suggests they may have joined the Seminole, who moved into Florida early in the 19th century and were later removed to Oklahoma.” ref
Tocobaga Chiefdom
“Tocobaga (occasionally Tocopaca) was the name of a chiefdom of Native Americans, its chief, and its principal town during the 16th century. The chiefdom was centered around the northern end of Old Tampa Bay. The exact location of the principal town is believed to be the archeological Safety Harbor site. The name “Tocobaga” first appears in Spanish documents in 1567, when Pedro Menéndez de Avilés visited what was almost certainly the Safety Harbor site. Menéndez had contacted the Calusa and reached an accommodation with Carlos, the Calusa king. Menéndez married Carlos’s sister. As Carlos was anxious to gain an advantage over his enemy Tocobaga, Menéndez took Carlos and 20 of his warriors to Tocobaga by ship. Menéndez persuaded Tocobaga and Carlos to make peace. He recovered several Europeans and a dozen Calusa being held as slaves by Tocobaga.” ref
“The Tocobaga and their neighbors disappeared from the historical record by the early 1700s, as endemic diseases carried by European explorers decimated the local population. They had no medical acquired immunity to these new diseases. Survivors were displaced by the raids and incursions of other indigenous groups from the north. The Tampa Bay area was virtually uninhabited for over a century. The population of Tocobaga declined severely in the 17th century, due mostly to the spread of infectious diseases brought by the Europeans, to which the native people had little resistance, as they had no acquired immunity. In addition, all of the Florida tribes lost population due to the raids by the Creek and Yamasee around the end of the 17th century. As Florida transitioned to British rule in 1763 following its defeat of France in the Seven Years’ War, the Calusa emigrated with the evacuating Spanish, resettling with them in Cuba, possibly along with the remnants of the Tocobaga. In any case, the Tocobaga disappeared from historical records in the early 18th century.” ref
“The Safety Harbor people were organized into chiefdoms and lived primarily in villages along the shoreline of Tampa Bay and the adjacent Gulf of Mexico coast. The chiefdoms may have consisted of about 15 mi (24 km) of shoreline, and extended about 20 mi (32 km) inland. Each chiefdom had a principal town or “capital” with a temple mound and central plaza. Fifteen such towns have been identified along the Florida Gulf coast from southern Pasco County to northern Sarasota County, an area that includes all of the Tampa Bay area. Only one principal town has been found inland.” ref
“Capitals had a central rectangular plaza. A truncated pyramidal mound up to 20 ft (6.1 m) high and up to 130 ft (40 m) long on each side at the base stood on one side of the plaza. One or more buildings stood on top of the mound, and a ramp ran from the top of the mound to the plaza. A burial mound would be located off to the side. A shell mound, or midden, ran along the shore, and other middens were sometimes located on other sides of the plaza. The plaza itself was kept clear of debris. The more important residents of the town had their houses around the plaza, while the lower class lived in huts further from the plaza. The Spanish reported that the chief and his family resided on the main mound, and that a “temple” (probably a charnel house) stood on the opposite side of the plaza.” ref
“Safety Harbor ceramics are found in burial mounds in the Caloosahatchee culture area (Mitchem’s South Florida Safety Harbor). Milanich ascribes the presence of such objects to trade, but states that future work may clarify the relationship of the Safety Harbor and Caloosahatchee cultures. Luer and Almy note that temple mounds south of Charlotte Harbor differ significantly from Safety Harbor temple mounds in form. Luer has also argued that other materials found in burial mounds south of Charlotte Harbor belong to a south Florida, or “Glades Cult”, artifact complex. Luer also argues that the presence of Mississippian culture and St. Johns culture artifacts in burial mounds shows that such articles, along with Safety Harbor objects, were traded into the area.” ref
“The Safety Harbor culture developed in place from the preceding Manasota culture, a Weeden Island-related culture of the central Florida Gulf coast. Safety Harbor was influenced by the Mississippian culture, with some ceramics resembling the Mississippian-related Fort Walton culture and incorporating symbols of the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex; however, the people of the Safety Harbor culture had not adopted an agricultural economy, and, consequently, the culture did not become Mississippian.” ref
“Pánfilo de Narváez sailed into Tampa Bay in April 1528 with about 400 men. He claimed the land for Spain and told the Tocobaga people to become Catholic and loyal to Spain or die. When misunderstandings happened, Narváez turned brutal. He cut off Chief Hirrihigua’s nose and fed the chief’s mother to his dogs. These cruel acts stuck in the Tocobaga’s memory, turning them against all Europeans who came later. The once-peaceful fishing communities became watchful defenders ready to fight any white-skinned visitors.” ref
“A ship from Cuba reached Tampa Bay in 1529, looking for survivors from Narváez’s failed trip. Some Tocobaga villagers waved from shore, saying they had a letter from Narváez. This friendly sign was actually a trap. Juan Ortiz, just 18 years old from Seville, went ashore with three friends to get the supposed message. As soon as they stepped on land, Tocobaga warriors grabbed all four men. The natives who rowed out to the Spanish ship jumped into the water and swam back to shore, finishing their trick.” ref
“Chief Hirrihigua used two Spanish captives for target practice, letting his warriors shoot them with arrows. For Juan Ortiz, he planned a more painful death – roasting him alive over a slow fire as payback for what Narváez did to his family. The Tocobaga tied Ortiz to a wooden frame and put him over flames. His screams filled the village as the fire burned under him. The chief watched with joy, finally getting revenge against the Spanish who had hurt him and killed his mother. Other villagers gathered to see this act of justice.” ref
“The chief’s teenage daughter rushed forward as Ortiz suffered over the flames. She threw herself over the young Spaniard and begged her father to stop. She said keeping one Christian as a prisoner would honor the tribe without causing harm. Other women joined her pleas, unable to listen to Ortiz’s cries any longer. Chief Hirrihigua agreed to spare the Spaniard’s life, pulling him from the fire before he burned to death. Ortiz lived but became a slave to the Tocobaga. The tribe gave him dangerous and gross jobs no one else wanted.” ref
“His main task involved guarding the village graveyard at night, where bodies lay out on wooden platforms until their flesh rotted away. He had to keep wolves and other animals from taking the bodies. After several months, Chief Hirrihigua’s hate for the Spanish grew stronger. He started planning another killing for Ortiz, still wanting full revenge for the cruelty done to his family. Chief Mocoso welcomed Ortiz and refused to give him back when Hirrihigua demanded the Spaniard’s return. Ortiz lived with the Mocoso people for about 10 years, learning their language and adopting their customs.” ref
Timucua Chiefdom
“The Timucua were a Native American people who lived in Northeast and North Central Florida and southeast Georgia. They were the largest indigenous group in that area and consisted of about 35 chiefdoms, many leading thousands of people. At the time of European contact, Timucuan speakers occupied about 19,200 square miles (50,000 km2) in the present-day states of Florida and Georgia, with an estimated population of 200,000. The word “Timucuan” may derive from “Thimogona” or “Tymangoua”, an exonym used by the Saturiwa chiefdom of present-day Jacksonville for their enemies, the Utina, who lived inland along the St. Johns River. Both groups spoke dialects of the Timucua language. Timucua tribes, in common with other peoples in Florida, engaged in limited warfare with each other. The standard pattern was to raid a town by surprise, kill and scalp as many men of the town as possible during the battle, and carry away any women and children that could be captured.” ref
“While alliances and confederacies arose between the chiefdoms from time to time, the Timucua were never organized into a single political unit. The various groups of Timucua speakers practiced several different cultural traditions. The people suffered severely from the introduction of Eurasian infectious diseases. By 1595, their population was estimated to have been reduced from 200,000 to 50,000, and thirteen chiefdoms remained. By 1700, the population of the tribe had been reduced to an estimated 1,000 due to slave raids from Carolinian settlers and their Indian allies. The local slave trade completed their extinction as a tribe soon after the turn of the 18th century.” ref
Tequesta Chiefdom
“The first record of European contact with the Tequesta (a complex stratified society led by a chief) was in 1513, by Juan Ponce de León when he discovered the Florida coast. In March 1567, Menéndez returned to the Tequesta and established a mission within a stockade, situated near the south bank of the Miami River below the native village. Menendez left a contingent of 30 soldiers, and for an undocumented reason, the soldiers executed an uncle of the chief. This ruined the trust the established, and forced to abandonment the mission in 1570.” ref
“The Tequesta, also Tekesta, Tegesta, Chequesta, Vizcaynos, were a Native American tribe on the Southeastern Atlantic coast of Florida. The Tequesta lived in the southeastern parts of present-day Florida. They lived in the region since the 3rd century BCE in the late Archaic period of the continent, and remained for roughly 2,000 years, By the 1800s, most had died as a result of settlement battles, slavery, and disease. The Tequesta tribe had only a few survivors by the time that Spanish Florida was traded to the British, who then established the area as part of the province of East Florida. The Tequesta were more or less dominated by the more numerous Calusa of the southwest coast of Florida. The Tequesta were closely allied to their immediate neighbors to the north, the Jaega. When Spain surrendered Florida to Britain in 1763, the remaining Tequestas, along with other Native Americans that had taken refuge in the Florida Keys, were evacuated to Cuba. In the 1770s, Bernard Romans reported seeing abandoned villages in the area, but no inhabitants.” ref
“English, who had colonies in Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina, sent their own Indian allies to raid the Tequesta, and sell them into slavery on indigo and rice plantations to their colonies stateside. “They needed the labor for the plantations.” To save the Tequesta, the Spanish petitioned the governor of Cuba in the 1700s to dispatch ships to rescue several thousand of the Indians. Many were turned into servants. Others died from disease.” ref
Jaega Chiefdom
“The Jaega (also Jega, Xega, Geiga) were Native Americans living in a chiefdom of the same name, which included the coastal parts of present-day Martin County and northern Palm Beach County, Florida, at the time of initial European contact, and until the 18th century. There is little written history about the Jaega. They were likely similar in culture and custom to the surrounding Calusa, Tequesta and Ais tribes. The area occupied by the Jaega corresponds to the East Okeechobee culture region, an archaeological culture that is part of, or closely related to, the Belle Glade culture or the Glades culture.” ref
“Starting in 1703, during Queen Anne’s War between England and Spain, the Jeaga were kidnapped into slavery and their villages ransacked by English slave traders from the Carolina Colony who were assisted by the Yemassee and Yuchi tribes. By 1711, the last Jeaga chief was desperately seeking sanctuary from the Spanish in Cuba for the remaining members of his tribe who were hiding out in the Florida Keys with 2,000 other Floridian Native Americans. Captain Luis Perdomo arrived with two ships from Havana, but could only rescue 270 of the refugees. Possessing no immunity, most died from disease within a few years in Cuba.” ref
Pensacola Chiefdom
“The settlement pattern of the Pensacola culture area suggests that the area was a series of minor chiefdoms with their own local centers such as Fort Walton Mound with one large paramount chiefdom located at the Bottle Creek site. The site is the largest on the Gulf Coast and with 18 mounds is comparable in scale to Moundville and the Plaquemine Mississippian Holly Bluff site in western Mississippi. The Pensacola culture was a regional variation of the Mississippian culture along the Gulf Coast of the United States that lasted from 1100 to 1700 CE. The archaeological culture covers an area stretching from a transitional Pensacola/Fort Walton culture zone at Choctawhatchee Bay in Florida to the eastern side of the Mississippi River Delta near Biloxi, Mississippi, with the majority of its sites located along Mobile Bay in the Mobile-Tensaw River Delta. Sites for the culture stretched inland, north into the southern Tombigee and Alabama River valleys, as far as the vicinity of Selma, Alabama.” ref
“By 1250 CE, Pensacola peoples had begun trading with Coastal Coles Creek culture peoples in southeastern Louisiana. Their style of pottery was found to be influential on peoples in this area, with many examples as well as local derivatives found at the Sims site in Saint Charles Parish, Louisiana. The early ceramics of Pensacola culture also show that they had significant contact with Plaquemine Mississippian culture peoples from the Lower Mississippi Valley. Archaeological research at the Bottle Creek site has shown that the people of the Pensacola culture may have moved into this geographical area from the north and west, but by the fourteenth century, they had developed their own distinctive ceramics style and their own unique settlement pattern. Unlike their Fort Walton neighbors to the east, Pensacola peoples relied more on the use of coastal resources than on maize agriculture.” ref
“The peoples of the Early Pensacola culture were closely tied to the people of the Moundville polity located upstream from them, and were possibly the result of colonization from the Moundville area. They used the more typical Mississippian culture shell tempering for their pottery. Whereas the Fort Walton peoples, whose largest site was Lake Jackson Mounds in Tallahassee, were more closely tied to and influenced by the Etowah polity of northern Georgia and, like them, used mostly sand, grit, grog, or combinations of these materials as tempering agents in their pottery.” ref
“Both the Pensacola culture and the nearby Fort Walton culture were a mixture of the Late Woodland period Weeden Island culture that preceded them in the area and an influx of Mississippian culture peoples from further north. Originally, Pensacola and Fort Walton had been classified together under the Pensacola name by archaeologists, named for a group of sites located around Pensacola Bay and Choctawhatchee Bay, the approximate geographic center of their combined areas. However, further study of their differing ceramic technologies over the years has led archaeologists to reclassify them as two separate cultures. Further archaeological research has also determined that the Bottle Creek site (the largest Pensacola culture site, which is located north of Mobile Bay) was the actual center for the culture and that there are more Pensacola sites in that area and around Perdido Bay than in the Pensacola area.” ref
“In 1516 Diego Miruelo may have been the first European to sail into Pensacola Bay. The Pensacola culture peoples first contact with Europeans may have been with the Narváez expedition in 1528. Cabeza de Vaca reported that the Native Americans they encountered in the vicinity of what is now Pensacola Bay were of “large stature and well formed,” and lived in permanent houses. The chief wore a robe of what de Vaca called “civet-marten”, “the best [skins], I think, that can be found.” After initially appearing to be friendly, they attacked the Spaniards without warning during the night. In 1539, Diego Maldonado, exploring the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico under orders from Hernando de Soto, found Pensacola Bay (which the Spanish called the Bay of Achuse, Achusi, Ochuse, or Ochus).” ref, ref
“Maldonado found a village on the bay, where he seized one or two of the inhabitants, along with a “good blanket of sables.” De Soto ordered Maldonado to meet him at the Bay of Achuse the next summer with supplies for his expedition. Maldonado returned three years in succession, but de Soto never appeared. It is possible that the Pensacola culture peoples were connected to or were the central Alabama Mabilians disastrously encountered by de Soto in 1540. Pensacola was, in fact, the very first European settlement in what was to become the United States.” ref
“On August 15, 1559, Spanish Conquistador Don Tristán de Luna led an 11-ship, 1,500-person expedition into Pensacola Bay. It brought not only Europeans to Pensacola, but also as many as 200 Africans, both enslaved and free, as well as natives from Mexico. This was the first multi-year European settlement in the territory of what is now the United States. But, weeks later, the colony was decimated by a hurricane on September 19, 1559, which killed an unknown number of sailors, sank six ships, grounded a seventh, and ruined supplies. The survivors struggled to survive, most moving inland to central Alabama for several months in 1560 before returning to the coast, but after two years, the effort was abandoned in 1561. Some of the survivors eventually sailed to Santa Elena (today’s Parris Island, South Carolina), but another storm hit there. Survivors made their way to Cuba and finally returned to Pensacola, where the remaining 50 at Pensacola were taken back to Veracruz. The Viceroy’s advisers later concluded that northwest Florida was too dangerous to settle. They largely ignored it for 137 years.” ref, ref
The next mention of the Mabilians is in 1674 by Bishop Gabriel Diaz Vara Calderon, who places them on an island in west Florida, possibly the swampy high ground of Mound Island, where the Bottle Creek site is located, or Dauphin Island. Later historic Mabilian villages are closer geographically to Bottle Creek, and the nearby city of Mobile, Alabama, was named for them. In 1559, Tristán de Luna y Arellano led a Spanish expedition to establish the colony of Ochuse on Pensacola Bay, then known as the Bay of Ichuse (also spelled Ychuse), but the endeavor ended up being short-lived. The Spanish had planned to rely on the local peoples for food supplies, but they found the area almost deserted and only a few people living in fishing camps around the bay.” ref
“The present city of Pensacola was established by the Spanish in 1698 as a buffer against French settlement in Louisiana. By the early eighteenth century, the Pensacola people, a Muskogean-speaking group associated with the Fort Walton culture, Apalachee Province, were living in the western part of what is now the Florida Panhandle and are the source of the name for Pensacola Bay, the city of Pensacola, and later the Pensacola culture. The Spanish colonial authorities also discovered that Carolinian traders were entering the colony to trade with the Creek people, establishing informal anti-Spanish alliances. During Queen Anne’s War, Creek war parties, aided by Carolinian raiders, launched several raids in the Pensacola region, and besieged the city twice in 1707. These raiding parties also raided settlements belonging to the Pensacola people, who responded by retreating into the cities of Pensacola, Mobile, and St.Augustine. They inhabited the area until the mid-eighteenth century, but by 1764, they had been assimilated into various Choctaw or Creek bands that had moved into the area or westward with the Biloxi to merge with the Tunica as part of the Tunica-Biloxi.” ref
“San Marcos de Apalache, another important Spanish settlement, was established in 1733 in Wakulla County. The Spanish settlers established a Creole culture at the frontier garrison, where Europeans were mostly males. They brought the Roman Catholic Church and tried to convert the Pensacola, as well as African slaves whom they imported as laborers. Marriages and unions took place among all three peoples, resulting in numerous mixed-race descendants, whom the Spanish classified in ranges. They described children of Pensacola-Spanish unions as mestizo and children of African-Spanish unions as mulattos.” ref
Fort Walton Culture’s Paramount Chiefdom
“The Fort Walton culture is the term used by archaeologists for a late prehistoric Native American archaeological culture that flourished in southeastern North America from approximately 1200~1500 CE and is associated with the historic Apalachee people. The Fort Walton culture was named by archaeologist Gordon Willey for the Fort Walton Mound site near Fort Walton Beach, Florida, based on his work at the site. Through more work in the area archaeologists have now come to believe the Ft. Walton site was actually built and used by people of the contemporaneous Pensacola culture. The peoples of the Ft. Walton culture used mostly sand, grit, grog, or combinations of these materials as tempering agents in their pottery, whereas the Pensacola culture peoples used the more typical Mississippian culture shell tempering for their pottery.” ref
“Approximately 1000 to 1200 CE, local Weeden Island peoples began adapting and adopting intensive maize agriculture, the building of platform mounds for ceremonial, political, and religious purposes, and making a new variety of ceramics, changes likely influenced by contact with the major Mississippian culture centers to the north and west. Early archaeologists thought that the Fort Walton culture represented the intrusion of peoples from Mexico or Mississippian cultures from the northwest, replacing the indigenous Weeden Island peoples, but by the late 1970s, this theory was generally discounted. Layouts and locations for Fort Walton sites are similar to other Mississippian culture sites, with the exception of sites in the Tallahassee Hills area which because of the local geography are located around lakes and swamps instead of rivers.” ref
“Settlement types include single-family homesteads, multi-family hamlets, small single-mound centers, and large multimound centers. The hierarchical settlement patterns suggest the area may have had one or more paramount chiefdoms. By the Late Fort Walton period, increased contact with Lamar phase peoples from central Georgia saw another change in styles of decoration and manufacture of ceramics. This new phase is known as the Leon-Jefferson culture. This period sees the collapse of the chiefdoms as aboriginal populations declined following contact with European explorers and colonizers, such as the Hernando de Soto Expedition in 1539. The Fort Walton and later Leon-Jefferson peoples are the direct ancestors of the Apalachee peoples.” ref
“The Lake Jackson Mounds site in Leon County is the largest known ceremonial center of the Fort Walton culture, although there are eight other known ceremonial sites in the Apalachee Province. It was occupied during the entire Fort Walton period, but abandoned at about 1500 CE when the capital of the chiefdom was moved to nearby Anhaica, the capital when the de Soto entrada encamped there in the winter of 1539. Another large site located nearby is the Velda Mound, which was occupied from approximately 1450 to 1625. Other sites include the Yon Mound and Village Site in Liberty County, and the Thick Greenbriar Site in Jackson County.” ref
Proto-Muskogean (1000 – 500 BCE or 3,000 to 2,500 years ago)
“Muskogean is a language family spoken in the Southeastern United States. The Muskogean family consists of Alabama, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee (or Creek), Koasati, Apalachee, and Hitchiti-Mikasuki. Hitchiti is generally considered a dialect of Mikasuki. “Seminole” is sometimes used for either a dialect of Muscogee spoken in Oklahoma or to refer to the Mikasuki, which is the ancestral language of most Florida Seminoles, while “Cow Creek Seminole” more specifically refers to a dialect of Muscogee spoken by a minority of Seminoles in Florida. The major subdivisions of the family have long been controversial, but the following lower-level groups are universally accepted: Choctaw–Chickasaw, Alabama–Koasati, Hitchiti–Mikasuki, and Muscogee. Apalachee is no longer spoken; its precise relationship to the other languages is uncertain, but Mary Haas and Pamela Munro both classify it with the Alabama–Koasati group.” ref
“The Muscogee Creek are associated with large mound-building polities, such as the Ocmulgee, Etowah Indian Mounds, and Moundville sites. Precontact Muscogee polities shared agriculture, transcontinental trade, craft specialization, hunting, and religion. Early Spanish explorers encountered ancestors of the Muscogee in the mid-16th century. The Muscogee were the first Native Americans officially considered by the early United States government to be “civilized” under George Washington‘s civilization plan. In the 19th century, the Muscogee were known as one of the “Five Civilized Tribes“, because they were said to have integrated numerous cultural and technological practices of their more recent European American neighbors. Formed in part originally by Muscogee refugees, the Seminole people today have three federally recognized tribes: the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, Seminole Tribe of Florida, and Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida.” ref
Muscogee Creek “Coosa” Chiefdom
“Coosa was the name of one of the four mother towns of the Muscogee Creek confederacy. The Coosa Chiefdom was a powerful Muskogean-speaking Native American paramount chiefdom centered in what are now northwestern Georgia and southeastern Tennessee, in the United States. The total population of Coosa’s area of influence, reaching further into present-day Tennessee and Alabama, has been estimated at 50,000. It was inhabited from at least 1400 until about 1600, and dominated several smaller chiefdoms.” ref
“The Coosa chiefdom was centered at a site along the Coosawattee River in present-day Gordon and Murray counties in northwestern Georgia. The capital of Coosa, it had a large plaza and three platform mounds, as well as residential dwellings. Researchers have found various Mississippian culture pottery types, the most substantial of which reflect the site’s Middle and Late South Appalachian Mississippian culture (a regional variation of the Mississippian culture) habitation from 1300 to 1600.” ref
“The Mississippian culture was a collection of Native American societies that flourished in what is now the Midwestern, Eastern, and Southeastern United States from approximately CE 800 to 1600, varying regionally. It was known for building large, earthen platform mounds, and often other-shaped mounds as well. It was composed of a series of urban settlements and satellite villages linked together by loose trading networks. The largest city was Cahokia, believed to be a major religious center, located in what is present-day southern Illinois.” ref
“Archeologists, who nicknamed the Coosa settlement as ‘Little Egypt’, have defined these as the Dallas, Lamar, and Mouse Creek phases of pottery. These types of variations could indicate that the chiefdom underwent three archaeological phases and changes in culture, each with distinct pottery and artifact styles. Only one other village had a mound; the others associated with the chiefdom had only residential dwellings. The Cherokee first appeared to use the word kusa to mean the Muskogee Creek people of the Upper Towns, who were competitors and enemies.” ref
“A number of cultural traits are recognized as being characteristic of the Mississippian culture. Although not all Mississippian peoples practiced all of the following activities, they were distinct from their ancestors in the adoption of some or all of these traits.
- The construction of large, truncated earthwork pyramid mounds, or platform mounds. Such mounds were usually square, rectangular, or occasionally circular. Structures (domestic houses, temples, burial buildings, or other) were usually constructed atop such mounds.
- Maize-based agriculture. In most places, the development of Mississippian culture coincided with the adoption of comparatively large-scale, intensive maize agriculture, which supported larger populations and craft specialization. They expanded by sectioning off land and working one plot at a time.
- Shell-tempered pottery. The adoption and use of riverine (or more rarely marine) shells as tempering agents in ceramics.
- Widespread trade networks extending as far west as the Rocky Mountains, north to the Great Lakes, south to the Gulf of Mexico, and east to the Atlantic Ocean.
- The development of the chiefdom or complex chiefdom level of social complexity.
- The development of institutionalized social inequality.
- A centralization of control of combined political and religious power in the hands of few or one.
- The beginnings of a settlement hierarchy, in which one major center (with mounds) has clear influence or control over a number of lesser communities, which may or may not possess a smaller number of mounds.
- The adoption of the paraphernalia of the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (SECC), also called the Southern Cult. SECC items are found in Mississippian-culture sites from Wisconsin (see Aztalan State Park) to the Gulf Coast, and from Florida to Arkansas and Oklahoma. The SECC was frequently tied into ritual game-playing, as with chunkey.” ref
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- Medicine Wheel
- Serpent Mound
- Mesa Verde
- Chaco Canyon
- Casas Grandes/Paquime
- Ciudad Perdida “lost city”; Teyuna
- Ingapirca “Inca”
- Chavín de Huántar “pre-Inca”
- Sacred City of Caral-Supe *Caral culture developed between 3000 – 1800 BCE*
- Machu Picchu
- Nazca Lines
- Sacsayhuamán
- Tiwanaku/Tiahuanaco
- Atacama Giant/Lines
- Pucará de Tilcara “pre-Inca”
“The Muscogee, also known as Muscogee Creek or just Creek, are a group of related Indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands in the United States. Their historical homelands are in what now comprises southern Tennessee, much of Alabama, western Georgia, and parts of northern Florida. Most of the Muscogee people were forcibly removed to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) by the federal government in the 1830s during the Trail of Tears. A small group of the Muscogee Creek Confederacy remained in Alabama, and their descendants formed the federally recognized Poarch Band of Creek Indians.” ref
“Another Muscogee group moved into Florida between roughly 1767 and 1821, trying to evade European encroachment, and intermarried with local tribes to form the Seminole. Through ethnogenesis, the Seminole emerged with a separate identity from the rest of the Muscogee Creek Confederacy. The great majority of Seminole were forcibly relocated to Indian Territory in the late 1830s, where their descendants later formed federally recognized tribes. Some of the Seminole moved south with the Miccosukee into the Everglades, resisting removal. These two tribes gained federal recognition in the 20th century and remain in Florida. The respective languages of all of these modern-day branches, bands, and tribes, except one, are closely related variants called Muscogee, Mvskoke, and Hitchiti-Mikasuki, all of which belong to the Eastern Muskogean branch of the Muscogean language family.” ref
“Hitchiti was a tribal town in what is now the Southeast United States. It was one of several towns whose people spoke the Hitchiti language. Its sites had large platform mounds, and may have served as ceremonial centers. Archaeological evidence indicates that the material culture of the 17th-century lower Chattahoochee region had developed in place over several centuries. A variant of the Lamar regional culture, with influences from the Fort Walton culture to the south, developed in the towns along the Chattahoochee between 1300 and 1400.” ref
AI Overview: The Hitchiti chiefdom was a prominent Indigenous society of the Southeastern Woodlands, primarily inhabiting present-day Georgia and Alabama. As a Muskogean-speaking paramount group, they formed a core part of the larger Creek (Muscogee) Confederacy and heavily influenced the subsequent development of the Seminole Nation.
“Oconee was a tribal town of Hitchiti-speaking Indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands during the 17th and 18th centuries. Oconee was one of a number of towns in the Apalachicola Province on the Chattahoochee River in Alabama and Georgia in the first half of the 17th century. The towns were situated along 160 kilometers (100 mi) of the river from the south of the falls at present-day Columbus to Barbour County, Alabama. A variant of the Lamar regional culture, with influences from the Fort Walton culture to the south, developed in the towns along the Chattahoochee River between 1300 and 1400.” ref
AI Overview: The Oconee chiefdom was a prominent Indigenous Mississippian society based in the Oconee River valley of central Georgia. Encountered by Spanish explorers in the 16th century, the Oconee transitioned into historic Muscogee (Creek) towns, ultimately playing a foundational role in the formation of the Yamasee and Seminole tribes.
Some Yamasee and Yuchi peoples also merged into the new Seminole Ethnicity
Yamasee peoples?
“The reason for the clear absence of the name Yamassee from any of the earliest Spanish or French accounts of the Southeast is, of course, quite simple; the group eventually known as Yamassee did not even exist in the 16th century. The names of most or all of its constituent towns, however, apparently did exist before European contact, either as independent chiefdoms or subordinate towns and villages within other chiefdoms. As will be explored in greater depth below, it is now evident that the Yamassee represented a social group forged from the remnants of many other groups during the colonial era. Not only is it now possible to identify the precise origins of many of the later Yamassee towns, but it is also possible to clarify the chronological framework within which the Yamassee confederacy formed. The Yamassee confederacy represented a purely contingent social formation that united refugee towns from a number of collapsed chiefdoms into a social entity that eventually became a de facto ethnic group. ” ref
“Some Guale people, with other survivors of Spanish diseases and war, became known as the Yamasee. Archaeological studies indicate that the precursors of the historically known Guale lived along the Georgia coast and Sea Islands, from at least CE 1150. Archaeologists identify the Prehistoric Guale cultures as the Savannah phase (CE 1150 to 1300) and the Irene phase (CE 1300 to 1600). While the prehistoric ancestors to the Guale shared many characteristics with regional neighbors, they left unique archaeological features that distinguished the “proto-Guale” people from other groups. The prehistoric people were organized into chiefdoms. They built Mississippian-type platform mounds, major earthworks requiring the organized labor of many people, and using highly skilled soil and engineering knowledge.” ref
“They used the mounds for ceremonial, religious, and burial purposes. Native American chiefdom along the coast of present-day Georgia and the Sea Islands. Spanish Florida established its Roman Catholic missionary system in the chiefdom in the late 16th century. During the late 17th century and early 18th century, the Guale society was shattered by extensive epidemics of new infectious diseases and warfare from other tribes. Some of the surviving remnants migrated to the mission areas of Spanish Florida, while others remained near the Georgia coast. Joining with other survivors, they became known as the Yamasee, an ethnically mixed group that emerged in a process of ethnogenesis. In 1675, the Spanish first used the term Yamasee to refer to the newcomer refugees. They thought them similar to the La Tama. In Guale Province, some of the Yamasee joined the existing missions, while others settled on the periphery. The La Tama Yamasee, Guale, and other refugees scattered in the southeast. Some relocated to new missions in Spanish Florida, but most rejected Spanish authority.” ref
“The Yamasee towns and chiefs’ names indicate plainly that they spoke a Muskhogean dialect, and tradition affirms that it was connected most closely with Hitchiti, a contention which may be considered probable. The Yamasees were a multiethnic confederation of Native Americans who lived in the coastal region of present-day northern coastal Georgia near the Savannah River and later in northeastern Florida. The Yamasees engaged in revolts and wars with other Native groups and Europeans living in North America, specifically from Florida to North Carolina. The Yamasees were joined by members of the Guale and Ocute polities, two late surviving Mississippian groups. The Yamasees, along with the Guale, are considered from linguistic evidence by many scholars to have been a Muskogean language people. For instance, the Yamasee term “Mico”, meaning chief, is also common in Muskogee. After the Yamasees migrated to the Carolinas, they began participating in the Indian slave trade in the American Southeast.” ref, ref
“They raided other tribes to take captives for sale to European colonists. Captives from other Native American tribes were sold into slavery, with some being transported to West Indian plantations. Their enemies fought back, and slave trading was a large cause of the Yamasee War. After the war, the Yamasees migrated southwards to the region around St. Augustine and Pensacola, where they formed an alliance with the Spanish colonial administration. These Yamasees continued to inhabit Florida until 1727, when the combination of a smallpox epidemic and raids by Col. John Palmer (leading fifty Carolinian militiamen and one hundred Indians) eventually led many of the remaining Yamasees to disperse, with some joining the Seminole or Creek. Descendants of the Yamasee are likely represented among citizens of several federally recognized tribes, including the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, the Seminole Tribe of Florida, and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians. Following their dispersal, some Yamasee refugees fled south to Florida, where their descendants joined with other tribal groups and remnants through a process of ethnogenesis to become part of the Seminole people.” ref
Yuchi peoples?
“In the 16th century, the Yuchi lived in the eastern Tennessee River valley. By the late 17th century, they had migrated south to Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina, settling near the Muscogee (Creek). Some also migrated to the Florida panhandle. A traditional town chief led each Yuchi settlement and continues to hold an annual series of ceremonies at its square-ground site. Traditionally, the Yuchi people were subsistence farmers, and the most important of these is the midsummer green corn ceremony. At first contact with Europeans, they resided in autonomous communities found in what is now eastern Tennessee, but during the colonial period, they established settlements throughout the southeastern United States. An earlier invasion of southern territories by the Yuchi is noted by one of the governors of Florida in a letter dated 1639. These invaders proved a constant source of annoyance to the Spaniards. Finally, they established themselves in west Florida, not far from the Choctawhatchee River, where they were attacked by an allied Spanish and Apalachee expedition in 1677 and suffered severely. In the 1700s, the Yuchi became geographically and militarily associated with Creek-speaking towns settled in present-day Georgia and Alabama.” ref, ref, ref
“At the time of first European contact, the Yuchi people lived in what is now eastern Tennessee. In 1541, Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto described them as a powerful tribe known as the Uchi, that were also associated with the Chisca tribe. The Yuchi constituted a linguistic stock, the Uchean, distinct from all others, though structurally their speech bears a certain resemblance to the languages of the Muskhogean and Siouan families. The Yuchi probably did not enter South Carolina until after the year 1661. There appear to have been three principal bands in historic times: one on the Tennessee River, one in west Florida, and one on the Savannah River, but only a suggestion of native band names has survived. At least three subdivisional names, including the Tsoyaha, or “Sun People,” and the Root People. Their autonym, or name for themselves, Tsoyaha or Coyaha, means “Children of the Sun.” Their language is an isolate. The Shawnee called them Tahokale, and the Cherokee called them Aniyutsi. A third influx of Yuchi who occupied the Savannah River between Silver Bluff and Ebenezer Creek in present-day Georgia.” ref, ref
“In 1714, the former was cut off by the Cherokee in revenge for the murder of a member of their tribe, instigated by two English traders. Later tradition affirms that the surviving Yuchi fled to Florida, but many of them certainly remained in the Cherokee country for a long time afterward, and probably eventually migrated west with their hosts. In the late 18th century, some Yuchi migrated south to Florida along with the Muscogee, where they became part of the newly formed Seminole people. A small band of Yuchi joined the Seminole just before the outbreak of the Seminole War. They appeared first in west Florida, near the Mikasuki, but later had a town at Spring Garden in Volusia County, FL. Their presence is indicated down to the end of the war in the Peninsula, when they appear to have gone west, probably reuniting with the remainder of the tribe. In 1729, a Kasihta chief named Captain Ellick married three Yuchi women and persuaded some of the Yuchi Indians to move over among the Lower Creeks, but Governor Oglethorpe of Georgia guaranteed them their rights to their old land until after 1740, and the final removal did not, in fact, take place until 1751.” ref, ref
Some Calusa peoples may have mixed with and become part of the Seminoles?
“Creek society was a chiefdom-level society, which was similar to the Calusa. Their society was organized into matrilineal clans, named after animals, such as Panther, ear, and Deer, natural forces, such as Wind, as well as plants, like Potato and Com. Clan membership was determined through the mother’s line and led back to a common female ancestor. Similarly, the Calusa likely operated under a matrilineal clan structure. Despite their initial resistance to European encroachment, the population of the Calusa dwindled due to diseases brought by contact with outsiders. By the late 1700s, their numbers had significantly decreased, leading to their eventual assimilation into other groups, such as the Seminoles, with some possibly migrating to Cuba. The legacy of the Calusa continues to be an important part of Florida’s Indigenous history. The Calusa are believed by some to have been adopted into, or to have integrated into, the Bear Clan of the Seminole Tribe. Since the Calusa were not agriculturalists, they did not participate in the Green Corn Dance or other rituals like it seen among the Creek. During colonialism, the Green Com Dance was still a vital and central part of Seminole religion, politics, and life. The religion of the Creeks was also vastly different from that of the Calusa. While the Calusa believed in three supreme beings, the Creeks believed in only one. The Creek believed in an omniscient Great Creator, or a Supreme Being who was the giver of life. The Creek would appeal to the spirits of the universe, such as the sun, the moon, and the natural spirits. During Colonialism and European expansion, it was then that the Seminoles became a distinct group of individuals and moved from being largely “Creeks” to “Seminoles”. Since the Seminoles were largely the descendants of the Creeks, they followed the same form of government. The micco, or leader, continued to reside in the talwa village. After colonialism, a council of elders, which was represented by several Creek (Seminole) clans, elected the highest official. This continued from their old ways of election. This position was filled by a member of a specific clan and was therefore hereditary. There were other positions that were filled by skill and ability. These men were very important to Creek society. There were four other positions: micco apokta, or Vice-Chief; micalgi, assistant leaders; heniha, ceremonial leaders; and lastly, holibonaya, the war speaker. A few writers speculate that a leader in the Second Seminole War in the 1830s named Chakaika may have had Calusa ancestry. However, there are no written documents to support this idea. A few Calusa may have integrated into the Seminole Tribe. Some Seminoles say if a person is tall, they must be Calusa. In the 1930s, folklorist Frances Densmore collected songs among the Seminoles. Some songs have been attributed to the Calusa.” ref, ref, ref, ref
“The Great Spirt and the Evil one Native American (Navajo): the Fathers of All Fathers. The Supreme Being. The Father of the Holy People. The Great Spirit. (watches us by light like sun light or moon light) = Sky Father creator and maker to all things, corn pollen prayer are offered, sacred stone offering to, protect us by the light of the sun. The Great Spirit is a common reference among many Native American Tribes.” ref, ref
There are three types of the Great Spirit thinking (to me):
- Great Spirit (animistic type): “Great Mystery” likely no referred gender.
- Great Spirit (totemistic/shamanistic type): “Great Spirit” is likely not fully seen as a god/goddess-type spirit, it could be an animal but may have male or female gender.
- Great Spirit (paganistic type): “Great/High God” likely a male gender commonly related to the sun or blue/clear sky.
Native American Names For The Great Spirit
Above Old Man (Wiyot Indian Great Spirit)Apistotoke (Blackfoot Great Spirit)Caddi-Ayo (Caddo Great Spirit)Chebbeniathan (Arapaho Great Spirit)Gici Niwaskw (Abenaki Great Spirit)Gichi Manidoo (Ojibwe Great Spirit)Ha-Wen-Neyu (Huron Indian Great Spirit)Kisulkw (Micmac Indian Great Spirit)Ketanitowet (Lenape Indian Great Spirit)Maheu (Cheyenne Indian Great Spirit)Orenda (Iroquois Indian Great Spirit)Sky-Chief (Carib Indian Great Spirit)Spider of Heaven (Gros Ventre Great Spirit)Tirawa Atius (Pawnee Indian Great Spirit)Utakké (Carrier Great Spirit)Wakantanka (Sioux Indian Great Spirit)Wakanda (Omaha Indian Great Spirit) ref
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The Great Spirit in both the Gros Ventre and the Arapaho is called: “Spider Above” or “Spider of Heaven.”
“Ixtcibenihehat “Great Spirit” (Gros Ventre), also known as: Spider of Heaven, Man Above, Creator, Chebbeniathan; as distinguished from the earthly Nihaat.” ref
“Chebbeniathan or Hichaba Nihancan “Great Spirit” (Arapaho), also known as: Spider-Above, Man Above, Creator, Heisonoonin, Our Father; as distinguished from the earthly Nihancan.” ref
“The Arapaho split from the Gros Ventres, and both are part of the Algic: Algonquian–Wiyot–Yurok language family, which also includes other names for the Great Spirit Creator god, as well as Spider mythology.” ref, ref, ref, ref, ref
Other Great Spirit terms recorded in other Algonquian languages
“To the Cree people, the Great Spirit is known as Kise-manito (related to Gitche Manitou). To the Munsee people, the Great Spirit is known as Kitschimanitto (related to Gitche Manitou). To the Illinois people, the Great Spirit is known as Kisseh Manetou (related to Kishe Manitou). To the Fox people, the Great Spirit is known as Mannittoo (related to Manitou). To the Narragansett people, the Great Spirit is known as Cautantowwit or Kytan. To the Shawnee people, the Great Spirit is known as Wishemenetou. To the Menominee people, the Great Spirit is known as Kishä Manido or Mashe Manido. To the Potawatomi people, the Great Spirit is known as Mamogosnan. To the Abenaki people, the Great Spirit is known as Gici Niwaskw. To the Powhatan people, the Great Spirit is known as Ahone. To the Massachusett/Wampanoag people, the Great Spirit is known as Kehtannit. To the Narragansett people, the Great Spirit is known as Cautantowwit or Kautantowit. To the Mohegan-Pequot people, the Great Spirit is known as Konchi Manto. To the Carolina Algonquian people, the Great Spirit is known as Manitou or Montoac.” ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref
Sky Father/Sky Chief Mythology: Great spirit, Great Mystery, and Great Father
The traditional Creator God of the Seminole people?
“Esaugeta Emissee (the Master of Breath) was a kind of Great Spirit who watched over the Creeks. Many lesser spirits surrounded him. The traditional Creator God of the Seminole people is known as Breathmaker (or Hisagita Misa in the traditional language). Breathmaker (Hisagita Misa): The Great Spirit who sustains life and watches over all. Breathmaker is the Creator God of the Seminole tribe. He made the people out of clay and taught them the arts of civilization. He is associated with the Milky Way, which he created as his own home and which is considered to be the afterlife in traditional Seminole cosmology. After colonization, some Seminole people began to associate Breathmaker with Jesus and the Milky Way with Heaven. Related figures in other tribes: Ababinili (Chickasaw: Creator God and divine spirit, relating to the meaning of “one who sits above” or “dwells above,” and he is associated with the Sun.), Unetlanvhi (Cherokee: Creator, Sometimes Cherokee people today also refer to the Creator as the Great Spirit borrowed from other tribes, sometimes Heavenly One, or Ruler is used instead.), Gitchi Manitou (Ojibway: Great Spirit, Sky Chief, Master of Life; as in other Algonquian tribes, the Great Spirit is abstract, benevolent, and does not directly interact with humans.).” ref, ref, ref, ref, ref
Seminoles
“The Seminoles were not originally a single tribe. They were an alliance of Northern Florida and Southern Georgia natives that banded together in the 1700’s to fight the European invaders, including people from the Creek, Miccosukee, Hitchiti, and Oconee tribes. Later, the alliance became even closer, and today the Seminoles are a united sovereign nation, even though their people speak two languages and have different cultural backgrounds. The original homelands of Florida’s Creek and Miccosukee Indians were in the northern part of the state, but since the native tribes of southern Florida had been conquered and shipped to Cuba by the Spanish, the Seminoles retreated into that area, where most Seminole people are still living today. (Other Seminoles were removed to Oklahoma by the US government.)” ref
“The Seminole are a Native American people who developed in Florida in the 18th century. The Seminole people emerged in a process of ethnogenesis from various Native American groups who settled in Spanish Florida beginning in the early 1700s, most significantly northern Muscogee Creeks from what are now Georgia and Alabama. The word “Seminole” is likely from the Spanish cimarones, meaning “wild one”, “untamed” or “runaway”, as opposed to the christianized natives who had previously lived in the mission villages of Spanish Florida. In the 17th century the Spanish in Florida used cimaron or cimarrón to refer to Christianized natives who had left their mission villages to live “wild” in the woods.” ref
“Some of the Hitchiti– or Mikasukee-speakers who had settled in Florida identified themselves to the British as “cimallon” (Muskogean languages have no “r” sound, replacing it with “l”). The British wrote the name as “Semallone”, and later “Seminole”. The use of “cimallon” by Hitchiti/Mikasukee-speaking bands in Florida to describe themselves may have been intended to distinguish themselves from the primarily Muskogee-speakers of the Upper Towns of the Muscogee Confederacy, called the “Creek Confederacy” by the British. After 1763, when they took over Florida from the Spanish, the British called all natives living in Florida “Seminoles”, “Creeks”, or “Seminole-Creeks”. An alternative explanation is that “Seminole” is derived from the Muscogee simanó-li. This has been variously translated as “frontiersman”, “outcast”, “runaway”, “separatist”, and similar words.” ref
“From the beginning of the 18th century, various groups of Native Americans, primarily Muscogee people (called Creeks by the English) from north of present-day Florida, moved into what is now the state. The Creek migrants included Hitchiti and Mikasuki speakers. There were also some non-Creek Yamasee and Yuchi migrants. They merged to form the new Seminole ethnicity.” ref
“Groups known to have been in Florida in the latter half of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century include:
- Alachua Seminoles – “Around 1750, a Hitchiti-speaking group of Oconees, led by Ahaya, moved to Florida, settling on what is now known as Paynes Prairie. They were joined by migrants from other Hitchiti-speaking Lower Towns of the Muscogee Confederacy and kept many captured Yamasees as slaves. Ahaya’s people were the first to be called “Seminole”. The Alachua Seminoles became involved in the Patriot War of East Florida in 1812. After fending off attacks on their largest town by militia from Georgia, the Alachua Seminoles moved south to the area around Okahumpka. The chief of the Alachua Seminole during the Second Seminole War was Micanopy, likely a great-nephew of Ahaya.” ref
- Apalachicola band – “Several groups of Mucogee-speakers who had settled along the Apalachicola River by the early 19th century were allowed to stay on small reservations along the Apalachicola River when most of the Native Americans in Florida were moved onto a reservation in the interior of the peninsula by the terms of the Treaty of Moultrie Creek. They gave up their reservations and moved to the Indian Territory in the 1830s.” ref
- Black Seminoles “The Gullahs were establishing their own free settlements in the Florida wilderness by at least the late 1700s. They built separate villages of thatched-roof houses surrounded by fields of corn and swamp rice, and they maintained friendly relations with the mixed population of refugee Indians. In time, the two groups came to view themselves as parts of the same loosely organized tribe, in which blacks held important positions of leadership. The Gullahs adopted Indian clothing, while the Indians acquired a taste for rice and appreciation for Abraham, a Black Seminole Leader in the Second Seminole War (1835-1842). The Indians called him “Souanaffe Tustenukke,” a title indicating membership in the highest of the three ranks of war leaders. He is wearing typical Seminole dress and holding a rifle. Gullah music and folklore. But the Gullahs were physically more suited to the tropical climate and possessed an indispensable knowledge of tropical agriculture; and, without their assistance, the Indians would not have been able to cope effectively with the Florida environment. The two groups led an independent life in the wilderness of northern Florida, rearing several generations of children in freedom—and they recognized the American settlers and slave owners as their common enemy. The Americans called the Florida Indians “Seminoles,” from the Spanish wordcimarron, meaning “wild” or “untamed”; and they called the runaway Gullahs “Seminole Negroes” or “Indian Negroes.” Modern historians have called these free Gullah frontiersmen the “Black Seminoles.” The Seminole settlements in Spanish Florida increased as more and more runaway slaves and renegade Indians escaped south—and conflict with the Americans was, sooner or later, inevitable. There were skirmishes in 1812 and 1816. In 1818, General Andrew Jackson led an American army into Florida to claim it for the United States, and war finally erupted. The blacks and Indians fought side-by-side in a desperate struggle to stop the American advance, but they were defeated and driven south into the more remote wilderness of central and southern Florida. General Jackson (later President) referred to this First Seminole War as an “Indian and Negro War.” In 1835, the Second Seminole War broke out, and this full-scale guerrilla war would last for six years and claim the lives of 1,500 American soldiers. The Black Seminoles waged the fiercest resistance, as they feared that capture or surrender meant death or return to slavery—and they were more adept at living and fighting in the jungles than their Indian comrades. The American commander, General Jesup, informed the War Department that, “This, you may be assured, is a negro and not an Indian war”; and a U.S. Congressman of the period commented that these black fighters were “contending against the whole military power of the United States.” When the Army finally captured the Black Seminoles, officers refused to return them to slavery— fearing that these seasoned warriors, accustomed to their freedom, would wreak havoc on the Southern plantations. In 1842, the Army forcibly removed them, along with their Indian comrades, to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) in the unsettled West. The Black Seminoles, exiled from their Florida strongholds, were forced to continue their struggle for freedom on the Western frontier. In Oklahoma, the Government put them under the authority of the Creek Indians, slave owners who tried to curb their freedom; and white slave traders came at night to kidnap their women and children. In 1850, a group of Black Seminoles and Seminole Indians escaped south across Texas to the desert badlands of northern Mexico. They established a free settlement and, as in Florida, began to attract runaway slaves from across the border. In 1855, a heavily armed band of Texas Rangers rode into Mexico to destroy the Seminole settlement, but the blacks and Indians stopped them and forced them back into the U.S. The Indians soon returned to Oklahoma, but the Black Seminoles remained in Mexico, fighting constantly to protect their settlement from the marauding Comanche and Apache Indians. In 1870, after emancipation of the slaves in the United States, the U.S. Cavalry in southern Texas invited some of the Black Seminoles to return and join the Army—and it officially established the “Seminole Negro Indian Scouts.” ref
- Chiscas – “People from Tennessee and Virginia who migrated into Florida in the 17th century. Some became known as Yuchi, while others may have assimilated into other tribes.” ref
- Choctaws – “A band of Choctaws was reported to be living near Charlotte Harbor in 1822. An 1823 report indicated that Choctaw refugees from the First Seminole War were in Florida. Mikasukee-speaking Seminole informants told William Sturtevant in the 1950s that there had never been Choctaws in Florida.” ref
- Creeks – “When the early English explorers and traders first encountered the native people that are now called Creek Indians, they were living in the valley of the Ocmulgee River. Ocmulgee River in Georgia. It was formerly known by its Hitchiti name of Ocheese Creek, from which the Creek (Muscogee) people derived their name. In those times, the river was known as the Ochese Creek to the English and the natives living in the area were called “Ochese Creek Indians.” Through time the name was shortened to be simply “Creek Indians.” However, this was the European name for these people, while they called themselves “Muscogee.” The Creeks incorporated into their alliance such small tribes as the Alabama, Hitchiti, Yuchi, some Shawnee and others. By the middle of the 18th Century, the Muscogee (Creek) Nation consisted of about 60 towns. The town government consisted of a principal micco or chief, a second subordinate micco, and a council. The micco was elected for life by the town council, which he chaired. Government for the entire nation centered in the General Council, which decided matters of peace and war. In form it resembled the town councils. It was made up of the head men of each town and served as the single unifying institution of the Creeks. The government was not as centralized as it might appear to an outsider. The towns retained their autonomy and often acted without the direction of the Nation’s General Council.” ref, ref
- Mikasukis – “Early in the 18th century the Spanish in Florida tried to recruit groups from the Muscogee Confederacy to move into Florida to replace the recently devastated Apalachee and Timucua peoples as buffers against English colonists in the Province of Carolina. Tamathlis and Chiahas moved into the old Apalachee Province, eventually coalescing onto the Mikasuki. The town of Mikasuki, on the shores of Lake Miccosukee, is known from when the British controlled Florida (1766–1783). As a result of the First Seminole War, the Mikasukis first moved southeastward, towards territory recently vacated by the Alachua Seminoles, then back northwestward into what is now Madison County, Florida. At the time of the Treaty of Moultrie Creek, in 1823, the Mikasukis were one of the two most important bands of Native Americans in Florida west of the Suwannee River. In 1826 six chiefs from Florida, including representatives of the Mikasukis, were taken to Washington in order to impress them with the power of the United States. The Mikasukis retained a separate identity through the Second Seminole War. At the end of that war, in 1842, it was reported that there were 33 Mikasuki warriors left in Florida (along with Seminoles, Tallahassees and Creeks).” ref
- Muscogees – “he Muscogee, also known as Muscogee Creek or just Creek, are a group of related Indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands in the United States. Their historical homelands are in what now comprises southern Tennessee, much of Alabama, western Georgia and parts of northern Florida. Most of the Muscogee people were forcibly removed to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) by the federal government in the 1830s during the Trail of Tears. A small group of the Muscogee Creek Confederacy remained in Alabama, and their descendants formed the federally recognized Poarch Band of Creek Indians. Another Muscogee group moved into Florida between roughly 1767 and 1821, trying to evade European encroachment, and intermarried with local tribes to form the Seminole. Through ethnogenesis, the Seminole emerged with a separate identity from the rest of the Muscogee Creek Confederacy. The great majority of Seminole were forcibly relocated to Indian Territory in the late 1830s, where their descendants later formed federally recognized tribes. Some of the Seminole, with the Miccosukee moved south into the Everglades, resisting removal. These two tribes gained federal recognition in the 20th century and remain in Florida. The ancestors of the Muscogee people were part of the Mississippian Ideological Interaction Sphere, also known as moundbuilding Mississippian cultures with chiefdoms or complex paramount chiefdom and paraphernalia of the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, also called the Southern Cult. Between 800 and 1600 CE, they built complex cities with earthwork mounds with surrounding networks of satellite towns and farmsteads. The Muscogee Creek are associated with large moundbuilding polities, such as the Ocmulgee, Etowah Indian Mounds, and Moundville sites. Precontact Muscogee polities shared agriculture, transcontinental trade, craft specialization, hunting, and religion. Early Spanish explorers encountered ancestors of the Muscogee in the mid-16th century. The Muscogee were the first Native Americans officially considered by the early United States government to be “civilized” under George Washington‘s civilization plan.” ref, ref
- Muspas – “People living in southwestern Florida in the first half of the 19th century, at one time believed to be remnants of the Calusa.” ref
- Rancho Indians – “Native American people and people of mixed native American and Spanish ancestry worked and lived at seasonal fishingranchos (fishing camps) established by Spanish/Cuban fishermen along the southwest coast of the Florida peninsula in the 18th century. They were all sent to Indian Territory during the Second Seminole War.” ref
- Spanish Indians – “A name sometimes given to Indians remaining in southern Florida after Florida was transferred from Spain to Great Britain in 1763. These Indians were believed to be trading with Spanish/Cuban fishermen who frequented the southwest Florida coast. The name has also been applied more narrowly to a band led by Chakaika that lived deep in the Everglades. Chakaika’s band is believed to have been responsible for the attack on a trading post on the Caloosahatchee River in 1839 that killed a number of soldiers and civilians, and the attack on Indian Key in 1840. Late in 1840 Colonel William S. Harney led a raid on Chakaika’s camp, in which Chakaika and several of his followers were killed. The so-called “Spanish Indians” were probably primarily speakers of a Muskogean language (retrospectively called “Seminoles”), with possibly a few Calusa who had remained in Florida when the Spanish left Florida. They were reputed to speak Spanish and to have extensive dealings with the Spanish. Some of the “Spanish Indians” who raided Indian Key were heard speaking English and may have been escaped slaves who had joined the band.” ref
- Tallahassees – “A band of Muscogee-speakers, called “Tallassees” or “Tallahassees”, settled in the old Apalachee Province in the late 18th century. When Osceola was a boy, his mother migrated to Florida with him, settling among the Tallahassees. At the time of the Treaty of Moultrie Creek, in 1823, the Tallahassees were one of the two most important bands of Native Americans in Florida west of the Suwannee River. In 1826 six chiefs from Florida, including representatives of the Tallahassees of northern Florida and the Pease Creek Tallahassees, were taken to Washington in order to impress them with the power of the United States. The Tallahassees retained a separate identity through the Second Seminole War. At the end of that war, in 1842, it was reported that there were ten Tallahassee warriors left in Florida (along with Seminoles, Mikasukis and Creeks).” ref
- Yamasees – “The Yamasees (also spelled Yamassees, Yemasees or Yemassees) were a multiethnic confederation of Native Americans who lived in the coastal region of present-day northern coastal Georgia near the Savannah River and later in northeastern Florida. The Yamasees lived in coastal towns in what are now southeast Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina. The Yamasees migrated from Florida to South Carolina in the late 16th century, where they became friendly with European colonists. The Yamasees were joined by members of the Guale and Ocute polities, two late surviving Mississippian groups. The Yamasees engaged in revolts and wars with other Native groups and Europeans living in North America, specifically from Florida to North Carolina. The Yamasees, along with the Guale, are considered from linguistic evidence by many scholars to have been a Muskogean language people. For instance, the Yamasee term “Mico”, meaning chief, is also common in Muskogee. After the Yamasees migrated to the Carolinas, they began participating in the Indian slave trade in the American Southeast. They raided other tribes to take captives for sale to European colonists. Captives from other Native American tribes were sold into slavery, with some being transported to West Indian plantations. Their enemies fought back, and slave trading was a large cause of the Yamasee War. For decades, Yamasee raiders (frequently equipped with European firearms and working in concert with Carolinian settlers) conducted slave raids against Spanish-allied Indian tribes in the American Southeast. The Yamasees also conducted raids on the Spanish colonial settlement of St. Augustine. Indian captives of the Yamasees were transported to colonial settlements throughout Carolina, where they were sold to white colonists; frequently, many of these captives were then resold to West Indian slave plantations. After the war, the Yamasees migrated southwards to the region around St. Augustine and Pensacola, where they formed an alliance with the Spanish colonial administration. These Yamasees continued to inhabit Florida until 1727, when the combination of a smallpox epidemic and raids by Col. John Palmer (leading fifty Carolinian militiamen and one hundred Indians) eventually led many of the remaining Yamasees to disperse, with some joining the Seminole or Creek. Still others remained near St. Augustine until the Spanish relinquished control of the city to the British. At that time, they took with them around ninety Yamasees to Havana, Cuba.” ref
- Yuchis – “The Yuchi people are a Native American tribe now in Oklahoma, though their original homeland was in the southeastern United States. In the 16th century, the Yuchi lived in the eastern Tennessee River valley. At the time of first European contact, the Yuchi people lived in what is now eastern Tennessee. By the late 17th century, they had migrated south to Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina, settling near the Muscogee (Creek). Some also migrated to the Florida panhandle. After suffering heavy losses from epidemic diseases and warfare in the 18th century, the remaining Yuchi bands were forcibly relocated to Indian Territory in the 1830s, alongside their allies, the Muscogee. During the 18th century, the Yuchi established an alliance with white settlers in the Southern Colonies, trading deerskins and Indian slaves with them. The Yuchi population plummeted during the 18th century due to Eurasian infectious diseases, to which they had no immunity, and to war with the Cherokee, who were moving into their territory. After the American Revolution, Yuchi people maintained close relations with the Creek Confederacy, into which federally recognized members were later absorbed. In the late 18th century, some Yuchi migrated south to Florida along with the Muscogee, where they became part of the newly formed Seminole people. Prior to 1818 some Yuchi moved to near Lake Miccosukee in northern Florida, settling near Muscogee refugees. Andrew Jackson‘s invasion of the area during the First Seminole War resulted in the Yuchi moving to eastern Florida. They fought alongside the Seminole during the Second Seminole War under their chief Uchee Billy. From 1890 to 1895, the Dawes Commission considered the Yuchi in Indian Territory to be an autonomous tribe. It registered tribal members preparatory to allotment of communal tribal lands in Indian Territory to individual households of members. Some 1,200 tribal members were registered in those years. The Dawes Commission later decided to legally classify the Yuchi as part of the Muscogee Nation.” ref
“A series of wars with the United States resulted in the death or removal to what is now Oklahoma of most of the above peoples and the merging of the remainder by ethnogenesis into the current Seminole and Miccosukee tribes of Florida.” ref
The only federally recognized tribes in Florida are:
- Miccosukee – “One of the two tribes to emerge by ethnogenesis from the migrations into Florida and wars with the United States. They were part of the Seminole nation until the mid-20th century, when they organized as an independent tribe, receiving federal recognition in 1962.” ref
- Seminole – “One of the two tribes to emerge by ethnogenesis from the migrations into Florida and wars with the United States.” ref
“The first European known to have explored the coasts of Florida was the Spanish explorer and governor of Puerto Rico, Juan Ponce de León, who likely ventured in 1513 as far north as the vicinity of the future St. Augustine, naming the peninsula he believed to be an island “La Florida” and claiming it for the Spanish crown. It is likely that slaves were included in the voyage, but they were not recorded.” ref
“The slave trade — Florida Indians were taken as slaves as early as 1520 — also helped kill off the aboriginal population.” ref
Indigenous Slavery among Native Americans in the United States
“Slavery among Native Americans in the United States includes slavery by and enslavement of Native Americans roughly within what is currently the United States of America. Tribal territories and the slave trade ranged over present-day borders. Some Native American tribes held war captives as slaves prior to and during European colonization. Some Native Americans were captured and sold by others into slavery to Europeans, while others were captured and sold by Europeans themselves.” ref
“In the late 18th and 19th centuries, a small number of tribes, such as the five so-called “civilized tribes” (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee and Seminole) began increasing their holding of African-American slaves. European contact greatly influenced slavery as it existed among pre-contact Native Americans, particularly in scale. As they raided other tribes to capture slaves for sales to Europeans, they fell into destructive wars among themselves, and against Europeans. Many Native-American tribes practiced some form of slavery before the European introduction of African slavery into North America.” ref
“The Haida and Tlingit peoples who lived along the southeastern Alaskan coast were traditionally known as fierce warriors and slave-traders, raiding as far as California. Slavery was hereditary after slaves were taken as prisoners of war. Among some Pacific Northwest tribes, about a quarter of the population were slaves. Other slave-owning tribes of North America were, for example, Comanche of Texas, Creek of Georgia, the fishing societies, such as the Yurok, that lived along the coast from what is now Alaska to California; the Pawnee, and Klamath.” ref
“Some tribes held people as captive slaves late in the 19th century. For instance, “Ute Woman”, was a Ute captured by the Arapaho and later sold to a Cheyenne. She was kept by the Cheyenne to be used as a prostitute to serve American soldiers at Cantonment in the Indian Territory. She lived in slavery until about 1880. She died of a hemorrhage resulting from “excessive sexual intercourse”. There were differences between slavery as practiced in the pre-colonial era among Native Americans and slavery as practiced by Europeans after colonization.” ref
“Whereas many Europeans eventually came to look upon slaves of African descent as being racially inferior, Native Americans took slaves from other Native American groups, and therefore viewed them as ethnically inferior. In some cases, Native American slaves were allowed to live on the fringes of Native American society until they were slowly integrated into the tribe. The word “slave” may not accurately apply to such captive people. When the Europeans made contact with the Native Americans, they began to participate in the slave trade.” ref
“Native Americans, in their initial encounters with the Europeans, attempted to use their captives from enemy tribes as a “method of playing one tribe against another” in an unsuccessful game of divide and conquer. Native American groups often enslaved war captives, whom they primarily used for small-scale labor. Others, however, would stake themselves in gambling situations when they had nothing else, which would put them into servitude for a short time, or in some cases for life; captives were also sometimes tortured as part of religious rites, which sometimes involved ritual cannibalism.” ref
“During times of famine, some Native Americans would also temporarily sell their children to obtain food. The ways in which captives were treated differed widely among Native American groups. Captives could be enslaved for life, killed, or adopted. In some cases, captives were only adopted after a period of slavery. For example, the Iroquoian peoples (not just the Iroquois tribes) often adopted captives, but for religious reasons there was a process, procedures, and many seasons when such adoptions were delayed until the proper spiritual times.” ref
“In many cases, new tribes adopted captives to replace warriors killed during a raid. Warrior captives were sometimes made to undergo ritual mutilation or torture that could end in death, as part of a spiritual grief ritual for relatives slain in battle. Adoptees were expected to fill the economic, military, and familial roles of the departed loved ones, to fit into the societal shoes of the dead relative, and maintain the spirit power of the tribe. Captured individuals were sometimes allowed to assimilate into the tribe, and would later produce a family within the tribe.” ref
“The Creek, who engaged in this practice and had a matrilineal system, treated children born of slaves and Creek women as full members of their mothers’ clans and of the tribe, as property and hereditary leadership passed through the maternal line. In the cultural practices of the Iroquoian peoples, also rooted in a matrilineal system with men and women having equal value, any child would have the status determined by the woman’s clan. More typically, tribes took women and children captives for adoption, as they tended to adapt more easily into new ways.” ref
“Several tribes held captives as hostages for payment. Various tribes also practiced debt slavery or imposed slavery on tribal members who had committed crimes; full tribal status would be restored as the enslaved worked off their obligations to the tribal society. Male warriors in some Native American groups also had a strong interest in obtaining prisoners, as this was seen as proof of one’s courage. Other slave-owning tribes of North America included the Comanche of Texas; the Creek of Georgia; the fishing societies, such as the Yurok, who lived in Northern California; the Pawnee; and the Klamath. When St. Augustine, Florida, was founded in 1565, the site already had enslaved Native Americans, whose ancestors had migrated from Cuba.” ref
“The Haida and Tlingit, who lived along Alaska’s southeast coast, were traditionally known as fierce warriors and slave-traders, raiding as far as California. In their society, slavery was hereditary after slaves were taken as prisoners of war—children of slaves were fated to be slaves themselves. Among a few Pacific Northwest tribes, as many as one-fourth of the population were slaves. They were typically captured by raids on enemy tribes, or purchased on inter-tribal slave markets. Slaves would be bought, sold, or given away at potlatches like any other property. Some were killed ceremonially because of a death or important event; at a potlatch they might be killed to demonstrate their owner’s wealth. Slaves were also sometimes freed to show favor to them or to honor a relative.” ref
“When Europeans arrived as colonists in North America, Native Americans changed their practice of slavery dramatically. Native Americans began selling war captives to Europeans rather than integrating them into their own societies as some had done before. Native Americans were enslaved by the Spanish in Florida and the Southwest under various legal tools. One tool was the encomienda system; new encomiendas were outlawed in the New Laws of 1542, but old ones continued, and the 1542 restriction was revoked in 1545.” ref
“As the demand for labor in the West Indies grew with the cultivation of sugarcane, Europeans exported enslaved Native Americans to the “sugar islands”. Historian Alan Gallay estimates that between 1670 and 1715, 24,000 to 51,000 captive Native Americans were exported through Carolina ports, of which more than half, 15,000-30,000, were brought from then-Spanish Florida. These numbers were more than the number of Africans imported to the Carolinas during the same period.” ref
“Gallay also says that “the trade in Indian slaves was at the center of the English empire’s development in the American South. The trade in Indian slaves was the most important factor affecting the South in the period 1670 to 1715”; intertribal wars to capture slaves destabilized English colonies, Florida and Louisiana. Additional enslaved Native Americans were exported from South Carolina to Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, Rhode Island and Massachusetts.” ref
“Starting in 1698, Parliament allowed competition among importers of enslaved Africans, raising purchase prices for slaves in Africa, so they cost more than enslaved Native Americans. British settlers, especially those in the Southern Colonies, purchased or captured Native Americans to use as forced labor in cultivating tobacco, rice, and indigo. Accurate records of the numbers enslaved do not exist. Slavery in Colonial America became a caste of people who were foreign to English colonists: Native Americans and Africans, who were predominantly non-Christian.” ref
“The Virginia General Assembly defined some terms of slavery in 1705: All servants imported and brought into the Country … who were not Christians in their native Country … shall be accounted and be slaves. All Negro, mulatto and Indian slaves within this dominion … shall be held to be real estate. If any slave resists his master … correcting such slave, and shall happen to be killed in such correction … the master shall be free of all punishment … as if such accident never happened.” ref
“The slave trade of Native Americans lasted until around 1730. It gave rise to a series of devastating wars among the tribes, including the Yamasee War. The Indian Wars of the early 18th century, combined with the increasing importation of African slaves, effectively ended the Native American slave trade by 1750. Colonists found that Native American slaves could easily escape, as they knew the country. The wars cost the lives of numerous colonial slave traders and disrupted their early societies. The remaining Native American groups banded together to face the Europeans from a position of strength.” ref
“Many surviving Native American peoples of the southeast strengthened their loose coalitions of language groups and joined confederacies such as the Choctaw, the Creek, and the Catawba for protection. Native American women were at risk for rape whether they were enslaved or not; during the early colonial years, settlers were disproportionately male. They turned to Native women for sexual relationships. Both Native American and African enslaved women suffered rape and sexual harassment by male slaveholders and other white men.” ref
“The exact number of Native Americans who were enslaved is unknown because vital statistics and census reports were at best infrequent. Andrés Reséndez estimates that between 147,000 and 340,000 Native Americans were enslaved in North America, excluding Mexico. Linford Fisher’s estimates 2.5 million to 5.5 million Natives enslaved in the entire Americas. Even though records became more reliable in the later colonial period, Native American slaves received little to no mention, or they were classed with African slaves with no distinction. For example, in the case of “Sarah Chauqum of Rhode Island”, her master listed her as mulatto in the bill of sale to Edward Robinson, but she won her freedom by asserting her Narragansett identity.” ref
“Little is known about Native Americans that were forced into labor. Two myths have complicated the history of Native American slavery: that Native Americans were undesirable as servants, and that Native Americans were exterminated or pushed out after King Philip’s War. The precise legal status for some Native Americans is at times difficult to establish, as involuntary servitude and slavery were poorly defined in 17th-century British North America. Some masters asserted ownership over the children of Native American servants, seeking to turn them into slaves.” ref
“The historical uniqueness of slavery in America is that European settlers drew a rigid line between insiders, “people like themselves who could never be enslaved”, and nonwhite outsiders, “mostly Africans and Native Americans who could be enslaved”. A unique feature between natives and colonists was that colonists gradually asserted sovereignty over the native inhabitants during the 17th century, ironically transforming them into subjects with collective rights and privileges that Africans could not enjoy. The West Indies developed as plantation societies prior to the Chesapeake Bay region and had a demand for labor.” ref
“In the Spanish colonies, the church assigned Spanish surnames to Native Americans and recorded them as servants rather than slaves. Many members of Native American tribes in the Western United States were taken for life as slaves. In some cases, courts served as conduits for enslavement of Indians, as evidenced by the enslavement of the Hopi man Juan Suñi in 1659 by a court in Santa Fe for theft of food and trinkets from the governor’s mansion. In the East, Native Americans were recorded as slaves.” ref
“Slaves in Indian Territory across the United States were used for many purposes, from work in the plantations of the East, to guides across the wilderness, to work in deserts of the West, or as soldiers in wars. Native American slaves suffered from European diseases and inhumane treatment, and many died while in captivity. European colonists caused a change in Native American slavery, as they created a new demand market for captives of raids. Especially in the southern colonies, initially developed for resource exploitation rather than settlement, colonists purchased or captured Native Americans to be used as forced labor in cultivating tobacco, and, by the 18th century, rice, and indigo.” ref
“To acquire trade goods, Native Americans began selling war captives to whites rather than integrating them into their own societies. Traded goods, such as axes, bronze kettles, Caribbean rum, European jewelry, needles, and scissors, varied among the tribes, but the most prized were rifles. English colonists aped the rationales of their Spanish and Portuguese counterparts: they saw the enslavement of Africans and Native Americans as a moral, legal, and socially acceptable institution; a rationale for enslavement was as part of a “just war“, where the taking of captives and using them as slave labor was viewed as an alternative to a death sentence.” ref
“The escape of Native American slaves was frequent, because they had a better understanding of the land, which African slaves did not. Consequently, the Natives who were captured and sold into slavery were often sent to the West Indies, or far away from their home. The first African slave on record was located in Jamestown. Before the 1630s, indentured servitude was the dominant form of bondage in the colonies, but by 1636 only Caucasians could lawfully receive contracts as indentured servants. The oldest known record of a permanent Native American slave was a native man from Massachusetts in 1636. By 1661 slavery had become legal in all of the existing colonies.” ref
“Virginia would later declare that “Indians, Mulattos, and Negros to be real estate”, and in 1682, New York forbade African or Native American slaves from leaving their master’s home or plantation without permission. Europeans also viewed the enslavement of Native Americans differently than the enslavement of Africans in some cases; a belief that Africans were “brutish people” was dominant. While both Native Americans and Africans were considered savages, Native Americans were romanticized as noble people that could be elevated into Christian civilization. Carolina, which originally included today’s North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, was unique among the North American English colonies because the colonists thought of slavery as essential to their success.” ref
“In 1680, proprietors ordered the Carolina government to ensure that enslaved Native Americans had equal justice and to treat them better than African slaves; these regulations were widely publicized, so no one could claim ignorance of them. The change in policy in Carolina was rooted in fear that escaped slaves would inform their tribes, resulting in even more devastating attacks on plantations. The new policy proved almost impossible to enforce, as both colonists and local officials viewed Native Americans and Africans as the same, and the exploitation of both as the easiest way to wealth, though the proprietors continued to attempt to enforce the changes for profit reasons. In the other colonies, slavery developed into a predominant form of labor over time.” ref
“It is estimated that Carolina traders operating out of Charles Towne exported an estimated 30,000 to 51,000 Native American captives between 1670 and 1715 in a profitable slave trade with the Caribbean, Spanish Hispaniola, and Northern colonies. It was more profitable to have Native American slaves because African slaves had to be shipped and purchased, while native slaves could be captured and immediately taken to plantations; whites in the Northern colonies sometimes preferred Native American slaves, especially Native women and children, to Africans because Native American women were agriculturalist and children could be trained more easily.” ref
“However, Carolinians had more of a preference for African slaves but also capitalized on the Indian slave trade combining both. In December 1675, Carolina’s grand council created a written justification of the enslavement and sale of Native Americans, claiming that those who were enemies of tribes the English colonists had befriended were targets, stating those enslaved were not “innocent Indians”. The council also claimed it was within the wishes of their “Indian allies” to take their prisoners and that the prisoners were willing to work in the country or be transported elsewhere. The council used this to please the proprietors, and to fulfill the practice of enslaving no one against their wishes or being transported without their own consent out of Carolina, though this is what the colonists did.” ref
“In John Norris’ “Profitable Advice for Rich and Poor” (1712), he recommends buying 18 native women, 15 African men, and 3 African women. Slave traders preferred captive Native Americans who were under 18 years old, as they were believed to be more easily trained to new work. In the Illinois Country, French colonists baptized the Native American slaves whom they bought for labor. They believed it essential to convert Native Americans to Catholicism. Church baptismal records have thousands of entries for Indian slaves. In the eastern colonies it became common practice to enslave Native American women and African men with a parallel growth of enslavement for both Africans and Native Americans. This practice also lead to large number of unions between Africans and Native Americans.” ref
“This practice of combining African slave men and Native American women was especially common in South Carolina. Native American women were cheaper to buy than Native American men or Africans. Moreover, it was more efficient to have native women because they were skilled laborers, the primary agriculturalists in their communities. During this era it was not uncommon for reward notices in colonial newspapers to mention runaway slaves speaking of Africans, Native Americans, and those of a partial mix between them. Many early laborers, including Africans, entered the colonies as indentured servants and could be free after paying off their passage. Slavery was associated with people who were non-Christian and non-European. In a Virginia General Assembly declaration of 1705, some terms were defined.” ref
“And also be in [sic.] enacted, by the authority aforesaid, and it is hereby enacted, That all servants imported and brought into the Country … who were not christians in their native country, (except … Turks and Moors in amity with her majesty, and others that can make due proof of their being free in England, or any other christian country, before they were shipped …) shall be accounted and be slaves, and such be here bought and sold notwithstanding a conversion to christianity afterward. [Section IV.] And if any slave resists his master, or owner, or other person, by his or her order, correcting such slave, and shall happen to be killed in such correction, it shall not be accounted felony; but the master, owner, and every such other person so giving correction, shall be free and acquit of all punishment and accusation for the same, as if such incident had never happened … [Section XXXIV].” ref
“In the mid-18th century, South Carolina colonial governor James Glen began to promote an official policy that aimed to create in Native Americans an “aversion” to African Americans in an attempt to thwart possible alliances between them. In 1758, James Glen wrote: “It has always been the policy of this government to create an aversion in them Indians to Negroes.” The dominance of the Native American slave trade lasted until around 1730, when it led to a series of devastating wars among the tribes. The slave trade created tensions that were not present among different tribes and even large scale abandonment of original homelands to escape the wars and slave trade. The majority of the Indian wars occurred in the south.” ref
“The Westos originally lived near Lake Erie in the 1640s but relocated to escape the Iroquois mourning wars designed to repopulate the Iroquois Confederacy due to large number of deaths due to wars and disease. The Westos eventually moved to Virginia and then South Carolina to take advantage of trading routes. The Westos strongly contributed to the rising involvement of southeastern Native American communities in the Indian slave trade especially with Westos expansion. The increased rise of the gun-slave trade forced the other tribes to participate or their refusal to engage in enslaving meant they would become targets of slavers. Before 1700, the Westos in Carolina dominated much of the Native American slave trade, enslaving natives of southern tribes indiscriminately.” ref
“The Westos gained power rapidly, but British colonists began to fear them as they were well-armed with a lot of rifle power through trading; from 1680 to 1682, the colonists joined forces with the Savannah, who resented Westo control of the slave trade, and wiped them out- killing most of the men and selling most of the women and children that could be captured. As a result, the Westo tribal group was completely eliminated culturally; its survivors were scattered or else sold into slavery in Antigua. Those Native Americans nearer to European colonial settlements raided tribes farther into the interior in the quest for slaves to be sold, especially to British colonists in Carolina. In response, the southeastern tribes intensified their warring and hunting, which increasingly challenged their traditional reasons for hunting or warring. The traditional reasoning for war was revenge not for profit.” ref
“The Chickasaw war parties had pushed the Houmas tribe further south where the tribe struggled to find stability. In 1704, the Chickasaw alliance with the French had weakened, and British colonists used the opportunity to make an alliance with the Chickasaw, bringing them 12 Taensa slaves. In Mississippi and Tennessee the Chickasaw played both the French and British against each other, and preyed on the Choctaw, who were traditional allies of the French, as well as the Arkansas, the Tunica, and the Taensa, establishing slave depots throughout their territories. In 1705, the Chickasaw activated their war parties again, targeting the unexpected Choctaw since a friendship had been established between the two tribes; several Choctaw families were taken into captivity, rekindling a war between the two tribes and ending their alliance.” ref
“A single Chickasaw raid in 1706 on the Choctaw yielded 300 Native American captives, which were promptly sold to English colonists in Charles Towne. The warring between them continued through the early 18th century with the worse incident for the Choctaw occurring in 1711 as a group of British colonist also attacked the Choctaw simultaneously, fearing them more because they were allies to the French. It is estimated that this conflict, mixed with enslavement and epidemics devastated the Chickasaw. It is estimated that in 1685 their population was 7,000 plus but by 1715 it was as low as 4,000. As the southern tribes continued their involvement in slave trade they became more involved economically and began to amass significant debts.” ref
“The Yamasee amassed a great debt in 1711 for rum, but the General Assembly had voted to forgive their debts; the tribe replied by stating they were preparing for war to pay their debts. The Indian slave trade began to negatively affect the social organization in many of the southern tribes particularly in gender roles in their communities. As male warriors began to interact more with colonial men and societies which were heavily patriarchal they began to increasingly sought out control over captives to trade with European men.” ref
“Among the Cherokee the undermining of women’s power began to create tensions among their communities e.g. warriors started to undermine women’s power to determine when to wage war. In the Cherokee and other tribes’ societies, “war women” and “beloved women” were those who had proven themselves in battle, and were respected with vested privileges to decide what to do with captives. The incidents led warring women to dress as traders in effort to get captives before warriors. A similar pattern of friendly and then hostile relations among the English and Native Americans followed in the southeastern colonies.” ref
“For example, the Creek, a loose confederacy of many different groups who had banded together to defend themselves against slave-raiding, allying with the English and moving on the Apalachee in Spanish Florida, destroying them as a group of people in the quest for slaves. These raids also destroyed several other Florida tribes, including the Timucua. In 1685, the Yamasee were persuaded by Scottish slave traders to attack the Timucuans, the attack was devastating. Most of the colonial-era Native Americans of Florida were killed, enslaved, or scattered. It is estimated that these raids on Florida yielded 4,000 Native American slaves between 1700 and 1705. A few years later, the Shawnee raided the Cherokee in similar fashion.” ref
“In North Carolina, the Tuscarora, fearing among other things that encroaching English colonists planned to enslave them as well as take their land, attacked them in a war that lasted from 1711 to 1713. In this war, Carolina settlers, aided by the Yamasee, completely vanquished the Tuscarora, taking thousands of captives as slaves. Within a few years, a similar fate befell the Yuchis and the Yamasee, who had fallen out of favor with the British. The French armed the Natchez tribe, who lived on the banks of the Mississippi, and the Illinois against the Chickasaw. By 1729, the Natchez, along with a number of enslaved and runaway Africans who lived among them, rose up against the French. An army composed of French soldiers, Choctaw warriors, and enslaved Africans defeated them.” ref
“Trade behavior of several tribes also began to change returning to more traditional ways of adopting war captives instead of immediately selling them to white slave traders or holding them for three days before deciding to sell them or not. This was due to the heavy losses many of the tribes were obtaining in the numerous wars that continued throughout the 18th century. The lethal combination of slavery, disease, and warfare dramatically decreased the free southern Native American populations; it is estimated that the southern tribes numbered around 199,400 in 1685 but decreased to 90,100 in 1715. The Indian wars of the early 18th century, combined with the growing availability of African slaves, essentially ended the Native American slave trade by 1750. Numerous colonial slave traders had been killed in the fighting, and the remaining Native American groups banded together, more determined to face the Europeans from a position of strength rather than be enslaved.” ref
“During this time, records also show that many Native American women bought African men, but, unknown to the European sellers, the women freed and married the men into their tribe. Though the Indian slave trade ended the practice of enslaving Native Americans continued, records from June 28, 1771 show Native American children were kept as slaves in Long Island, New York. Native Americans had also married while enslaved creating families both native and some of partial African descent. Occasional mentioning of Native American slaves running away, being bought, or sold along with Africans in newspapers is found throughout the later colonial period. Many of the Native American remnant tribes joined confederacies such as the Choctaw, the Creek, and the Catawba for protection, making them less easy victims of European slavers. There are also many accounts of former slaves mentioning having a parent or grandparent who was Native American or of partial descent.” ref
“Records and slave narratives obtained by the WPA (Works Progress Administration) clearly indicate that the enslavement of Native Americans continued in the 1800s, mostly through kidnappings. One example is a documented WPA interview from a former slave, Dennis Grant, whose mother was full-blooded Native American. She was kidnapped as a child near Beaumont, Texas, in the 1850s, and made a slave, later becoming the forced wife of another enslaved person. The abductions showed that even in the 1800s little distinction was still made between African Americans and Native Americans. Both Native American and African-American enslaved people were at risk of sexual abuse by slaveholders and other white men of power. The pressures of slavery also gave way to the creation of colonies of runaway slaves and Native Americans living in Florida, called Maroons.” ref
Other Native Americans’ responses to African slavery
“Tensions varied between African Americans and Native Americans in the South, as each nation dealt with the ideology behind the enslavement of Africans differently. In the late 1700s and 1800s, some Native American nations gave sanctuary to runaway slaves while others were more likely to capture them, and return them to their white masters or even re-enslave them. Still others incorporated runaway slaves into their societies, sometimes resulting in intermarriage between the Africans and Native Americans, which was commonplace among tribes like the Creek and Seminole. Some Native Americans may have had a strong dislike of slavery, because they too were seen as a people of a subordinate race than whites of European descent, they lacked the political power to influence the racialistic culture that pervaded the Non-Indian South.” ref
“It is unclear if some Native American slaveholders sympathized with African-American slaves along racial lines. Missionary work was an efficient method the United States used to persuade Native Americans to accept European methods of living. Missionaries vociferously denounced Indian removal as cruel, oppressive, and feared such actions would push Native Americans away from converting. These same missionaries reported that Native American slave owners were brutal masters, even though accounts of Indian freedmen gave different accounts of being treated relatively well without tyrannical treatment. In 1718, the Lenape threatened war if Penn’s Quakers allowed slavery in Pennsylvania. To preserve the peace, the Quakers began restricting slavery and eventually banned it.” ref
Slavery in the Indian Territory
“In the 1830s, all of the Five Civilized Tribes were relocated, many of them forcibly to the Indian Territory (later, the state of Oklahoma). The incident is known as the Trail of Tears, and the institution of owning enslaved Africans came with them. Of the estimated 4,500 to 5,000 blacks who formed the slave class in the Indian Territory by 1839, the great majority were in the possession of the mixed bloods. The Trail of Tears was the forced displacement and ethnic cleansing of about 60,000 Native Americans of the “Five Civilized Tribes“, including their black slaves, between 1830 and 1850 by the United States government.” ref
Slavery on the Trail of Tears?
“As part of Indian removal, members of the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations were forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands in the Southeastern United States to newly designated Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River after the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830. The Cherokee removal in 1838 was the last forced removal east of the Mississippi and was brought on by the discovery of gold near Dahlonega, Georgia, in 1828, resulting in the Georgia Gold Rush. The relocated peoples suffered from exposure, disease, and starvation while en route to their newly designated Indian reserve. Thousands died from disease before reaching their destinations or shortly after. A variety of scholars have classified the Trail of Tears as an example of the genocide of Native Americans; others categorize it as ethnic cleansing.” ref
“In 1830, a group of Indian nations collectively referred to as the “Five Civilized Tribes” (the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee, and Seminole nations), were living autonomously in what would later be termed the American Deep South. The process of cultural transformation from their traditional way of life towards a white American way of life as proposed by George Washington and Henry Knox was gaining momentum, especially among the Cherokee and Choctaw.” ref
“American settlers had been pressuring the federal government to remove Indians from the Southeast; many settlers were encroaching on Indian lands, while others wanted more land made available to the settlers. Although the effort was vehemently opposed by some, including U.S. Congressman Davy Crockett of Tennessee, President Andrew Jackson was able to gain Congressional passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which authorized the government to extinguish any Indian title to land claims in the Southeast.” ref
“In 1831, the Choctaw became the first Nation to be removed, and their removal served as the model for all future relocations. After two wars, many Seminoles were removed in 1832. The first group of Chickasaws moved in 1837 and was led by John M. Millard. The Chickasaws gathered at Memphis on July 4, 1837, with all of their assets—belongings, livestock, and slaves. Once across the Mississippi River, they followed routes previously established by the Choctaws and the Creeks. Once in Indian Territory, the Chickasaws merged with the Choctaw nation.” ref
“The Creek removal followed in 1834, the Chickasaw in 1837, and lastly the Cherokee in 1838. Some managed to evade the removals, however, and remained in their ancestral homelands; some Choctaw still reside in Mississippi, Creek in Alabama and Florida, Cherokee in North Carolina, and Seminole in Florida. A small group of Seminole, fewer than 500, evaded forced removal; the modern Seminole Nation of Florida is descended from these individuals. A number of non-Indians who lived with the nations, including over 4,000 slaves and others of African descent such as spouses or Freedmen, also accompanied the Indians on the trek westward.” ref
“By 1837, 46,000 Indians from the southeastern states had been removed from their homelands, thereby opening 25 million acres (100,000 km2) for white settlement. When the “Five Tribes” arrived in Indian Territory, “they followed their physical appropriation of Plains Indians’ land with an erasure of their predecessor’s history”, and “perpetuated the idea that they had found an undeveloped ‘wilderness” when they arrived” in an attempt to appeal to white American values by participating in the settler colonial process themselves. Other Indian nations, such as the Quapaws and Osages had moved to Indian Territory before the “Five Tribes” and saw them as intruders.” ref
“Prior to Jackson’s presidency, removal policy was already in place and justified by the myth of the “Vanishing Indian“. Historian Jeffrey Ostler explains that “Scholars have exposed how the discourse of the vanishing Indian was an ideology that made declining Indigenous American populations seem to be an inevitable consequence of natural processes and so allowed Americans to evade moral responsibility for their destructive choices”. Despite the common association of Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears, ideas for Removal began prior to Jackson’s presidency.” ref
“Dina Gilio-Whitaker draws on research by Choctaw and Chippewa historian Clara Sue Kidwell to show the relationship between the Trail of Tears and a negative impact on the environment. In tracking the environmental changes of the southeastern tribes who relocated to new lands across the Trail of Tears, Kidwell finds that “prior to removal the tribes had already begun adapting to a cash-based, private property economic system with their adoption of many European customs (including the practice of slave owning), after their move west they had become more deeply entrenched into the American economic system with the discovery of coal deposits and the western expansion of the railroads on and through their lands. So while they adapted to their new environments, their relationship to land would change to fit the needs of an imposed capitalist system”. Trail of Tears statistics show Choctaw Nation had 500 Black slaves, Creek (Muscogee) had 900 Black slaves, Chickasaw had 1,156 Black slaves, and Seminole had fugitive slaves.” ref
How Native American Slaveholders Complicate the Trail of Tears Narrative
“When you think of the Trail of Tears, you likely imagine a long procession of suffering Cherokee Indians forced westward by a villainous Andrew Jackson. Perhaps you envision unscrupulous white slaveholders, whose interest in growing a plantation economy underlay the decision to expel the Cherokee, flooding in to take their place east of the Mississippi River.” ref
“What you probably don’t picture are Cherokee slaveholders, foremost among them Cherokee chief John Ross. What you probably don’t picture are the numerous African-American slaves, Cherokee-owned, who made the brutal march themselves, or else were shipped en masse to what is now Oklahoma aboard cramped boats by their wealthy Indian masters. And what you may not know is that the federal policy of Indian removal, which ranged far beyond the Trail of Tears and the Cherokee, was not simply the vindictive scheme of Andrew Jackson, but rather a popularly endorsed, congressionally sanctioned campaign spanning the administrations of nine separate presidents.” ref
“These uncomfortable complications in the narrative were brought to the forefront at a recent event held at the National Museum of the American Indian. Titled “Finding Common Ground,” the symposium offered a deep dive into intersectional African-American and Native American history.” ref
“For museum curator Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche), who has overseen the design and opening of the widely lauded “Americans” exhibition now on view on the museum’s third floor, it is imperative to provide the museum-going public with an unflinching history, even when doing so is painful.” ref
“I used to like history,” Smith told the crowd ruefully. “And sometimes, I still do. But not most of the time. Most of the time, history and I are frenemies at best.” In the case of the Trail of Tears and the enslavement of blacks by prominent members of all five so-called “Civilized Tribes” (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole), Smith went one step further, likening the ugly truth of history to a “mangy, snarling dog standing between you and a crowd-pleasing narrative.” ref
“Obviously,” Smith said, “the story should be, needs to be, that the enslaved black people and soon-to-be-exiled red people would join forces and defeat their oppressor.” But such was not the case—far from it. “The Five Civilized Tribes were deeply committed to slavery, established their own racialized black codes, immediately reestablished slavery when they arrived in Indian territory, rebuilt their nations with slave labor, crushed slave rebellions, and enthusiastically sided with the Confederacy in the Civil War.” ref
“In other words, the truth is about as far a cry from a “crowd-pleasing narrative” as you could possibly get. “Do you want to hear that?” Smith asked the audience. “I don’t think so. Nobody does.” And yet, Smith is firm in his belief that it is a museum’s duty to embrace and elucidate ambiguity, not sweep it under the rug in the pursuit of some cleaner fiction. Tiya Miles, an African-American historian at the University of Michigan, agrees. At the “Finding Common Ground” event, she meticulously laid out primary-source evidence to paint a picture of Indian/African-American relations in the years leading up to the Civil War.” ref
“Native Americans, she said, had themselves been enslaved, even before African-Americans, and the two groups “were enslaved for approximately 150 years in tandem.” It wasn’t until the mid 18th-century that the bondage of Native Americans began to wane as Africans were imported in greater and greater numbers. Increasingly, where white colonists viewed Africans as little more than mindless beasts of burden, they saw Native Americans as something more: “noble savages,” unrefined but courageous and fierce.” ref
“Perversely, Native American ownership of black slaves came about as a way for Native Americans to illustrate their societal sophistication to white settlers. “They were working hard to comply with government dictates that told native people that in order to be protected and secure in their land base, they had to prove their level of ‘civilization,’” Miles explained.
“How would slave ownership prove civilization? The answer, Miles contends, is that in capitalism-crazed America, slaves became tokens of economic success. The more slaves you owned, the more serious a businessperson you were, and the more serious a businessperson you were, the fitter you were to join the ranks of “civilized society.” It’s worth remembering, as Paul Chaat Smith says, that while most Native Americans did not own slaves, neither did most Mississippi whites. Slave ownership was a serious status symbol.” ref
“Smith and Miles agree that much of early American history is explained poorly by modern morality but effectively by simple economics and power dynamics. “The Cherokee owned slaves for the same reasons their white neighbors did. They knew exactly what they were doing. In truth,” Smith said, the Cherokee and other “Civilized Tribes were not that complicated. They were willful and determined oppressors of blacks they owned, enthusiastic participants in a global economy driven by cotton, and believers in the idea that they were equal to whites and superior to blacks.” ref
“None of this lessens the very real hardship endured by Cherokees and other Native Americans compelled to abandon their homelands as a result of the Indian Removal Act. Signed into law in the spring of 1830, the bill had been rigorously debated in the Senate (where it was endorsed with a 28-19 vote) that April and in the House of Representatives (where it prevailed 102-97) that May. Despite a sustained, courageous campaign on the part of John Ross to preserve his people’s property rights, including multiple White House visits with Jackson, in the end the influx of white settlers and economic incentives made the bill’s momentum insuperable. All told, the process of removal claimed more than 11,000 Indian lives—2,000-4,000 of them Cherokee.” ref
“What the slaveholding of Ross and other Civilized Nations leaders does mean, however, is that our assumptions regarding clearly differentiated heroes and villains are worth pushing back on. “I don’t know why our brains make it so hard to compute that Jackson had a terrible Indian policy and radically expanded American democracy,” Smith said, “or that John Ross was a skillful leader for the Cherokee nation who fought the criminal policy of removal with every ounce of strength, but also a man who deeply believed in and practiced the enslavement of black people.” ref
Seminoles as slavers?
“African-American slaves lived with Seminole Indians in communities or family groups both within territorial boundaries and outside of them, in a relationship characterized as benevolent servitude. Under the Seminoles, blacks served in varying capacities – as advisors, interpreters, warriors, hunters, and field hands. Many intermarried with the Indians. Most blacks living among the Seminoles considered it an improvement over the American chattel system of slavery.” ref
“Seminoles were more patrons than masters to their slaves. In the Indian society, blacks were tenant farmers, living in their own villages near Indian villages and paying only a harvest tribute from their yields to the chief. They owned their own horses, cattle, and hogs. Out of some 400 blacks reported living with the Seminoles in the 1820s, only about 80 were identified as fugitive slaves. The trader Horatio Dexter noted that they “could speak English as well as Indian, and feel satisfied with their situation.” ref
“They have the easy unconstrained manner of the Indian but more vivacity, and from their understanding of both languages possess considerable influence with their masters.” Seminole society had blacks of every status – free born, slave, and fugitive. Some were more equal in this society than others. Bilingual blacks participated in council meetings and interpreted for Indian leaders at treaty negotiations.” ref
“Groups of blacks and Indians not only lived together in and apart from Seminole society, but left the country together. Many runaways slaves went to the Bahamas and Cuba. Seminoles living in south Florida traded with Cuban fishermen, relaying slaves to Havana, sometimes for freedom, sometimes for sale.” ref
“The spread of American settlement into Indian territory began a national policy of Indian displacement. In the campaign to remove Indians from Florida, however, land was not the overriding concern. Thousands of acres of public land not claimed by the Seminoles could be easily acquired. A more heated debate centered initially around the ownership of black slaves by Native Americans and later around the threat that their potential alliance posed to national security.” ref
“Disputes between whites and Indians over runaway slaves were ongoing. They were complicated by the fact that many federal Indian agents engaged in the slave trade themselves and had a personal interest in the issue. The Indians valued blacks not only as slaves, but as important and much needed cultural go-betweens since they were familiar with the language and customs of the whites.” ref
“When Florida became United States territory, the government expected the Seminoles to give up any slaves voluntarily. At the signing of the Treaty of Moultrie Creek, the Indians were to list all their towns and inhabitants and specify how many blacks were included. In addition to reservation land, the Seminoles were to receive $5,000 per year for 20 years, were bound to prevent runaway slaves from passing through Indian territory and turn them over to the federal agent.” ref
“Planters migrating into the peninsula from other parts of the country brought slaves with them to perform the heavy labor needed to establish cotton, sugar, or tobacco plantations and farms. Many planters moved into Florida in the 1820s and 30s from the Tidewater and Piedmont regions of the Carolinas. In 1828 the territorial legislature requested that public land be reduced in price to encourage more settlement in the interests of national security. The 1830 census listed 34,730 Floridians, 15,501 of whom were slaves and 844 “free colored.” ref
“White slave interests were supported by the government. The acting governor of Florida in 1827 asked the Legislative Council to strengthen the militia to prepare for hostilities from both the Indians and blacks. He wanted to remove the Indians from the territory altogether, without moving their slaves. An 1826 Florida law to regulate Indian trade called for the death penalty for anyone stealing slaves or hiring someone else to do so. Another law later prohibited “Indian Negroes” from leaving Indian territory.” ref
“When the Seminole leaders met with government, officials at Payne’s Landing in Alachua to negotiate the move to the western territory, the Seminoles chose Abraham, “a faithful domestic of Micanope, the Head Chief.” In addition, the interpreter of the agent, Cudjo, was present. One prominent politician and historian, John Lee Williams, stated that Abraham had “as much influence in the nation as any other man.” Abraham accompanied seven Seminole leaders to inspect the proposed new Seminole land in Oklahoma in 1832. Although three of the leaders were said to have signed the agreement, Chief Micanope declined the offer on behalf of the Seminole nation.” ref
“The majority of the Indians opposed emigration on any terms, even though some leaders felt that resistance would be futile in the face of U.S. power. Osceola emerged as leader of the resistance; he later killed one of the leaders who had counseled for removal against the wishes of his people. The Indians were advised that their situation would be much worse if they remained in Florida without federal protection, but Micanope held firm that the Moultrie Creek Treaty, which had a term of 20 years, allowed them to live in Florida for nine more years. Other Indian leaders protested that the Paynes Landing Treaty had not been explained to them well and that the western land had been evaluated as no good.” ref
“Abraham, who had interpreted for the removal treaties, now counseled for resistance. At a meeting arranged in April, 1835 the Seminole Council was told that if they did not voluntarily emigrate, they would be removed by force. Advisors warned the adjutant general of the army that the Florida frontier might be destroyed “by a combination of the Indians, Indian Negroes, and the Negroes on the plantations.” ref
“In December, 1835 reinforcements arrived and the Army prepared to move on the Seminole country to round up and emigrate the Indians by force after New Year’s Day. When the Indians attacked the plantations along the East Coast, they were aided by black allies, and were joined by approximately 300 slaves. The leaders of the raids included John Caesar and John Philip, black Seminoles who had family members on the plantations.” ref
“Blacks were sympathetic to the cause of Indian resistance throughout the war, and had a significant influence on the events leading to it. This can be seen in the fact that one of the guarantees emerging from the resolution of the war was that blacks would be permitted to go to the West with the Seminoles, rather than being sold into slavery.” ref
“Saltwater Railroad”
The route saw the highest activity between 1821 and 1861, coinciding with the period of U.S. territorial expansion in Florida.
“Sea migrations (Saltwater Underground Railroad) of Native American Seminoles (or other indigenous peoples) and Black Seminoles (or other free as well as fleeing enslaved peoples) left from Florida to the islands in the Caribbean. Following Florida’s transfer to the United States in 1821, the Southern “Underground Railroad” Route shifted toward the Caribbean. Known as the “Saltwater Railroad,” this maritime network. Some who still call themselves Black Seminoles live on Andros. Cuba, Haiti, and other Caribbean islands were additional secondary destinations for the Saltwater Railroad. Also in 1823, the Seminole Chiefs were forced into the Treaty of Moultrie, making them surrender some 4 million acres of prime land in Florida, which they had claimed to be theirs. They would be moved to a reservation in central Florida that was acknowledged to be bad land. The Seminole nation would be reduced from wealth and a stable relationship with their black friends to poverty and hunger on a government reserve. While the agreement provided for the faith of the U.S. government to protect them against raiders upon their new lands, soon it was found that this was not to be true. Other treaties and invasions by the whites, hungry for new lands in Florida, brought never-ending conflicts to the Seminoles, who often now were hungry and destitute in their new reservation. The “Black Seminoles,” or the sons and daughters of slaves who had escaped into Florida long ago, were in a similar desperate condition. Eventually, some “Black Seminoles” were captured and sent west with the Seminoles. Some escaped by joining with the Spanish gun runners and went to the Islands and also to Cuba. By the 1830s, an estimated 6,000 enslaved people had escaped to the Caribbean islands. The Bahamas attracted enslaved people because there was a community of Black Seminoles and other escapees. The Bahamas was a British-controlled island where, under local imperial practices, Black people owned land, had access to education, and were legally married.” ref, ref, ref, ref, ref
“In 1821, Andrew Jackson attacked and terrorized Blacks throughout Florida. Later that year, a group of Black Seminoles gathered at Cape Florida in Key Biscayne and made the 154-mile journey to the Bahamas, landing on Green Bays in Andros Island. When the Black Seminoles arrived, only a few people lived on Andros. Hundreds more Black Seminoles and other Black fugitives were soon traversing the Saltwater Railroad to the island, some on Bahamian sloops that picked them up in Florida, some in dugout canoes and even rafts. Others were liberated by the British Navy, which stopped and searched U.S. ships in island waters long before slavery was officially outlawed.” ref
“In 1825, British authorities proclaimed that enslaved U.S. citizens arriving in the Bahamas would be declared free. And in 1834, all slavery was outlawed in British colonies. By then, some 6,000 enslaved people had escaped to the islands and were officially declared to be a “class of devoted subjects.” By 1835, rising tensions between the Seminoles and the United States led to the Second Seminole War. The Second Seminole War lasted until 1842, was the longest, costliest, and deadliest “Indian war” in United States history. However intent the Americans were in ejecting all Native Americans from Florida, they were equally, indeed, more determined to ensure that any Blacks living with the Seminoles or on their own would be killed or returned to slavery.” ref
“Understanding their peril, more Black Seminoles and newly escaped runaways fled to Biscayne Bay or the Florida Keys to take the Saltwater Railroad to freedom. The Third Seminole War (1855-1858) resulted in the removal of all but a few hundred Seminoles from Florida. During the Civil War, formerly enslaved people continued to use the sea route to the Caribbean to escape re-enslavement or death in combat. They also intermarried with Bahamians and absorbed aspects of island culture. Only in the 1930s and following decades did scholars begin to unearth the history of Caribbean Black Seminoles.” ref
Andros Island
“The Lucayans, a subgroup of the Taíno people, were Indigenous to the Bahamas at the time of European encounter. Archeological artifacts and remains have been found in both Morgan’s Cave on North Andros and in the Stargate Blue Hole on South Andros. The population of The Bahamas is estimated to have been approximately 40,000 Lucayan-Taínos when the Spanish arrived in the region. After the United States acquired Florida from Spain in 1821, some Seminoles and black American slaves escaped and sailed to the west coast of Andros by the wrecking sloop Steerwater, where they established the settlement of Red Bays. Hundreds of Black Seminoles and slaves traveling in 1823 by canoe and 27 sloops across the Gulf Stream joined them, with more arriving in later years. While sometimes called “Black Indians”, the descendants of Black Seminoles identify as Bahamians, while acknowledging their connections to the American South.” ref
Seminole Wars and Black Seminoles leaving Florida
“The Seminole Wars (also known as the Florida Wars) were a series of three military conflicts between the United States and the Seminoles that took place in Florida between about 1816 and 1858. The Seminoles are a Native American nation that coalesced in northern Florida during the early 1700s, when the territory was still a Spanish colonial possession. Tensions grew between the Seminoles and American settlers in the newly independent United States in the early 1800s, mainly because enslaved people regularly fled from Georgia into Spanish Florida, prompting slaveowners to conduct slave raids across the border. What began as small cross-border skirmishes became the First Seminole War, as Andrew Jackson led U.S. forces into Florida—despite Spanish objections—to pursue the Seminoles. Jackson’s forces destroyed several Seminole, Mikasuki, and Black Seminole towns, as well as captured San Marcos de Apalache and briefly occupied Pensacola before withdrawing in 1818. In 1819, the U.S. and Spain agreed to transfer Florida in the Adams–Onís Treaty. Jackson ultimately captured the Spanish settlement of Pensacola, and the Spanish ceded Florida to the United States in 1821. About that time, some Black Seminoles chose to leave Florida for Andros Island, in the Bahamas, where a remnant of the Black Seminoles still remains, although they no longer identify themselves as such.” ref, ref
“The United States gained possession of Florida in 1821 and coerced the Seminoles into leaving their lands in the Florida panhandle for a large Indian reservation in the center of the peninsula per the Treaty of Moultrie Creek. In 1832, by the Treaty of Payne’s Landing, however, the federal government under United States President Andrew Jackson demanded that they leave Florida altogether and relocate to Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma) as per the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Although some bands of Seminoles had signed a treaty agreeing to the move, they did not represent the whole body of Seminoles. Those who refused to move resisted violently, leading to the Second Seminole War (1835–1842), which was by far the longest and most wide-ranging of the three conflicts. By 1845, however, most Seminoles and Black Seminoles had been resettled in Oklahoma, where they came under the rule of the Creek Indians. A total of 3,612 to 3,700 Seminoles and 5,000 fugitive slaves or “Black Seminoles” had relocated to the Indian Territory on the Trail of Tears, along with the Choctaw, who had 500 Black slaves, the Creek (Muscogee), who had 900 Black slaves, and the Chickasaw, who had 1,592 Black slaves. A minority of about 350 to 500 remained in Florida, where they were allowed to remain in an uneasy truce.” ref, ref, ref
Black Seminoles and Mexico
“Although both groups were subjugated by the Creeks, life was much worse for the Black Seminoles, and many left the reservation for Coahuila, Mexico, in 1849, led by John Horse, also known as Juan Caballo. In Mexico, the Black Seminoles (known there as Mascogos) worked as border guards protecting their adopted country from attacks by slave raiders. When slavery finally ended in the United States, Black Seminoles were tempted to leave Mexico. The Mexican government granted newly arrived Black Seminoles land for settlement on the condition that they patrol and protect the area from hostile Native Americans. As such, many young Black Seminoles gained extensive skills in scouting, which made them a valuable asset. In 1870, the U.S. government offered them money and land to return to the United States and work as scouts for the army. The US armed forces employed Black Seminoles as scouts in the western ranges of Texas. Some of them went on to join army units and later served in the Indian Wars of the late 1800s, in which four Black Seminoles won the US Medal of Honor. Even though many did return and serve as scouts, the government never made good on its promise of land. Small communities of descendants of the Black Seminoles continue to live in Texas, Oklahoma, and Mexico.” ref, ref
“Tensions over a new settlement in the state under the Armed Occupation Act of 1842, south of Tampa, led to renewed hostilities, and the Third Seminole War broke out in 1855. By the cessation of active fighting in 1858, the few remaining bands of Seminoles in Florida had fled deep into the Everglades to land unwanted by American settlers. Altogether, the Seminole Wars were the longest of the American Indian Wars while also being the most expensive. The government believed that only about 100 Seminoles were left in Florida when Colonel Loomis declared an end to the Third Seminole War, but the estimate proved to be too low. In December 1858, the US recruited two bands totaling 75 people, who agreed to removal to the West; they were shipped out on 15 February 1859. Seminoles remained in Florida, however. Sam Jones’ band was living on the eastern edge of the Everglades, inland from Fort Lauderdale. Chipco’s band was thought to be living north of Lake Okeechobee (although the Army had failed to locate them), and smaller family groupings lived on remote patches of higher ground scattered across the wetlands of South Florida.” ref, ref
“Since the war was officially over and the remaining Seminole carefully avoided contact with settlers, the government sent the militia home and reassigned most of the regular Army troops, leaving only small contingents in larger coastal forts such as Fort Brooke. Most of the smaller forts scattered across the Florida wilderness were decommissioned and soon stripped by settlers of any usable material. During the American Civil War, the Confederate government of Florida contacted Sam Jones with promises of aid to keep the Seminole from fighting on the side of the Union. The state did not follow through on its promises, but the Seminole were not interested in fighting another war and remained neutral. The 1868 Florida Constitution, developed by the Reconstruction legislature, gave the Seminole one seat in the House and one seat in the Senate of the state legislature. The Seminole never filled the positions.” ref
“Following the Seminole Wars, the vast majority of Black Seminoles were forcibly exiled to the Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma) or fled to places like Mexico and the Bahamas. While hundreds of Black and Seminole Floridians remained in that state, most eventually died or left. As the Plains Wars ended, the U.S. Army no longer needed the Seminole Negro Indian Scouts. Many of them enlisted in the segregated Buffalo Soldier regiments. In 1914, the U.S. Army officially disbanded the Seminole Negro Indian Scouts. The Black Seminoles were displaced from Fort Clark and moved to nearby Brackettville, Texas. Some of the Black Seminole scouts’ descendants remain in Brackettville, keeping their unique culture and heritage alive for future generations. As of the year 2000, there were around 2,000 enrolled citizens in the Florida Seminole tribe, with over 1,300 living on the reservations. The Florida Seminole Tribe includes some Black Mixed Seminoles, including 50 living on the Fort Pierce Reservation. Almost all escaped slaves or Black Seminoles among the Seminole in Florida were removed to Oklahoma, where their descendants are citizens of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma and are organized into Freedmen’s Bands.” ref, ref, ref, ref
Black Seminoles?
“The Black Seminoles (Spanish: Semínolas Negros), or Afro-Seminoles (Afro-Seminolas), are a Native American group of mixed Seminole and African origin. They are mostly blood descendants of the Seminole people, free Africans, and escaped former slaves, who allied with Seminole groups in Spanish Florida. Their history includes a continuous struggle against invasion and enslavement while preserving their distinct culture and reconnecting with their relatives throughout the African diaspora. Many have Seminole lineage, but due to the stigma of having mixed origin, they have all been categorized as slaves or Freedmen in the past.” ref
“Historically, the Black Seminoles lived mostly in distinct bands near the Native American Seminoles. Some were held as slaves, particularly of Seminole leaders, but the Black Seminole had more freedom than did slaves held by whites in the South and by other Native American tribes, including the right to bear arms. Today, Black Seminole descendants live primarily in rural communities around the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma. Its two Freedmen’s bands, the Caesar Bruner Band and the Dosar Barkus Band, are represented on the General Council of the Nation. Other centers are in Florida, Texas, the Bahamas, and northern Mexico. Their culture is a blending of African, Gullah, Seminole, Mexican, Caribbean, and European traditions.” ref
“Since the 1930s, the Seminole Freedmen have struggled with cycles of exclusion from the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma. In 1990, the tribe received the majority of a $56 million judgment trust by the United States, for seizure of lands in Florida in 1823, and the Freedmen have worked to gain a share of it. In 1999, the Seminole Freedmen’s suit against the government was dismissed in the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit; the court ruled the Freedmen could not bring suit independently of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, which refused to join on the claim issue.” ref
“In 2000 the Seminole Nation voted to restrict membership to those who could prove descent from a Seminole on the Dawes Rolls of the early 20th century, which excluded about 1,200 Freedmen who were previously included as members. Excluded Freedmen argue that the Dawes Rolls were inaccurate and often classified persons with both Seminole and African ancestry as only Freedmen. The District Court for the District of Columbia however ruled in Seminole Nation of Oklahoma v. Norton that Freedmen retained membership and voting rights.” ref
“Spaniards were the first Europeans to colonize Florida and North America in the 16th century. The colony of Spanish Florida included Georgia, the Carolinas, Mississippi, and Alabama. Prior to colonization, Native Americans lived on the land for thousands of years where they hunted, fished, raised cattle, and performed religious ceremonies. Over time, European contact affected Indigenous peoples’ way of life. Indigenous peoples in Spanish Florida defended their lands from European settlers and colonists. By the 17th century, Spaniards lacked the resources to protect all of Florida’s territory. Spain lost control of the Carolinas in 1633 and the Georgia colony in 1670 to the English (British).” ref
“To escape conflict with Europeans, Muscogee people from Alabama and Georgia fled to Florida in search of new lands. Over time the Creek (Muscogee) were joined by other remnant groups of Southeast American Native Americans, such as the Miccosukee, Choctaw, and the Apalachicola, and formed communities. Other Native American tribes, the Yuchis and Yamasees, merged with the Muscogee and by a process of ethnogenesis, the Native Americans formed the Seminole. Spain had given land to some Muscogee (Creek) Native Americans. Their community evolved over the late 18th and early 19th centuries as waves of Creek left present-day Georgia and Alabama under pressure from white settlement and the Creek Wars. In 1773, when the American naturalist William Bartram visited the area, he referred to the Seminole as a distinct people.” ref
“He believed their name was derived from the word “simanó-li”, which according to John Reed Swanton, “is applied by the Creeks to people who remove from populous towns and live by themselves.” William C. Sturtevant says the ethnonym was borrowed by Muskogee from the Spanish word cimarrón, supposedly the source as well of the English word maroon. This was used to describe the runaway slave communities of Florida and of the Great Dismal Swamp on the border of Virginia and North Carolina, on colonial islands of the Caribbean, and other parts of the New World. But linguist Leo Spitzer, writing in the journal Language, says, “If there is a connection between Eng. maroon, Fr. marron, and Sp. cimarron, Spain (or Spanish America) probably gave the word directly to England (or English America).” ref
“Enslaved and free Africans in the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia gradually formed what has become known as the Gullah culture of the coastal Southeast that will influence Black Seminole culture. As early as 1686, enslaved people from the Carolinas, Georgia, and the Sea Islands fled British plantations on the Underground Railroad, finding refuge and alliance with Florida’s Indigenous populations. These freedom seekers became known as the “Black Seminoles” and “Seminole Maroons“. Under a 1693 edict from King Charles II of Spain, Gullah freedom seekers received liberty in exchange for defending the Spanish settlers at St. Augustine against the British. The Spanish organized the Black volunteers into a militia; their settlement at Fort Mosé, founded in 1738, was the first legally sanctioned free Black town in North America. In 1739, Carolinas slaveholders complained to Governor Manuel de Mantiano of Spanish Florida about enslaved laborers escaping to Spanish territory.” ref
“Mantiano upheld the right to sanctuary, established in Spanish law, for Gullah people seeking freedom. In St. Augustine, not all freedom seekers found military service to their liking. More fugitive slaves sought refuge in wilderness areas in northern Florida, where their knowledge of tropical agriculture—and resistance to tropical diseases—served them well. The majority of Africans who pioneered Florida were Gullah people who escaped from the rice plantations of South Carolina (and later Georgia). As Gullah, they developed distinct cultural practices and African leadership structure. Black pioneers built their own settlements based on rice and corn agriculture. They became allies of Creek and other Native Americans escaping into Florida from the Southeast at the same time. In Florida, they developed the Afro-Seminole Creole, which they spoke with the growing Seminole tribe.” ref
“By 1750, the Muscogee people established an “Indian Country” in Florida and had more semi-autonomy than other Native Americans in colonies controlled by the Spanish and the British. Enslaved people continued to seek refuge in Indian Country, and British American slaveholders demanded the return of their enslaved laborers from the Muscogee and Seminole Indians. Native Americans allied with Black people and together they fought against European colonists and slaveholders. The Maroons lived in proximity to Seminole villages but lived in independent separate communities on Native land and were culturally and politically autonomous. Florida had been a refuge for fugitive slaves for at least 70 years by the time of the American Revolution.” ref
“Communities of Black Seminoles were established on the outskirts of Seminole villages in the 18th and 19th centuries, such as Bowlegs Town on the Suwannee River, an Alachua Seminole village in Paynes Town, Florida, and Okahumpka community of free people and Alachua Seminoles, and others. During the Revolution, the Seminole allied with the British, and African Americans and Seminole came into increased contact with each other. The Seminole held some slaves, as did the Creek and other Southeast Native American tribes. During the War of 1812, members of both communities sided with the British against the US in the hopes of repelling American settlers; they strengthened their internal ties and earned the enmity of American general Andrew Jackson.” ref
“After winning independence in the Revolution, American slaveholders were increasingly worried about the armed Black communities in Florida. The territory was ruled again by Spain, as Britain had ceded both East and West Florida. The US slaveholders sought the capture and return of Florida’s Black fugitives under the Treaty of New York (1790), the first treaty ratified under the Confederation. Wanting to disrupt Florida’s maroon communities after the War of 1812, General Andrew Jackson attacked the Negro Fort, which had become a Black Seminole stronghold after the British had allowed them to occupy it when they evacuated Florida.” ref
“Breaking up the maroon communities was one of Jackson’s major objectives in the First Seminole War (1817–18). Andrew Jackson directed Edmund P. Gaines to destroy Negro Fort, a haven for escaped slaves and their Seminole allies; however, Gaines delegated the mission to Duncan L. Clinch, whose troops destroyed the fort on July 27, 1816, resulting in 270 deaths. The survivors of Negro Fort settled in other free Black and Maroon communities in the Florida peninsula. The US military focused on eliminating the fort because white Americans worried about a growing community of Black and Native resistance. On April 16, 1818, at the town of Seminole leader Bolek (aka Bowlegs) on the Suwannee River, Andrew Jackson and his troops burned 400 Maroon and Seminole homes, destroyed their food supplies, and took several horses and cattle.” ref
“Under pressure, the Native American and Black communities moved into south and central Florida. The enslaved and Black Seminoles frequently migrated down the peninsula to escape from Cape Florida to the Bahamas. Hundreds left in the early 1820s after the United States acquired the territory from Spain, effective 1821. Contemporary accounts noted a group of 120 migrating in 1821, and a much larger group of 300 African-American slaves escaping in 1823, picked up by Bahamians in 27 sloops and also by canoes. Their concern about living under American rule was not unwarranted. In 1821, Andrew Jackson became the territorial governor of Florida and ordered an attack on Black Seminoles and other free Black settlements near Tampa Bay.” ref
“By the early 19th century, Maroons (free Black people and freedom seekers) and the Seminole were in regular contact in Florida, where they evolved a system of relations unique among North American Native Americans and Black people. Seminole practice in Florida had acknowledged slavery, though not on the chattel slavery model then common in the American south. It was, in fact, more like feudal dependency and taxation since African Americans among the Seminole generally lived in their own communities. Historian David Colburn estimates that by 1836 at least twelve hundred Black Maroon settlements lived in Seminole towns.” ref
“General Edmund Pendleton Gaines, who visited several flourishing Black Seminole settlements in the 1800s, described the African Americans as “vassals and allies” of the Seminole. Nero, Garçon, Cyrus, and Prince were Afro Seminole warriors and chiefs who sat in counsel with the Seminoles. The Maroons and Seminole led military operations together against the Georgia militia and US forces during the Patriot War and commanded 300 Black soldiers at the Battle of Suwannee in 1818. Atlantic Creoles (Maroons) and Seminoles fought against U.S. imperialism and southern racial slavery. Black Maroons offered military backing to the Red Sticks during their armed conflict at Prospect Bluff fort. Black Seminoles advanced to leadership roles. Abraham, whose Seminole name was Souanaffe Tustenukke, was the “hoponaya,” translating English for the Seminole council.” ref
“Black prisoners or freedom seekers found sanctuary among the Seminole, and in exchange paid an annual tribute of livestock, crops, hunting, and war party obligations. Seminoles, in turn, acquired an important strategic ally in a sparsely populated region. They elected their own leaders, and could amass wealth in cattle and crops. Most importantly, they bore arms for self-defense. Florida real estate records show that the Seminole and Black Seminole people owned large quantities of Florida land. In some cases, a portion of that Florida land is still owned by the Seminole and Black Seminole descendants in Florida. In the 19th century, the Black Seminoles were called “Seminole Negroes” by their white American enemies and Estelusti (“Black People”), by their Native American allies.” ref
“The traditional relationship between Black Seminoles and Natives changed in the course of the Second Seminole War when the old tribal system broke down and the Seminole resolved themselves into loose war bands living off the land with no distinction between tribal members and Black fugitives. That changed again in the new territory when the Seminole were obliged to settle on fixed lots of land and take up settled agriculture. Conflict arose in the territory because the transplanted Seminole had been placed on land allocated to the Creek, who had a practice of chattel slavery. There was increasing pressure from both Creek and pro-Creek Seminole for the adoption of the Creek model of slavery for the Black Seminoles. Creek slavers and those from other Native groups, and whites, began raiding the Black Seminole settlements to kidnap and enslave people. The Seminole leadership would become headed by a pro-Creek faction who supported the institution of chattel slavery. These threats led to many Black Seminoles escaping to Mexico.” ref
“According to Rachel Sarah O’Toole, an associate professor of history: Throughout the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, the Seminole people also profited from the enslavement of Black people who they defined as Estelusti. For the Seminole, enslaved people were categorized as a lower subservient group and, as captives, lacked necessary kin ties to be considered as political, social, and cultural equals. Enslaved people were acquired with violence and sold among owners. Still, enslaved Atlantic Creoles could be more mobile and independent among the Seminole. For example, rather than having to work for their Indigenous enslavers Black families lived together in separate villages near Indian settlements and paid an annual tribute to the Seminole people in the form of provisions as well as ritual gifts.” ref
“Anticipating attempts to re-enslave more members of their community, Black Seminoles opposed removal to the West. In councils before the war, they threw their support behind the most militant Seminole faction, led by Osceola. After war broke out, individual Black leaders, such as John Caesar, Abraham, and John Horse, played key roles. In addition to aiding the Natives in their fight, Black Seminoles recruited plantation slaves to rebellion at the start of the war. The slaves joined Native Americans and maroons in the destruction of 21 sugar plantations from Christmas Day, December 25, 1835, through the summer of 1836. Historians do not agree on whether these events should be considered a separate slave rebellion; generally they view the attacks on the sugar plantations as part of the Seminole War.” ref
“By 1838, U.S. General Thomas Sydney Jesup tried to divide the Black and Seminole warriors by offering freedom to African Americans if they surrendered and agreed to removal to Indian Territory. John Horse was among the Black warriors who surrendered under this condition. Due to Seminole opposition, however, the Army did not fully follow through on its offer. After 1838, more than 500 Black Seminoles traveled with the Seminoles thousands of miles to the Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma; some traveled by ship across the Gulf of Mexico and up the Mississippi River. Because of harsh conditions, many of both peoples died along this trail from Florida to Oklahoma, also known as The Trail of Tears.” ref
“The status of Black Seminoles and fugitive slaves was largely unsettled after they reached Indian Territory. The issue was compounded by the government’s initially putting Black people and Seminole under the administration of the Creek Nation, many of whom were slaveholders. The Creek tried to re-enslave some of the fugitive Black slaves. John Horse and others set up towns, generally near Seminole settlements, repeating their pattern from Florida.” ref
“In the west, the Black Seminoles were still threatened by slave raiders. These included pro-slavery members of the Creek tribe and some Seminole, whose allegiance to African Americans diminished after defeat by the US in the war. Officers of the federal army may have tried to protect the Black Seminoles, but in 1848 the U.S. Attorney General bowed to pro-slavery lobbyists and ordered the army to disarm the community. This left hundreds of Seminoles and Black Seminoles unable to leave the settlement or to defend themselves against slavers.” ref
“Facing the threat of enslavement, the Black Seminole leader John Horse and about 180 Black Seminoles staged a mass escape in 1849 to northern Mexico, where slavery had been abolished twenty years earlier. The Black fugitives crossed to freedom in July 1850.[ They rode with a faction of traditionalist Seminole under the chief Coacochee, who led the expedition. The Mexican government welcomed the Seminole allies as border guards on the frontier, and they settled at El Nacimiento [es], Coahuila.” ref
“After 1861, the Black Seminoles in Mexico and Texas had little contact with those in Oklahoma. For the next 20 years, Black Seminoles served as militiamen and Native American fighters in Mexico, where they became known as mascogos, derived from the tribal name of the Creek – Muskogee. Slave raiders from Texas continued to threaten the community but arms and reinforcements from the Mexican Army enabled the Black warriors to defend their community.” ref
“Throughout the period, several hundred Black Seminoles remained in the Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). Because most of the Seminole and the other Five Civilized Tribes supported the Confederacy during the American Civil War, in 1866 the US required new peace treaties with them. The US required the tribes emancipate any slaves and extend to the Freedmen full citizenship rights in the tribes if they chose to stay in Indian Territory. In the late nineteenth century, Seminole Freedmen thrived in towns near the Seminole communities on the reservation. Most had not been living as slaves to the Native Americans before the war. They lived —as their descendants still do— in and around Wewoka, Oklahoma, the community founded in 1849 by John Horse as a Black settlement. Today it is the capital of the federally recognized Seminole Nation of Oklahoma.” ref
“Oklahoma’s federal government assigned them to the control of the Creek tribe, which practiced slavery. Seminole Maroons were also at risk from capture by white slave traders. In 1850, some Afro-Seminoles, weary of their situation, fled south through pro-slavery Texas into Mexico, where slavery had been abolished in 1829. Following the Civil War, some Freedmen’s leaders in Indian Territory practiced polygyny, as did ethnic African leaders in other diaspora communities.” ref
“African Americans adopted some elements of the European-American patriarchal system. But, under the South’s adoption of the principle of partus sequitur ventrem in the 17th century and incorporated into slavery law in slave states, children of slave mothers were considered legally slaves. Under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, even if the mother escaped to a free state, she and her children were legally considered slaves and fugitives. As a result, the Black Seminoles born to slave mothers were always at risk from slave raiders.” ref
“In 1900 there were 1,000 Freedmen listed in the population of the Seminole Nation in Indian Territory, about one-third of the total. By the time of the Dawes Rolls, there were numerous female-headed households registered. The Freedmen’s towns were made up of large, closely connected families.” ref
“After allotment, “[f]reedmen, unlike their [Native] peers on the blood roll, were permitted to sell their land without clearing the transaction through the Indian Bureau. That made the poorly educated Freedmen easy marks for white settlers migrating from the Deep South.” Numerous Seminole Freedmen lost their land in the early decades after allotment, and some moved to urban areas. Others left the state because of its conditions of racial segregation. As US citizens, they were exposed to the harsher racial laws of Oklahoma. Since 1954, the Freedmen have been included in the constitution of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma.” ref
“Black people and Seminoles had limited intermarriage, but historians and anthropologists have come to believe that generally the Black Seminoles had independent communities. They allied with the Seminole at times of war. The Seminole society was based on a matrilineal kinship system, in which inheritance and descent went through the maternal line. Children were considered to belong to the mother’s clan, so those born to ethnic African mothers would have been considered Black by the Seminole. While the children might integrate customs from both parents’ cultures, the Seminole believed they belonged to the mother’s group more than the father’s.” ref
“In 1900, Seminole Freedmen numbered about 1,000 on the Oklahoma reservation, about one-third of the total population at the time. Members were registered on the Dawes Rolls for allocation of communal land to individual households. Since then, numerous Freedmen left after losing their land, as their land sales were not overseen by the Indian Bureau. Others left because of having to deal with the harshly segregated society of Oklahoma.” ref
“The land allotments and participation in Oklahoma society altered relations between the Seminole and Freedmen, particularly after the 1930s. Both peoples faced racial discrimination from whites in Oklahoma, who essentially divided society into two: white and “other”. Public schools and facilities were racially segregated.” ref
“When the tribe reorganized under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, some Seminole wanted to exclude the Freedmen and keep the tribe as Native American only. It was not until the 1950s that the Black Seminole were officially recognized in the constitution. Another was adopted in 1969, that restructured the government according to more traditional Seminole lines. It established 14 town bands, of which two represented Freedmen. The two Freedmen’s bands were given two seats each, like other bands, on the Seminole General Council.” ref
“There have been “battles over tribal membership across the country, as gambling revenues and federal land payments have given Native Americans something to fight over.” In 2000, Seminole Freedmen were in the national news because of a legal dispute with the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, of which they had been legal members since 1866, over membership and rights within the tribe.” ref
“The Seminole Nation of Oklahoma held the Black Seminoles could not share in services to be provided by a $56 million federal settlement, a judgement trust, originally awarded in 1976 to the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma and the Seminole Tribe of Florida (and other Florida Seminoles) by the federal government. The settlement was in compensation for land taken from them in northern Florida by the United States at the time of the signing of the Treaty of Moultrie Creek in 1823, when most of the Seminole and maroons were moved to a reservation in the center of the territory. This was before removal west of the Mississippi.” ref
“The judgement trust was based on the Seminole tribe as it existed in 1823. Black Seminoles were not recognized legally as part of the tribe, nor was their ownership or occupancy of land separately recognized. The US government at the time would have assumed most were fugitive slaves, without legal standing. The Oklahoma and Florida groups were awarded portions of the judgement related to their respective populations in the early 20th century, when records were made of the mostly full-blood descendants of the time. The settlement apportionment was disputed in court cases between the Oklahoma and Florida tribes, but finally awarded in 1990, with three-quarters going to the Oklahoma people and one-quarter to those in Florida.” ref
“However, the Black Seminole descendants asserted their ancestors had also held and farmed land in Florida and suffered property losses as a result of US actions. They filed suit in 1996 against the Department of Interior to share in the benefits of the judgement trust of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, of which they were members. In 1999, the Seminole Freedmen’s suit against the government was dismissed in the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit; the court ruled the Freedmen could not bring suit independently of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, which refused to join. As a sovereign nation, they could not be ordered to join the suit.” ref
“In another aspect of the dispute over citizenship, in the summer of 2000 the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma voted to restrict members, according to blood quantum, to those who had one-eighth Seminole ancestry, basically those who could document descent from a Seminole ancestor listed on the Dawes Rolls, the federal registry established in the early 20th century. At the time, during rushed conditions, registrars had separate lists for Seminole-Indian and Freedmen. They classified those with visible African ancestry as Freedmen, regardless of their proportion of Native American ancestry or whether they were considered Native members of the tribe at the time. This excluded some Black Seminole from being listed on the Seminole-Indian list who qualified by ancestry.” ref
“The Dawes Rolls included in the Seminole-Indian list many Intermarried Whites who lived on Native American lands, but did not include Black people of the same status. The Seminole Freedmen believed the tribe’s 21st-century decision to exclude them was racially based and has opposed it on those grounds. The Department of Interior said that it would not recognize a Seminole government that did not have Seminole Freedmen participating as voters and on the council, as they had officially been members of the nation since 1866. In October 2000, the Seminole Nation filed its own suit against the Interior Department, contending it had the sovereign right to determine tribal membership.” ref
“The District Court for the District of Columbia ruled in September 2002 in Seminole Nation of Oklahoma v. Norton that Freedmen retained membership and voting rights. The tribe however maintained a separate status for Freedmen and does not consider them full members, or members “by blood”. In Oklahoma during 2006 and 2007, historian Ray Von Robertson conducted oral interviews with sixteen Black Seminoles who had obtained Seminole Freedman identification cards and found that Black Seminoles were disenfranchised, did not receive full acceptance in the Seminole Nation, and did not receive full benefits from the funds programs offered to the Seminole nation coming from the Bureau of Indian Affairs.” ref
“Conditions began crumbling for Florida’s Spanish missions in the late 1600s with the Indian slave trade one of the main causes. Many thought Indian slavery was something new. It actually dated back through the centuries, although the practice was new in this part of the country. The act, which brought tragic effects to Florida, had its beginnings with the Iroquois Indians of the north. After the loss of millions of Native Americans to epidemics of diseases and warfare, the Iroquois swooped south intent on claiming other Indians for their tribes and selling the rest to slave dealers.” ref
“Soon hundreds of other Native Americans became involved in capturing Indians for slaves. They formed groups that grew into Indian slaving societies, which controlled southern trade and access to the Europeans’ guns and ammunition. According to Robbie Ethridge in “Light on the Path,” the raiding societies were dominated by different groups. The Westos controlled much of present-day Georgia and northern Florida, while the Chiscas, it is believed, governed present-day eastern Alabama and western Georgia. These raiding societies bore a resemblance to the crime families of today.” ref
“In 1675, the Spanish governor of Florida received word from a Chisca Indian chief and a friar in the Marianna section. They warned that unusual activity was taking place among the English in North Georgia and on a ship from Charleston, intent on spying on the Apalachee garrison. Charleston, which began as Charles Town, welcomed English colonists and groups from Barbados who desired to live in peace with those affiliated with the missions. They wanted to trade with Spain and had no desire to make slaves of the Indians of the Carolinas or the Spanish Indians.” ref
“But two important events soon took place to increase the Indian slave policy in the Southeast, according to the “Florida Anthropologist,” March-June 1967. “The majority of Carolina settlers who migrated from Barbados came from a country where Indians were enslaved and forced to work on sugar plantations.” They were accustomed to slavery, and those who contemplated joining this horrible business found it produced quick profits and riddance of any threatening Indians.” ref
“In 1671, the Carolina colony passed an act permitting Indian slavery. Soon “militiamen were busy capturing Indians who could not protect themselves.” Between 1680-1702, the Westos, along with Yuchis and Cherokees, seized Spanish mission Indians living in Georgia, extreme northeast Florida and South Carolina. They either sold these Indians or traded their captives for European goods, especially guns and ammunition.” ref
“Charleston gave slave dealers a place to congregate and bring their Indian captives. In the 1680s, the Westos wiped out a number of coastal missions. Many of these Indians sought refuge on Talbot and Amelia islands. A number of Native Americans were attracted to Carolina by the English with gifts of rum, muskets and ammunition. They subsequently were picked up by the slave traders. The destruction crept closer and closer to the Timucua and Apalachee missions of Florida. Timucua held the largest number of Christianized Indians.” ref
“Attacking missions became one of the easiest ways to make money from helpless Indians. Charleston became the main port for shipping out slave Indians. Then in May 1702, a band of Lower Creeks headed south and attacked and burned a village of Santa Fe de Toloco in the Timucuan province of Florida. The Queen Anne’s War (1702-1713) also began this year. It was during this period that the Florida Indian slave trade assumed major proportions.” ref
“By then, James Moore, an ambitious English governor in the Carolinas, had plans all of his own. He was aware of the profit that could be made by capturing Indians with one of the easiest places being the Spanish missions of Florida. By doing this, he would also help rid the Spanish from Florida. In the fall of 1702, he headed south, leading raids from the Carolinas into Spanish Florida with the aid of Yamasee and Lower Creek Indians. The mission Indians offered little resistance and accepted their fate since the Spanish would not allow them to have any weapons.” ref
“Moore burnt much of St. Augustine, but his raid failed when hundreds of residents and Indians sought the protective walls of the Castillo de San Marco, and he had no way of getting to them. The siege of St. Augustine lasted three months. Moore returned home and his followers considered his invasion a failure with the high cost of his expedition born by the people of Carolina. He used many of the Indians captured on the expedition to build his huge plantation and to work the crops.” ref
But is Atlantis real?
No. Atlantis (an allegory: “fake story” interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning) can’t be found any more than one can locate the Jolly Green Giant that is said to watch over frozen vegetables. Lol
May Reason Set You Free
There are a lot of truly great things said by anarchists in history, and also some deeply vile things, too, from not supporting Women’s rights to Anti-Semitism. There are those who also reject those supporting women’s rights as well as fight anti-Semitism. This is why I push reason as my only master, not anarchist thinking, though anarchism, to me, should see all humans everywhere as equal in dignity and rights.
We—Cory and Damien—are following the greatness that can be found in anarchist thinking.
As an Anarchist Educator, Damien strives to teach the plain truth. Damien does not support violence as my method to change. Rather, I choose education that builds Enlightenment and Empowerment. I champion Dignity and Equality. We rise by helping each other. What is the price of a tear? What is the cost of a smile? How can we see clearly when others pay the cost of our indifference and fear? We should help people in need. Why is that so hard for some people? Rich Ghouls must End. Damien wants “billionaires” to stop being a thing. Tax then into equality. To Damien, there is no debate, Capitalism is unethical. Moreover, as an Anarchist Educator, Damien knows violence is not the way to inspire lasting positive change. But we are not limited to violence, we have education, one of the most lasting and powerful ways to improve the world. We empower the world by championing Truth and its supporters.
Anarchism and Education
“Various alternatives to education and their problems have been proposed by anarchists which have gone from alternative education systems and environments, self-education, advocacy of youth and children rights, and freethought activism.” ref
“Historical accounts of anarchist educational experiments to explore how their pedagogical practices, organization, and content constituted a radical alternative to mainstream forms of educational provision in different historical periods.” ref
“The Ferrer school was an early 20th century libertarian school inspired by the anarchist pedagogy of Francisco Ferrer. He was a proponent of rationalist, secular education that emphasized reason, dignity, self-reliance, and scientific observation. The Ferrer movement’s philosophy had two distinct tendencies: non-didactic freedom from dogma and the more didactic fostering of counter-hegemonic beliefs. Towards non-didactic freedom from dogma, and fulfilled the child-centered tradition.” ref
Teach Real History: all our lives depend on it.
Damien sees lies about history as crimes against humanity. And we all must help humanity by addressing “any and all” who make harmful lies about history.
Dylan Violette (CopperViolette) (in Maine) and Damien Marie AtHope (in Texas) seek to learn more about the indigenous peoples of the Americas (First Nations/Native Americans) where they both live.
Native Americans in Maine are: collectively known as the Wabanaki or “People of the Dawnland.” Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians (Maliseet/Wolastoqiyik), Miꞌkmaq Nation (concentrated in Northern Maine, specifically Aroostook County), Passamaquoddy Tribe (with communities at Motahkomikuk/Indian Township and Sipayik/Pleasant Point), and Penobscot Nation (headquartered on Indian Island).
Native Americans in Texas: More than 30 organizations claim to represent historic tribes within Texas; however, these groups are unrecognized, meaning they do not meet the minimum criteria of federally recognized tribes and are not state-recognized tribes. There are three federally recognized tribes in Texas, each with their own reservation:
- Alabama-Coushatta Tribe of Texas: Located near Livingston in the Big Thicket area, the reservation is the oldest in Texas.
- Kickapoo Traditional Tribe of Texas: Based in Eagle Pass, the tribe maintains strong cultural ties and resides on a reservation along the Rio Grande on the U.S.-Mexico border.
- Ysleta del Sur Pueblo (Tigua): Located in El Paso, this is one of the oldest continuously inhabited communities in Texas, established in 1682.
Before European settlement, numerous tribes lived across the varied Texas landscape, developing distinct cultures
Southeastern & East Texas: The Caddo built large, permanent villages and elaborate ceremonial mounds, developing extensive trade networks. Other groups included the Atakapa and Wichita peoples.
Gulf Coast: Tribes like the Karankawa and Coahuiltecans were semi-nomadic, adapting to the coastal environment through fishing, hunting, and gathering.
Plains (North & West Texas): The powerful, horse-mounted Comanche and Kiowa dominated a vast territory known as the Comanchería, hunting bison and conducting trade and raids. The Apache, including the Lipan and Mescalero groups, were also prominent in West and Central Texas before being pushed out by the Comanche and later by Anglo settlers.
West Texas: The Jumano people lived along rivers and practiced farming and extensive trading before eventually joining Apache groups.
Damien and Dylan live around a 33 hr. drive apart.
Dylan Violette (CopperViolette) (in Maine) is close to the Mi’kmaq. He passes by their reservation whenever he heads south (the nearest city is that way; He is almost in the middle of nowhere).
Damien Marie AtHope (in Texas) lives in Corpus Christi, which is in the Gulf Coast Tribes area, like the Karankawa and Coahuiltecans. (I was living in Florida, but moved to Texas)
My favorite “Graham Hancock” Quote?
“In what archaeologists have studied, yes, we can say there is NO Evidence of an advanced civilization.” – (Time 1:27) Joe Rogan Experience #2136 – Graham Hancock & Flint Dibble
People don’t commonly teach religious history, even that of their own claimed religion. No, rather they teach a limited “pro their religion” history of their religion from a religious perspective favorable to the religion of choice.
Do you truly think “Religious Belief” is only a matter of some personal choice?
Do you not see how coercive one’s world of choice is limited to the obvious hereditary belief, in most religious choices available to the child of religious parents or caregivers? Religion is more commonly like a family, culture, society, etc. available belief that limits the belief choices of the child and that is when “Religious Belief” is not only a matter of some personal choice and when it becomes hereditary faith, not because of the quality of its alleged facts or proposed truths but because everyone else important to the child believes similarly so they do as well simply mimicking authority beliefs handed to them. Because children are raised in religion rather than being presented all possible choices but rather one limited dogmatic brand of “Religious Belief” where children only have a choice of following the belief as instructed, and then personally claim the faith hereditary belief seen in the confirming to the belief they have held themselves all their lives. This is obvious in statements asked and answered by children claiming a faith they barely understand but they do understand that their family believes “this or that” faith, so they feel obligated to believe it too. While I do agree that “Religious Belief” should only be a matter of some personal choice, it rarely is… End Hereditary Religion!
Animism: Respecting the Living World by Graham Harvey
“How have human cultures engaged with and thought about animals, plants, rocks, clouds, and other elements in their natural surroundings? Do animals and other natural objects have a spirit or soul? What is their relationship to humans? In this new study, Graham Harvey explores current and past animistic beliefs and practices of Native Americans, Maori, Aboriginal Australians, and eco-pagans. He considers the varieties of animism found in these cultures as well as their shared desire to live respectfully within larger natural communities. Drawing on his extensive casework, Harvey also considers the linguistic, performative, ecological, and activist implications of these different animisms.” ref
We are like believing machines; we vacuum up ideas, like Velcro sticks to almost everything. We accumulate beliefs that we allow to negatively influence our lives, often without realizing it. Our willingness must be to alter skewed beliefs that impede our balance or reason, which allows us to achieve new positive thinking and accurate outcomes.
My thoughts on Religion Evolution with external links for more info:
- (Pre-Animism Africa mainly, but also Europe, and Asia at least 300,000 years ago), (Pre-Animism – Oxford Dictionaries)
- (Animism Africa around 100,000 years ago), (Animism – Britannica.com)
- (Totemism Europe around 50,000 years ago), (Totemism – Anthropology)
- (Shamanism Siberia around 30,000 years ago), (Shamanism – Britannica.com)
- (Paganism Turkey around 12,000 years ago), (Paganism – BBC Religion)
- (Progressed Organized Religion “Institutional Religion” Egypt around 5,000 years ago), (Ancient Egyptian Religion – Britannica.com)
- (CURRENT “World” RELIGIONS after 4,000 years ago) (Origin of Major Religions – Sacred Texts)
- (Early Atheistic Doubting at least by 2,600 years ago) (History of Atheism – Wikipedia)
“Religion is an Evolved Product” and Yes, Religion is Like Fear Given Wings…
Atheists talk about gods and religions for the same reason doctors talk about cancer, they are looking for a cure, or a firefighter talks about fires because they burn people and they care to stop them. We atheists too often feel a need to help the victims of mental slavery, held in the bondage that is the false beliefs of gods and the conspiracy theories of reality found in religions.
Understanding Religion Evolution:
- Pre-Animism (at least 300,000 years ago)
- Animism (Africa: 100,000 years ago)
- Totemism (Europe: 50,000 years ago)
- Shamanism (Siberia: 30,000 years ago)
- Paganism (Turkey: 12,000 years ago)
- Progressed organized religion (Egypt: 5,000 years ago), (Egypt, the First Dynasty 5,150 years ago)
- CURRENT “World” RELIGIONS (after 4,000 years ago)
- Early Atheistic Doubting (at least by 2,600 years ago)
“An Archaeological/Anthropological Understanding of Religion Evolution”
It seems ancient peoples had to survived amazing threats in a “dangerous universe (by superstition perceived as good and evil),” and human “immorality or imperfection of the soul” which was thought to affect the still living, leading to ancestor worship. This ancestor worship presumably led to the belief in supernatural beings, and then some of these were turned into the belief in gods. This feeble myth called gods were just a human conceived “made from nothing into something over and over, changing, again and again, taking on more as they evolve, all the while they are thought to be special,” but it is just supernatural animistic spirit-belief perceived as sacred.
Quick Evolution of Religion?
Pre-Animism (at least 300,000 years ago) pre-religion is a beginning that evolves into later Animism. So, Religion as we think of it, to me, all starts in a general way with Animism (Africa: 100,000 years ago) (theoretical belief in supernatural powers/spirits), then this is physically expressed in or with Totemism (Europe: 50,000 years ago) (theoretical belief in mythical relationship with powers/spirits through a totem item), which then enlists a full-time specific person to do this worship and believed interacting Shamanism (Siberia/Russia: 30,000 years ago) (theoretical belief in access and influence with spirits through ritual), and then there is the further employment of myths and gods added to all the above giving you Paganism (Turkey: 12,000 years ago) (often a lot more nature-based than most current top world religions, thus hinting to their close link to more ancient religious thinking it stems from). My hypothesis is expressed with an explanation of the building of a theatrical house (modern religions development). Progressed organized religion (Egypt: 5,000 years ago) with CURRENT “World” RELIGIONS (after 4,000 years ago).
Historically, in large city-state societies (such as Egypt or Iraq) starting around 5,000 years ago culminated to make religion something kind of new, a sociocultural-governmental-religious monarchy, where all or at least many of the people of such large city-state societies seem familiar with and committed to the existence of “religion” as the integrated life identity package of control dynamics with a fixed closed magical doctrine, but this juggernaut integrated religion identity package of Dogmatic-Propaganda certainly did not exist or if developed to an extent it was highly limited in most smaller prehistoric societies as they seem to lack most of the strong control dynamics with a fixed closed magical doctrine (magical beliefs could be at times be added or removed). Many people just want to see developed religious dynamics everywhere even if it is not. Instead, all that is found is largely fragments until the domestication of religion.
Religions, as we think of them today, are a new fad, even if they go back to around 6,000 years in the timeline of human existence, this amounts to almost nothing when seen in the long slow evolution of religion at least around 70,000 years ago with one of the oldest ritual worship. Stone Snake of South Africa: “first human worship” 70,000 years ago. This message of how religion and gods among them are clearly a man-made thing that was developed slowly as it was invented and then implemented peace by peace discrediting them all. Which seems to be a simple point some are just not grasping how devastating to any claims of truth when we can see the lie clearly in the archeological sites.
I wish people fought as hard for the actual values as they fight for the group/clan names political or otherwise they think support values. Every amount spent on war is theft to children in need of food or the homeless kept from shelter.
Here are several of my blog posts on history:
- To Find Truth You Must First Look
- (Magdalenian/Iberomaurusian) Connections to the First Paganists of the early Neolithic Near East Dating from around 17,000 to 12,000 Years Ago
- Natufians: an Ancient People at the Origins of Agriculture and Sedentary Life
- Possible Clan Leader/Special “MALE” Ancestor Totem Poles At Least 13,500 years ago?
- Jewish People with DNA at least 13,200 years old, Judaism, and the Origins of Some of its Ideas
- Baltic Reindeer Hunters: Swiderian, Lyngby, Ahrensburgian, and Krasnosillya cultures 12,020 to 11,020 years ago are evidence of powerful migratory waves during the last 13,000 years and a genetic link to Saami and the Finno-Ugric peoples.
- The Rise of Inequality: patriarchy and state hierarchy inequality
- Fertile Crescent 12,500 – 9,500 Years Ago: fertility and death cult belief system?
- 12,400 – 11,700 Years Ago – Kortik Tepe (Turkey) Pre/early-Agriculture Cultic Ritualism
- Ritualistic Bird Symbolism at Gobekli Tepe and its “Ancestor Cult”
- Male-Homosexual (female-like) / Trans-woman (female) Seated Figurine from Gobekli Tepe
- Could a 12,000-year-old Bull Geoglyph at Göbekli Tepe relate to older Bull and Female Art 25,000 years ago and Later Goddess and the Bull cults like Catal Huyuk?
- Sedentism and the Creation of goddesses around 12,000 years ago as well as male gods after 7,000 years ago.
- Alcohol, where Agriculture and Religion Become one? Such as Gobekli Tepe’s Ritualistic use of Grain as Food and Ritual Drink
- Neolithic Ritual Sites with T-Pillars and other Cultic Pillars
- Paganism: Goddesses around 12,000 years ago then Male Gods after 7,000 years ago
- First Patriarchy: Split of Women’s Status around 12,000 years ago & First Hierarchy: fall of Women’s Status around 5,000 years ago.
- Natufians: an Ancient People at the Origins of Agriculture and Sedentary Life
- J DNA and the Spread of Agricultural Religion (paganism)
- Paganism: an approximately 12,000-year-old belief system
- Paganism 12,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism” (Pre-Capitalism)
- Shaman burial in Israel 12,000 years ago and the Shamanism Phenomena
- Need to Mythicized: gods and goddesses
- 12,000 – 7,000 Years Ago – Paleo-Indian Culture (The Americas)
- 12,000 – 2,000 Years Ago – Indigenous-Scandinavians (Nordic)
- Norse did not wear helmets with horns?
- Pre-Pottery Neolithic Skull Cult around 11,500 to 8,400 Years Ago?
- 10,400 – 10,100 Years Ago, in Turkey the Nevail Cori Religious Settlement
- 9,000-6,500 Years Old Submerged Pre-Pottery/Pottery Neolithic Ritual Settlements off Israel’s Coast
- Catal Huyuk “first religious designed city” around 9,500 to 7,700 years ago (Turkey)
- Cultic Hunting at Catal Huyuk “first religious designed city”
- Special Items and Art as well as Special Elite Burials at Catal Huyuk
- New Rituals and Violence with the appearance of Pottery and People?
- Haplogroup N and its related Uralic Languages and Cultures
- Ainu people, Sámi people, Native Americans, the Ancient North Eurasians, and Paganistic-Shamanism with Totemism
- Ideas, Technology and People from Turkey, Europe, to China and Back again 9,000 to 5,000 years ago?
- First Pottery of Europe and the Related Cultures
- 9,000 years old Neolithic Artifacts Judean Desert and Hills Israel
- 9,000-7,000 years-old Sex and Death Rituals: Cult Sites in Israel, Jordan, and the Sinai
- 9,000-8500 year old Horned Female shaman Bad Dürrenberg Germany
- Neolithic Jewelry and the Spread of Farming in Europe Emerging out of West Turkey
- 8,600-year-old Tortoise Shells in Neolithic graves in central China have Early Writing and Shamanism
- Swing of the Mace: the rise of Elite, Forced Authority, and Inequality begin to Emerge 8,500 years ago?
- Migrations and Changing Europeans Beginning around 8,000 Years Ago
- My “Steppe-Anatolian-Kurgan hypothesis” 8,000/7,000 years ago
- Around 8,000-year-old Shared Idea of the Mistress of Animals, “Ritual” Motif
- Pre-Columbian Red-Paint (red ochre) Maritime Archaic Culture 8,000-3,000 years ago
- 7,522-6,522 years ago Linear Pottery culture which I think relates to Arcane Capitalism’s origins
- Arcane Capitalism: Primitive socialism, Primitive capital, Private ownership, Means of production, Market capitalism, Class discrimination, and Petite bourgeoisie (smaller capitalists)
- 7,500-4,750 years old Ritualistic Cucuteni-Trypillian culture of Moldova, Romania, and Ukraine
- Roots of a changing early society 7,200-6,700 years ago Jordan and Israel
- Agriculture religion (Paganism) with farming reached Britain between about 7,000 to 6,500 or so years ago and seemingly expressed in things like Western Europe’s Long Barrows
- My Thoughts on Possible Migrations of “R” DNA and Proto-Indo-European?
- “Millet” Spreading from China 7,022 years ago to Europe and related Language may have Spread with it leading to Proto-Indo-European
- Proto-Indo-European (PIE), ancestor of Indo-European languages: DNA, Society, Language, and Mythology
- The Dnieper–Donets culture and Asian varieties of Millet from China to the Black Sea region of Europe by 7,022 years ago
- Kurgan 6,000 years ago/dolmens 7,000 years ago: funeral, ritual, and other?
- 7,020 to 6,020-year-old Proto-Indo-European Homeland of Urheimat or proposed home of their Language and Religion
- Ancient Megaliths: Kurgan, Ziggurat, Pyramid, Menhir, Trilithon, Dolman, Kromlech, and Kromlech of Trilithons
- The Mytheme of Ancient North Eurasian Sacred-Dog belief and similar motifs are found in Indo-European, Native American, and Siberian comparative mythology
- Elite Power Accumulation: Ancient Trade, Tokens, Writing, Wealth, Merchants, and Priest-Kings
- Sacred Mounds, Mountains, Kurgans, and Pyramids may hold deep connections?
- Between 7,000-5,000 Years ago, rise of unequal hierarchy elite, leading to a “birth of the State” or worship of power, strong new sexism, oppression of non-elites, and the fall of Women’s equal status
- Paganism 7,000-5,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism” (Capitalism) (World War 0) Elite & their slaves
- Hell and Underworld mythologies starting maybe as far back as 7,000 to 5,000 years ago with the Proto-Indo-Europeans?
- The First Expression of the Male God around 7,000 years ago?
- White (light complexion skin) Bigotry and Sexism started 7,000 years ago?
- Around 7,000-year-old Shared Idea of the Divine Bird (Tutelary and/or Trickster spirit/deity), “Ritual” Motif
- Nekhbet an Ancient Egyptian Vulture Goddess and Tutelary Deity
- 6,720 to 4,920 years old Ritualistic Hongshan Culture of Inner Mongolia with 5,000-year-old Pyramid Mounds and Temples
- First proto-king in the Balkans, Varna culture around 6,500 years ago?
- 6,500–5,800 years ago in Israel Late Chalcolithic (Copper Age) Period in the Southern Levant Seems to Express Northern Levant Migrations, Cultural and Religious Transfer
- KING OF BEASTS: Master of Animals “Ritual” Motif, around 6,000 years old or older…
- Around 6000-year-old Shared Idea of the Solid Wheel & the Spoked Wheel-Shaped Ritual Motif
- “The Ghassulian Star,” a mysterious 6,000-year-old mural from Jordan; a Proto-Star of Ishtar, Star of Inanna or Star of Venus?
- Religious/Ritual Ideas, including goddesses and gods as well as ritual mounds or pyramids from Northeastern Asia at least 6,000 years old, seemingly filtering to Iran, Iraq, the Mediterranean, Europe, Egypt, and the Americas?
- Maykop (5,720–5,020 years ago) Caucasus region Bronze Age culture-related to Copper Age farmers from the south, influenced by the Ubaid period and Leyla-Tepe culture, as well as influencing the Kura-Araxes culture
- 5-600-year-old Tomb, Mummy, and First Bearded Male Figurine in a Grave
- Kura-Araxes Cultural 5,520 to 4,470 years old DNA traces to the Canaanites, Arabs, and Jews
- Minoan/Cretan (Keftiu) Civilization and Religion around 5,520 to 3,120 years ago
- Evolution Of Science at least by 5,500 years ago
- 5,500 Years old birth of the State, the rise of Hierarchy, and the fall of Women’s status
- “Jiroft culture” 5,100 – 4,200 years ago and the History of Iran
- Stonehenge: Paganistic Burial and Astrological Ritual Complex, England (5,100-3,600 years ago)
- Around 5,000-year-old Shared Idea of the “Tree of Life” Ritual Motif
- Complex rituals for elite, seen from China to Egypt, at least by 5,000 years ago
- Around 5,000 years ago: “Birth of the State” where Religion gets Military Power and Influence
- The Center of the World “Axis Mundi” and/or “Sacred Mountains” Mythology Could Relate to the Altai Mountains, Heart of the Steppe
- Progressed organized religion starts, an approximately 5,000-year-old belief system
- China’s Civilization between 5,000-3,000 years ago, was a time of war and class struggle, violent transition from free clans to a Slave or Elite society
- Origin of Logics is Naturalistic Observation at least by around 5,000 years ago.
- Paganism 5,000 years old: progressed organized religion and the state: related to “Anarchism and Socialism” (Kings and the Rise of the State)
- Ziggurats (multi-platform temples: 4,900 years old) to Pyramids (multi-platform tombs: 4,700 years old)
- Did a 4,520–4,420-year-old Volcano In Turkey Inspire the Bible God?
- Finland’s Horned Shaman and Pre-Horned-God at least 4,500 years ago?
- 4,000-year-Old Dolmens in Israel: A Connected Dolmen Religious Phenomenon?
- Creation myths: From chaos, Ex nihilo, Earth-diver, Emergence, World egg, and World parent
- Bronze Age “Ritual” connections of the Bell Beaker culture with the Corded Ware/Single Grave culture, which were related to the Yamnaya culture and Proto-Indo-European Languages/Religions
- Low Gods (Earth/ Tutelary deity), High Gods (Sky/Supreme deity), and Moralistic Gods (Deity enforcement/divine order)
- The exchange of people, ideas, and material-culture including, to me, the new god (Sky Father) and goddess (Earth Mother) religion between the Cucuteni-Trypillians and others which is then spread far and wide
- Koryaks: Indigenous People of the Russian Far East and Big Raven myths also found in Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, and other Indigenous People of North America
- 42 Principles Of Maat (Egyptian Goddess of the justice) around 4,400 years ago, 2000 Years Before Ten Commandments
- “Happy Easter” Well Happy Eostre/Ishter
- 4,320-3,820 years old “Shimao” (North China) site with Totemistic-Shamanistic Paganism and a Stepped Pyramid
- 4,250 to 3,400 Year old Stonehenge from Russia: Arkaim?
- 4,100-year-old beaker with medicinal & flowering plants in a grave of a woman in Scotland
- Early European Farmer ancestry, Kelif el Boroud people with the Cardial Ware culture, and the Bell Beaker culture Paganists too, spread into North Africa, then to the Canary Islands off West Africa
- Flood Accounts: Gilgamesh epic (4,100 years ago) Noah in Genesis (2,600 years ago)
- Paganism 4,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism” (First Moralistic gods, then the Origin time of Monotheism)
- When was the beginning: TIMELINE OF CURRENT RELIGIONS, which start around 4,000 years ago.
- Early Religions Thought to Express Proto-Monotheistic Systems around 4,000 years ago
- Kultepe? An archaeological site with a 4,000 years old women’s rights document.
- Single God Religions (Monotheism) = “Man-o-theism” started around 4,000 years ago with the Great Sky Spirit/God Tiān (天)?
- Confucianism’s Tiān (Shangdi god 4,000 years old): Supernaturalism, Pantheism or Theism?
- Yes, Your Male God is Ridiculous
- Mythology, a Lunar Deity is a Goddess or God of the Moon
- Sacred Land, Hills, and Mountains: Sami Mythology (Paganistic Shamanism)
- Horse Worship/Sacrifice: mythical union of Ruling Elite/Kingship and the Horse
- The Amorite/Amurru people’s God Amurru “Lord of the Steppe”, relates to the Origins of the Bible God?
- Bronze Age Exotic Trade Routes Spread Quite Far as well as Spread Religious Ideas with Them
- Sami and the Northern Indigenous Peoples Landscape, Language, and its Connection to Religion
- Prototype of Ancient Analemmatic Sundials around 3,900-3,150 years ago and a Possible Solar Connection to gods?
- Judaism is around 3,450 or 3,250 years old. (“Paleo-Hebrew” 3,000 years ago and Torah 2,500 years ago)
- The Weakening of Ancient Trade and the Strengthening of Religions around 3000 years ago?
- Are you aware that there are religions that worship women gods, explain now religion tears women down?
- Animistic, Totemistic, and Paganistic Superstition Origins of bible god and the bible’s Religion.
- Myths and Folklore: “Trickster gods and goddesses”
- Jews, Judaism, and the Origins of Some of its Ideas
- An Old Branch of Religion Still Giving Fruit: Sacred Trees
- Dating the BIBLE: naming names and telling times (written less than 3,000 years ago, provable to 2,200 years ago)
- Did a Volcano Inspire the bible god?
- Dené–Yeniseian language, Old Copper Complex, and Pre-Columbian Mound Builders?
- No “dinosaurs and humans didn’t exist together just because some think they are in the bible itself”
- Sacred Shit and Sacred Animals?
- Everyone Killed in the Bible Flood? “Nephilim” (giants)?
- Hey, Damien dude, I have a question for you regarding “the bible” Exodus.
- Archaeology Disproves the Bible
- Bible Battle, Just More, Bible Babble
- The Jericho Conquest lie?
- Canaanites and Israelites?
- Accurate Account on how did Christianity Began?
- Let’s talk about Christianity.
- So the 10 commandments isn’t anything to go by either right?
- Misinformed christian
- Debunking Jesus?
- Paulism vs Jesus
- Ok, you seem confused so let’s talk about Buddhism.
- Unacknowledged Buddhism: Gods, Savior, Demons, Rebirth, Heavens, Hells, and Terrorism
- His Foolishness The Dalai Lama
- Yin and Yang is sexist with an ORIGIN around 2,300 years ago?
- I Believe Archaeology, not Myths & Why Not, as the Religious Myths Already Violate Reason!
- Archaeological, Scientific, & Philosophic evidence shows the god myth is man-made nonsense.
- Aquatic Ape Theory/Hypothesis? As Always, Just Pseudoscience.
- Ancient Aliens Conspiracy Theorists are Pseudohistorians
- The Pseudohistoric and Pseudoscientific claims about “Bakoni Ruins” of South Africa
- Why do people think Religion is much more than supernaturalism and superstitionism?
- Religion is an Evolved Product
- Was the Value of Ancient Women Different?
- 1000 to 1100 CE, human sacrifice Cahokia Mounds a pre-Columbian Native American site
- Feminist atheists as far back as the 1800s?
- Promoting Religion as Real is Mentally Harmful to a Flourishing Humanity
- Screw All Religions and Their Toxic lies, they are all fraud
- Forget Religions’ Unfounded Myths, I Have Substantiated “Archaeology Facts.”
- Religion Dispersal throughout the World
- I Hate Religion Just as I Hate all Pseudoscience
- Exposing Scientology, Eckankar, Wicca and Other Nonsense?
- Main deity or religious belief systems
- Quit Trying to Invent Your God From the Scraps of Science.
- Archaeological, Scientific, & Philosophic evidence shows the god myth is man-made nonsense.
- Ancient Alien Conspiracy Theorists: Misunderstanding, Rhetoric, Misinformation, Fabrications, and Lies
- Misinformation, Distortion, and Pseudoscience in Talking with a Christian Creationist
- Judging the Lack of Goodness in Gods, Even the Norse God Odin
- Challenging the Belief in God-like Aliens and Gods in General
- A Challenge to Christian use of Torture Devices?
- Yes, Hinduism is a Religion
- Trump is One of the Most Reactionary Forces of Far-right Christian Extremism
- Was the Bull Head a Symbol of God? Yes!
- Primate Death Rituals
- Christian – “God and Christianity are objectively true”
- Australopithecus afarensis Death Ritual?
- You Claim Global Warming is a Hoax?
- Doubter of Science and Defamer of Atheists?
- I think that sounds like the Bible?
- History of the Antifa (“anti-fascist”) Movements
- Indianapolis Anti-Blasphemy Laws #Free Soheil Rally
- Damien, you repeat the golden rule in so many forms then you say religion is dogmatic?
- Science is a Trustable Methodology whereas Faith is not Trustable at all!
- Was I ever a believer, before I was an atheist?
- Atheists rise in reason
- Mistrust of science?
- Open to Talking About the Definition of ‘God’? But first, we address Faith.
- ‘United Monarchy’ full of splendor and power – Saul, David, and Solomon? Most likely not.
- Is there EXODUS ARCHAEOLOGY? The short answer is “no.”
- Lacking Proof of Bigfoots, Unicorns, and Gods is Just a Lack of Research?
- Religion and Politics: Faith Beliefs vs. Rational Thinking
- Hammer of Truth that lying pig RELIGION: challenged by an archaeologist
- “The Hammer of Truth” -ontology question- What do You Mean by That?
- Navigation of a bad argument: Ad Hominem vs. Attack
- Why is it Often Claimed that Gods have a Gender?
- Why are basically all monotheistic religions ones that have a male god?
- Shifting through the Claims in support of Faith
- Dear Mr. AtHope, The 20th Century is an Indictment of Secularism and a Failed Atheist Century
- An Understanding of the Worldwide Statistics and Dynamics of Terrorist Incidents and Suicide Attacks
- Intoxication and Evolution? Addressing and Assessing the “Stoned Ape” or “Drunken Monkey” Theories as Catalysts in Human Evolution
- Sacred Menstrual cloth? Inanna’s knot, Isis knot, and maybe Ma’at’s feather?
- Damien, why don’t the Hebrews accept the bible stories?
- Dealing with a Troll and Arguing Over Word Meaning
- Knowledge without Belief? Justified beliefs or disbeliefs worthy of Knowledge?
- Afrocentrism and African Religions
- Crecganford @crecganford offers history & stories of the people, places, gods, & culture
- Empiricism-Denier?
I am not an academic. I am a revolutionary that teaches in public, in places like social media, and in the streets. I am not a leader by some title given but from my commanding leadership style of simply to start teaching everywhere to everyone, all manner of positive education.
To me, Animism starts in Southern Africa, then to West Europe, and becomes Totemism. Another split goes near the Russia and Siberia border becoming Shamanism, which heads into Central Europe meeting up with Totemism, which also had moved there, mixing the two which then heads to Lake Baikal in Siberia. From there this Shamanism-Totemism heads to Turkey where it becomes Paganism.
Not all “Religions” or “Religious Persuasions” have a god(s) but
All can be said to believe in some imaginary beings or imaginary things like spirits, afterlives, etc.
Paganism 12,000-4,000 years old
12,000-7,000 years old: related to (Pre-Capitalism)
7,000-5,000 years old: related to (Capitalism) (World War 0) Elite and their slaves!
5,000 years old: related to (Kings and the Rise of the State)
4,000 years old: related to (First Moralistic gods, then the Origin time of Monotheism)
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Low Gods “Earth” or Tutelary deity and High Gods “Sky” or Supreme deity
“An Earth goddess is a deification of the Earth. Earth goddesses are often associated with the “chthonic” deities of the underworld. Ki and Ninhursag are Mesopotamian earth goddesses. In Greek mythology, the Earth is personified as Gaia, corresponding to Roman Terra, Indic Prithvi/Bhūmi, etc. traced to an “Earth Mother” complementary to the “Sky Father” in Proto-Indo-European religion. Egyptian mythology exceptionally has a sky goddess and an Earth god.” ref
“A mother goddess is a goddess who represents or is a personification of nature, motherhood, fertility, creation, destruction or who embodies the bounty of the Earth. When equated with the Earth or the natural world, such goddesses are sometimes referred to as Mother Earth or as the Earth Mother. In some religious traditions or movements, Heavenly Mother (also referred to as Mother in Heaven or Sky Mother) is the wife or feminine counterpart of the Sky father or God the Father.” ref
“Any masculine sky god is often also king of the gods, taking the position of patriarch within a pantheon. Such king gods are collectively categorized as “sky father” deities, with a polarity between sky and earth often being expressed by pairing a “sky father” god with an “earth mother” goddess (pairings of a sky mother with an earth father are less frequent). A main sky goddess is often the queen of the gods and may be an air/sky goddess in her own right, though she usually has other functions as well with “sky” not being her main. In antiquity, several sky goddesses in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Near East were called Queen of Heaven. Neopagans often apply it with impunity to sky goddesses from other regions who were never associated with the term historically. The sky often has important religious significance. Many religions, both polytheistic and monotheistic, have deities associated with the sky.” ref
“In comparative mythology, sky father is a term for a recurring concept in polytheistic religions of a sky god who is addressed as a “father”, often the father of a pantheon and is often either a reigning or former King of the Gods. The concept of “sky father” may also be taken to include Sun gods with similar characteristics, such as Ra. The concept is complementary to an “earth mother“. “Sky Father” is a direct translation of the Vedic Dyaus Pita, etymologically descended from the same Proto-Indo-European deity name as the Greek Zeûs Pater and Roman Jupiter and Germanic Týr, Tir or Tiwaz, all of which are reflexes of the same Proto-Indo-European deity’s name, *Dyēus Ph₂tḗr. While there are numerous parallels adduced from outside of Indo-European mythology, there are exceptions (e.g. In Egyptian mythology, Nut is the sky mother and Geb is the earth father).” ref
Tutelary deity
“A tutelary (also tutelar) is a deity or spirit who is a guardian, patron, or protector of a particular place, geographic feature, person, lineage, nation, culture, or occupation. The etymology of “tutelary” expresses the concept of safety and thus of guardianship. In late Greek and Roman religion, one type of tutelary deity, the genius, functions as the personal deity or daimon of an individual from birth to death. Another form of personal tutelary spirit is the familiar spirit of European folklore.” ref
“A tutelary (also tutelar) in Korean shamanism, jangseung and sotdae were placed at the edge of villages to frighten off demons. They were also worshiped as deities. Seonangshin is the patron deity of the village in Korean tradition and was believed to embody the Seonangdang. In Philippine animism, Diwata or Lambana are deities or spirits that inhabit sacred places like mountains and mounds and serve as guardians. Such as: Maria Makiling is the deity who guards Mt. Makiling and Maria Cacao and Maria Sinukuan. In Shinto, the spirits, or kami, which give life to human bodies come from nature and return to it after death. Ancestors are therefore themselves tutelaries to be worshiped. And similarly, Native American beliefs such as Tonás, tutelary animal spirit among the Zapotec and Totems, familial or clan spirits among the Ojibwe, can be animals.” ref
“A tutelary (also tutelar) in Austronesian beliefs such as: Atua (gods and spirits of the Polynesian peoples such as the Māori or the Hawaiians), Hanitu (Bunun of Taiwan‘s term for spirit), Hyang (Kawi, Sundanese, Javanese, and Balinese Supreme Being, in ancient Java and Bali mythology and this spiritual entity, can be either divine or ancestral), Kaitiaki (New Zealand Māori term used for the concept of guardianship, for the sky, the sea, and the land), Kawas (mythology) (divided into 6 groups: gods, ancestors, souls of the living, spirits of living things, spirits of lifeless objects, and ghosts), Tiki (Māori mythology, Tiki is the first man created by either Tūmatauenga or Tāne and represents deified ancestors found in most Polynesian cultures). ” ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref
Mesopotamian Tutelary Deities can be seen as ones related to City-States
“Historical city-states included Sumerian cities such as Uruk and Ur; Ancient Egyptian city-states, such as Thebes and Memphis; the Phoenician cities (such as Tyre and Sidon); the five Philistine city-states; the Berber city-states of the Garamantes; the city-states of ancient Greece (the poleis such as Athens, Sparta, Thebes, and Corinth); the Roman Republic (which grew from a city-state into a vast empire); the Italian city-states from the Middle Ages to the early modern period, such as Florence, Siena, Ferrara, Milan (which as they grew in power began to dominate neighboring cities) and Genoa and Venice, which became powerful thalassocracies; the Mayan and other cultures of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica (including cities such as Chichen Itza, Tikal, Copán and Monte Albán); the central Asian cities along the Silk Road; the city-states of the Swahili coast; Ragusa; states of the medieval Russian lands such as Novgorod and Pskov; and many others.” ref
“The Uruk period (ca. 4000 to 3100 BCE; also known as Protoliterate period) of Mesopotamia, named after the Sumerian city of Uruk, this period saw the emergence of urban life in Mesopotamia and the Sumerian civilization. City-States like Uruk and others had a patron tutelary City Deity along with a Priest-King.” ref
“Chinese folk religion, both past, and present, includes myriad tutelary deities. Exceptional individuals, highly cultivated sages, and prominent ancestors can be deified and honored after death. Lord Guan is the patron of military personnel and police, while Mazu is the patron of fishermen and sailors. Such as Tu Di Gong (Earth Deity) is the tutelary deity of a locality, and each individual locality has its own Earth Deity and Cheng Huang Gong (City God) is the guardian deity of an individual city, worshipped by local officials and locals since imperial times.” ref
“A tutelary (also tutelar) in Hinduism, personal tutelary deities are known as ishta-devata, while family tutelary deities are known as Kuladevata. Gramadevata are guardian deities of villages. Devas can also be seen as tutelary. Shiva is the patron of yogis and renunciants. City goddesses include: Mumbadevi (Mumbai), Sachchika (Osian); Kuladevis include: Ambika (Porwad), and Mahalakshmi. In NorthEast India Meitei mythology and religion (Sanamahism) of Manipur, there are various types of tutelary deities, among which Lam Lais are the most predominant ones. Tibetan Buddhism has Yidam as a tutelary deity. Dakini is the patron of those who seek knowledge.” ref
“A tutelary (also tutelar) The Greeks also thought deities guarded specific places: for instance, Athena was the patron goddess of the city of Athens. Socrates spoke of hearing the voice of his personal spirit or daimonion:
You have often heard me speak of an oracle or sign which comes to me … . This sign I have had ever since I was a child. The sign is a voice which comes to me and always forbids me to do something which I am going to do, but never commands me to do anything, and this is what stands in the way of my being a politician.” ref
“Tutelary deities who guard and preserve a place or a person are fundamental to ancient Roman religion. The tutelary deity of a man was his Genius, that of a woman her Juno. In the Imperial era, the Genius of the Emperor was a focus of Imperial cult. An emperor might also adopt a major deity as his personal patron or tutelary, as Augustus did Apollo. Precedents for claiming the personal protection of a deity were established in the Republican era, when for instance the Roman dictator Sulla advertised the goddess Victory as his tutelary by holding public games (ludi) in her honor.” ref
“Each town or city had one or more tutelary deities, whose protection was considered particularly vital in time of war and siege. Rome itself was protected by a goddess whose name was to be kept ritually secret on pain of death (for a supposed case, see Quintus Valerius Soranus). The Capitoline Triad of Juno, Jupiter, and Minerva were also tutelaries of Rome. The Italic towns had their own tutelary deities. Juno often had this function, as at the Latin town of Lanuvium and the Etruscan city of Veii, and was often housed in an especially grand temple on the arx (citadel) or other prominent or central location. The tutelary deity of Praeneste was Fortuna, whose oracle was renowned.” ref
“The Roman ritual of evocatio was premised on the belief that a town could be made vulnerable to military defeat if the power of its tutelary deity were diverted outside the city, perhaps by the offer of superior cult at Rome. The depiction of some goddesses such as the Magna Mater (Great Mother, or Cybele) as “tower-crowned” represents their capacity to preserve the city. A town in the provinces might adopt a deity from within the Roman religious sphere to serve as its guardian, or syncretize its own tutelary with such; for instance, a community within the civitas of the Remi in Gaul adopted Apollo as its tutelary, and at the capital of the Remi (present-day Rheims), the tutelary was Mars Camulus.” ref
Household deity (a kind of or related to a Tutelary deity)
“A household deity is a deity or spirit that protects the home, looking after the entire household or certain key members. It has been a common belief in paganism as well as in folklore across many parts of the world. Household deities fit into two types; firstly, a specific deity – typically a goddess – often referred to as a hearth goddess or domestic goddess who is associated with the home and hearth, such as the ancient Greek Hestia.” ref
“The second type of household deities are those that are not one singular deity, but a type, or species of animistic deity, who usually have lesser powers than major deities. This type was common in the religions of antiquity, such as the Lares of ancient Roman religion, the Gashin of Korean shamanism, and Cofgodas of Anglo-Saxon paganism. These survived Christianisation as fairy-like creatures existing in folklore, such as the Anglo-Scottish Brownie and Slavic Domovoy.” ref
“Household deities were usually worshipped not in temples but in the home, where they would be represented by small idols (such as the teraphim of the Bible, often translated as “household gods” in Genesis 31:19 for example), amulets, paintings, or reliefs. They could also be found on domestic objects, such as cosmetic articles in the case of Tawaret. The more prosperous houses might have a small shrine to the household god(s); the lararium served this purpose in the case of the Romans. The gods would be treated as members of the family and invited to join in meals, or be given offerings of food and drink.” ref
“In many religions, both ancient and modern, a god would preside over the home. Certain species, or types, of household deities, existed. An example of this was the Roman Lares. Many European cultures retained house spirits into the modern period. Some examples of these include:
- Brownie (Scotland and England) or Hob (England) / Kobold (Germany) / Goblin / Hobgoblin
- Domovoy (Slavic)
- Nisse (Norwegian or Danish) / Tomte (Swedish) / Tonttu (Finnish)
- Húsvættir (Norse)” ref
“Although the cosmic status of household deities was not as lofty as that of the Twelve Olympians or the Aesir, they were also jealous of their dignity and also had to be appeased with shrines and offerings, however humble. Because of their immediacy they had arguably more influence on the day-to-day affairs of men than the remote gods did. Vestiges of their worship persisted long after Christianity and other major religions extirpated nearly every trace of the major pagan pantheons. Elements of the practice can be seen even today, with Christian accretions, where statues to various saints (such as St. Francis) protect gardens and grottos. Even the gargoyles found on older churches, could be viewed as guardians partitioning a sacred space.” ref
“For centuries, Christianity fought a mop-up war against these lingering minor pagan deities, but they proved tenacious. For example, Martin Luther‘s Tischreden have numerous – quite serious – references to dealing with kobolds. Eventually, rationalism and the Industrial Revolution threatened to erase most of these minor deities, until the advent of romantic nationalism rehabilitated them and embellished them into objects of literary curiosity in the 19th century. Since the 20th century this literature has been mined for characters for role-playing games, video games, and other fantasy personae, not infrequently invested with invented traits and hierarchies somewhat different from their mythological and folkloric roots.” ref
“In contradistinction to both Herbert Spencer and Edward Burnett Tylor, who defended theories of animistic origins of ancestor worship, Émile Durkheim saw its origin in totemism. In reality, this distinction is somewhat academic, since totemism may be regarded as a particularized manifestation of animism, and something of a synthesis of the two positions was attempted by Sigmund Freud. In Freud’s Totem and Taboo, both totem and taboo are outward expressions or manifestations of the same psychological tendency, a concept which is complementary to, or which rather reconciles, the apparent conflict. Freud preferred to emphasize the psychoanalytic implications of the reification of metaphysical forces, but with particular emphasis on its familial nature. This emphasis underscores, rather than weakens, the ancestral component.” ref
“William Edward Hearn, a noted classicist, and jurist, traced the origin of domestic deities from the earliest stages as an expression of animism, a belief system thought to have existed also in the neolithic, and the forerunner of Indo-European religion. In his analysis of the Indo-European household, in Chapter II “The House Spirit”, Section 1, he states:
The belief which guided the conduct of our forefathers was … the spirit rule of dead ancestors.” ref
“In Section 2 he proceeds to elaborate:
It is thus certain that the worship of deceased ancestors is a vera causa, and not a mere hypothesis. …
In the other European nations, the Slavs, the Teutons, and the Kelts, the House Spirit appears with no less distinctness. … [T]he existence of that worship does not admit of doubt. … The House Spirits had a multitude of other names which it is needless here to enumerate, but all of which are more or less expressive of their friendly relations with man. … In [England] … [h]e is the Brownie. … In Scotland this same Brownie is well known. He is usually described as attached to particular families, with whom he has been known to reside for centuries, threshing the corn, cleaning the house, and performing similar household tasks. His favorite gratification was milk and honey.” ref
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“These ideas are my speculations from the evidence.”
I am still researching the “god‘s origins” all over the world. So, you know, it is very complicated, but I am smart and willing to look, DEEP, if necessary, which going very deep does seem to be needed here, when trying to actually understand the evolution of gods and goddesses. I am sure of a few things and less sure of others, but even in stuff I am not fully grasping I still am slowly figuring it out, to explain it to others. But as I research more, I am understanding things a little better, though I am still working on understanding it all or something close and thus always figuring out more.
Sky Father/Sky God?
“Egyptian: (Nut) Sky Mother and (Geb) Earth Father” (Egypt is different but similar)
Turkic/Mongolic: (Tengri/Tenger Etseg) Sky Father and (Eje/Gazar Eej) Earth Mother *Transeurasian*
Hawaiian: (Wākea) Sky Father and (Papahānaumoku) Earth Mother *Austronesian*
New Zealand/ Māori: (Ranginui) Sky Father and (Papatūānuku) Earth Mother *Austronesian*
Proto-Indo-European: (Dyḗus/Dyḗus ph₂tḗr) Sky Father and (Dʰéǵʰōm/Pleth₂wih₁) Earth Mother
Indo-Aryan: (Dyaus Pita) Sky Father and (Prithvi Mata) Earth Mother *Indo-European*
Italic: (Jupiter) Sky Father and (Juno) Sky Mother *Indo-European*
Etruscan: (Tinia) Sky Father and (Uni) Sky Mother *Tyrsenian/Italy Pre–Indo-European*
Hellenic/Greek: (Zeus) Sky Father and (Hera) Sky Mother who started as an “Earth Goddess” *Indo-European*
Nordic: (Dagr) Sky Father and (Nótt) Sky Mother *Indo-European*
Slavic: (Perun) Sky Father and (Mokosh) Earth Mother *Indo-European*
Illyrian: (Deipaturos) Sky Father and (Messapic Damatura’s “earth-mother” maybe) Earth Mother *Indo-European*
Albanian: (Zojz) Sky Father and (?) *Indo-European*
Baltic: (Perkūnas) Sky Father and (Saulė) Sky Mother *Indo-European*
Germanic: (Týr) Sky Father and (?) *Indo-European*
Colombian-Muisca: (Bochica) Sky Father and (Huythaca) Sky Mother *Chibchan*
Aztec: (Quetzalcoatl) Sky Father and (Xochiquetzal) Sky Mother *Uto-Aztecan*
Incan: (Viracocha) Sky Father and (Mama Runtucaya) Sky Mother *Quechuan*
China: (Tian/Shangdi) Sky Father and (Dì) Earth Mother *Sino-Tibetan*
Sumerian, Assyrian and Babylonian: (An/Anu) Sky Father and (Ki) Earth Mother
Finnish: (Ukko) Sky Father and (Akka) Earth Mother *Finno-Ugric*
Sami: (Horagalles) Sky Father and (Ravdna) Earth Mother *Finno-Ugric*
Puebloan-Zuni: (Ápoyan Ta’chu) Sky Father and (Áwitelin Tsíta) Earth Mother
Puebloan-Hopi: (Tawa) Sky Father and (Kokyangwuti/Spider Woman/Grandmother) Earth Mother *Uto-Aztecan*
Puebloan-Navajo: (Tsohanoai) Sky Father and (Estsanatlehi) Earth Mother *Na-Dene*
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“In Australian Aboriginal mythology, Baiame (or Biame, Biami, Baayami, Baayama, Byamee) is the creator god and sky father, and Birrangulu, or Birrahgnooloo, a “fertility spirit” with powers over water (can send floods if properly asked), maintenance of the earthly landscape, and one of his two wives, can be seen as the mother from the sky, often being identified as an emu. By coming to earth (and possibly staying on earth), she may have become the earth mother and is said to be the mother of Daramulum. Daramulum (variations: Darhumulan, Daramulan, Dhurramoolun or Dharramaalan), a sky hero shapeshifter associated with an emu-wife. In other stories, Dharramalan is said to be the brother of Baiame. The Baiame story tells how Baiame came down from the sky to the land and created rivers, mountains, and forests in all the lands. When he had finished, he returned to the sky, and people called him the Sky Hero, or All Father, or Sky Father. He then gave the people their laws of life, traditions, songs, and culture of several Aboriginal Australian peoples of south-eastern Australia, such as the Wonnarua, Kamilaroi, Guringay, Eora, Darkinjung, and Wiradjuri peoples.” ref, ref, ref
“There are Australian Aborigines who believed that the Sun Mother created all the animals, plants, and bodies of water on earth upon the urging of the Father of All Spirits. These two divine beings did not actually have children. Only their names reflected the mother-father theme. However, the Sun Mother was portrayed as one who gives life to the sleeping spirits. A human mother also gives life to a spirit.” ref
I believe that the birth of the Earth Mother, which may have occurred sometime before 10,000 years ago, or after it sometime at least by 8,000 years ago to likely 9,000 years ago from the Sky Woman/Mistress of Animals, took place at Nevalı Çori (8400-8100 BCE or approximately 10,000 years ago), in Southeastern Anatolia, Turkey. This new Earth Mother/Mistress of Animals goddess is later seen at Çatal Höyük (7,100-5,700 BCE or 9,100 to 7,700 years ago), sitting figurines, and to me, the standing figurines are likely related to the sky. Later, after 6/5,000 years ago, even sky deities may be depicted as sitting and sitting in a chair/stool in general, after this time seems to be associated with elites and deities. These ideas seem to spread in the movement ways of Haplogroup E, west to Central Turkey as seen at seen at Çatal Höyük, on next to west Turkey, then Europe/Balkans/Ukraine, as seen at the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture, It moved south to Israel and Egypt/North Africa, as well as Sodi Arabia and the Horn of Africa. These ideas seem to spread East to Iran, then Pakistan/India, as seen in the Indus Valley civilization.
From Sky Mother to Earth Mother?
Native American Legends: Sky Woman (Ataensic, Atahensic, Ataentsic)
“Tribal affiliation: Iroquois League, Wyandot
Native names: Ataensic, Ata-en-sic, Ataentsic, Atahensic, Ataensiq, Aataentsic, Athensic, Ataensie, Eataentsic, Eyatahentsik, Iaataientsik, Yatahentshi; Iotsitsisonh, Iotsitsisen, Iottsitison, Iottsitíson, Atsi’tsiaka:ion, Atsi’tsiakaion, Ajinjagaayonh; Iagen’tci, Iagentci, Eagentci, Yekëhtsi, Yagentci; Awenhai, Awenha’i, Awenha:ih; Wa’tewatsitsiané:kare; Aientsik, Aentsik
Also known as: Grandmother Moon, the Woman who Fell from the Sky
Type: Mother goddess, sky spirit, first woman
Related figures in other tribes: Nokomis (Anishinabe), Our Grandmother (Shawnee)” ref
“Sky Woman is either the grandmother or the mother (depending on the version) of the twin culture heroes Sky-Holder and Flint, sometimes known as Good Spirit and Bad Spirit.” ref
Sky Woman (depending on the version) either dies giving birth to twins and becomes Earth Mother, or Sky Woman has a daughter who dies giving birth to twins, becoming Earth Mother.
“Myths about Sky Woman vary enormously from community to community. In some Iroquois myths, Sky Woman is a minor character who dies in childbirth immediately upon reaching the earth, while in others, she is the central character of the entire creation saga. In some myths, Sky Woman is the mother of the twins, but more commonly, she is the mother of a daughter, Tekawerahkwa or Breath of the Wind, who in turn gives birth to the twins. In some Iroquois traditions, the twins represent good and evil, while in others, neither twin is evil, but Flint represents destruction, death, night, and winter to Sky-Holder’s creation, life, day, and summer. In many versions of the myth, Sky Woman favored Flint, usually because Flint had deceived her into thinking Sky-Holder killed Tekawerahkwa, but sometimes because Sky Woman herself disapproved of Sky-Holder’s human creations and their ways. In other versions, Sky Woman supported both of her grandchildren equally, declaring that there must be both life and death in the world. Sky Woman is associated with the moon by many Iroquois people. In some traditions, Sky Woman turned into the moon; in others, Sky-Holder turned her body into the sun, moon, and stars after her death; and in still others, it was Sky Woman herself who created the sun, moon, and stars.” ref
“Sky Woman goes by many different names in Iroquois mythology. The name “Sky Woman” itself is a title, not her name– she is a Sky Woman because she is one of the Sky People, Karionake. Her own name is variously given as Ataensic (a Huron name probably meaning “ancient body,”) Iagentci (a Seneca name meaning “ancient woman,”) Iotsitsisonh or Atsi’tsiaka:ion (Mohawk names meaning “fertile flower” and “mature flower,”) Awenhai (a Cayuga and Seneca name also meaning “mature flower,”) and Aentsik (probably an Iroquois borrowing from Huron.) She is sometimes also referred to as Grandmother or Grandmother Moon.” ref
“Sky Woman (Shy Mother in my thinking) is the Iroquois sky goddess who falls from the sky world to a watery world, where animals create land on a turtle’s back. Sky Woman gives birth to the first child on earth, a daughter (Earth Mother in my thinking), who later becomes pregnant, dies in childbirth, giving birth to twins who are polar opposites; her body becomes the source of the Earth’s fertility. The good twin created the Moon and Stars from his mother’s breasts, and tasked them, his sisters, to guard the night sky. He gave the rest of his mother’s body to the earth, the Great Mother from whom all life came. Hahgwehdiyu then planted a seed into his mother’s corpse. From this seed grew corn, as a gift to mankind.”
According to Mohawk midwife Katsi Cook: “They say corn is the breast milk of Mother Earth. In Akwesasne, a Mohawk community on the New York/Canadian border, the connections between women’s fertile bodies and these important cultural foods are reinforced through Mother Earth gardens, which were planted as part of the Ohero:kon Rites of Passage ceremonies revitalized by Bear Clan Mother Louise MacDonald and her family. As part of this ceremony, young men shape a pile of dirt into the form of a woman’s body, while the uncles lead them in a discussion about the sanctity of women. The young women then plant seeds on the woman-shaped garden—corn at her breasts, strawberries at her heart, beans at her fingers, squash at her navel, and sunchokes at her feet—just as they sprang up from the grave of Sky Woman’s daughter.
Sky Woman (Shy Mother in my thinking) fell from the sky and was placed upon the newly formed earth made for her. Soon after her arrival, Sky Woman gave birth to twins. The firstborn became known as the Good Spirit. The other twin caused his mother so much pain that she died during his birth. He was to be known as the Evil Spirit. The Good Spirit took his mother’s head and hung it in the sky, and it became the sun. The Good Spirit also fashioned the stars and the moon from his mother’s body. He buried the remaining parts of Sky Woman under the earth (Thus, she became Earth Mother, in my thinking). Thus, living things may always find nourishment from the soil, for it springs from Mother Earth. While the Good Spirit provided light, the Evil Spirit created the darkness.” ref
Hinduism around 3,700 to 3,500 years old. ref
Judaism around 3,450 or 3,250 years old. (The first writing in the bible was “Paleo-Hebrew” dated to around 3,000 years ago Khirbet Qeiyafa is the site of an ancient fortress city overlooking the Elah Valley. And many believe the religious Jewish texts were completed around 2,500) ref, ref
Judaism is around 3,450 or 3,250 years old. (“Paleo-Hebrew” 3,000 years ago and Torah 2,500 years ago)
“Judaism is an Abrahamic, its roots as an organized religion in the Middle East during the Bronze Age. Some scholars argue that modern Judaism evolved from Yahwism, the religion of ancient Israel and Judah, by the late 6th century BCE, and is thus considered to be one of the oldest monotheistic religions.” ref
“Yahwism is the name given by modern scholars to the religion of ancient Israel, essentially polytheistic, with a plethora of gods and goddesses. Heading the pantheon was Yahweh, the national god of the Israelite kingdoms of Israel and Judah, with his consort, the goddess Asherah; below them were second-tier gods and goddesses such as Baal, Shamash, Yarikh, Mot, and Astarte, all of whom had their own priests and prophets and numbered royalty among their devotees, and a third and fourth tier of minor divine beings, including the mal’ak, the messengers of the higher gods, who in later times became the angels of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Yahweh, however, was not the ‘original’ god of Israel “Isra-El”; it is El, the head of the Canaanite pantheon, whose name forms the basis of the name “Israel”, and none of the Old Testament patriarchs, the tribes of Israel, the Judges, or the earliest monarchs, have a Yahwistic theophoric name (i.e., one incorporating the name of Yahweh).” ref
“El is a Northwest Semitic word meaning “god” or “deity“, or referring (as a proper name) to any one of multiple major ancient Near Eastern deities. A rarer form, ‘ila, represents the predicate form in Old Akkadian and in Amorite. The word is derived from the Proto-Semitic *ʔil-, meaning “god”. Specific deities known as ‘El or ‘Il include the supreme god of the ancient Canaanite religion and the supreme god of East Semitic speakers in Mesopotamia’s Early Dynastic Period. ʼĒl is listed at the head of many pantheons. In some Canaanite and Ugaritic sources, ʼĒl played a role as father of the gods, of creation, or both. For example, in the Ugaritic texts, ʾil mlk is understood to mean “ʼĒl the King” but ʾil hd as “the god Hadad“. The Semitic root ʾlh (Arabic ʾilāh, Aramaic ʾAlāh, ʾElāh, Hebrew ʾelōah) may be ʾl with a parasitic h, and ʾl may be an abbreviated form of ʾlh. In Ugaritic the plural form meaning “gods” is ʾilhm, equivalent to Hebrew ʾelōhîm “powers”. In the Hebrew texts this word is interpreted as being semantically singular for “god” by biblical commentators. However the documentary hypothesis for the Old Testament (corresponds to the Jewish Torah) developed originally in the 1870s, identifies these that different authors – the Jahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomist, and the Priestly source – were responsible for editing stories from a polytheistic religion into those of a monotheistic religion. Inconsistencies that arise between monotheism and polytheism in the texts are reflective of this hypothesis.” ref
Jainism around 2,599 – 2,527 years old. ref
Confucianism around 2,600 – 2,551 years old. ref
Buddhism around 2,563/2,480 – 2,483/2,400 years old. ref
Christianity around 2,o00 years old. ref
Shinto around 1,305 years old. ref
Islam around 1407–1385 years old. ref
Knowledge to Ponder:
Stars/Astrology:
- Possibly, around 30,000 years ago (in simpler form) to 6,000 years ago, Stars/Astrology are connected to Ancestors, Spirit Animals, and Deities.
- The star also seems to be a possible proto-star for Star of Ishtar, Star of Inanna, or Star of Venus.
- Around 7,000 to 6,000 years ago, Star Constellations/Astrology have connections to the “Kurgan phenomenon” of below-ground “mound” stone/wood burial structures and “Dolmen phenomenon” of above-ground stone burial structures.
- Around 6,500–5,800 years ago, The Northern Levant migrations into Jordon and Israel in the Southern Levant brought new cultural and religious transfer from Turkey and Iran.
- “The Ghassulian Star,” a mysterious 6,000-year-old mural from Jordan may have connections to the European paganstic kurgan/dolmens phenomenon.
“Astrology is a range of divinatory practices, recognized as pseudoscientific since the 18th century, that claim to discern information about human affairs and terrestrial events by studying the apparent positions of celestial objects. Different cultures have employed forms of astrology since at least the 2nd millennium BCE, these practices having originated in calendrical systems used to predict seasonal shifts and to interpret celestial cycles as signs of divine communications. Most, if not all, cultures have attached importance to what they observed in the sky, and some—such as the Hindus, Chinese, and the Maya—developed elaborate systems for predicting terrestrial events from celestial observations. Western astrology, one of the oldest astrological systems still in use, can trace its roots to 19th–17th century BCE Mesopotamia, from where it spread to Ancient Greece, Rome, the Islamicate world and eventually Central and Western Europe. Contemporary Western astrology is often associated with systems of horoscopes that purport to explain aspects of a person’s personality and predict significant events in their lives based on the positions of celestial objects; the majority of professional astrologers rely on such systems.” ref
Around 5,500 years ago, Science evolves, The first evidence of science was 5,500 years ago and was demonstrated by a body of empirical, theoretical, and practical knowledge about the natural world. ref
Around 5,000 years ago, Origin of Logics is a Naturalistic Observation (principles of valid reasoning, inference, & demonstration) ref
Around 4,150 to 4,000 years ago: The earliest surviving versions of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, which was originally titled “He who Saw the Deep” (Sha naqba īmuru) or “Surpassing All Other Kings” (Shūtur eli sharrī) were written. ref
Hinduism:
- 3,700 years ago or so, the oldest of the Hindu Vedas (scriptures), the Rig Veda was composed.
- 3,500 years ago or so, the Vedic Age began in India after the collapse of the Indus Valley Civilization.
Judaism:
- around 3,000 years ago, the first writing in the bible was “Paleo-Hebrew”
- around 2,500 years ago, many believe the religious Jewish texts were completed
Myths: The bible inspired religion is not just one religion or one myth but a grouping of several religions and myths
- Around 3,450 or 3,250 years ago, according to legend, is the traditionally accepted period in which the Israelite lawgiver, Moses, provided the Ten Commandments.
- Around 2,500 to 2,400 years ago, a collection of ancient religious writings by the Israelites based primarily upon the Hebrew Bible, Tanakh, or Old Testament is the first part of Christianity’s bible.
- Around 2,400 years ago, the most accepted hypothesis is that the canon was formed in stages, first the Pentateuch (Torah).
- Around 2,140 to 2,116 years ago, the Prophets was written during the Hasmonean dynasty, and finally the remaining books.
- Christians traditionally divide the Old Testament into four sections:
- The first five books or Pentateuch (Torah).
- The proposed history books telling the history of the Israelites from their conquest of Canaan to their defeat and exile in Babylon.
- The poetic and proposed “Wisdom books” dealing, in various forms, with questions of good and evil in the world.
- The books of the biblical prophets, warning of the consequences of turning away from God:
- Henotheism:
- Exodus 20:23 “You shall not make other gods besides Me (not saying there are no other gods just not to worship them); gods of silver or gods of gold, you shall not make for yourselves.”
- Polytheism:
- Judges 10:6 “Then the sons of Israel again did evil in the sight of the LORD, served the Baals and the Ashtaroth, the gods of Aram, the gods of Sidon, the gods of Moab, the gods of the sons of Ammon, and the gods of the Philistines; thus they forsook the LORD and did not serve Him.”
- 1 Corinthians 8:5 “For even if there are so-called gods whether in heaven or on earth, as indeed there are many gods and many lords.”
- Monotheism:
- Isaiah 43:10 “You are my witnesses,” declares the LORD, “and my servant whom I have chosen, so that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he. Before me no god was formed, nor will there be one after me.
Around 2,570 to 2,270 Years Ago, there is a confirmation of atheistic doubting as well as atheistic thinking, mainly by Greek philosophers. However, doubting gods is likely as old as the invention of gods and should destroy the thinking that belief in god(s) is the “default belief”. The Greek word is apistos (a “not” and pistos “faithful,”), thus not faithful or faithless because one is unpersuaded and unconvinced by a god(s) claim. Short Definition: unbelieving, unbeliever, or unbelief.
Expressions of Atheistic Thinking:
- Around 2,600 years ago, Ajita Kesakambali, ancient Indian philosopher, who is the first known proponent of Indian materialism. ref
- Around 2,535 to 2,475 years ago, Heraclitus, Greek pre-Socratic philosopher, a native of the Greek city Ephesus, Ionia, on the coast of Anatolia, also known as Asia Minor or modern Turkey. ref
- Around 2,500 to 2,400 years ago, according to The Story of Civilization book series certain African pygmy tribes have no identifiable gods, spirits, or religious beliefs or rituals, and even what burials accrue are without ceremony. ref
- Around 2,490 to 2,430 years ago, Empedocles, Greek pre-Socratic philosopher and a citizen of Agrigentum, a Greek city in Sicily. ref
- Around 2,460 to 2,370 years ago, Democritus, Greek pre-Socratic philosopher considered to be the “father of modern science” possibly had some disbelief amounting to atheism. ref
- Around 2,399 years ago or so, Socrates, a famous Greek philosopher was tried for sinfulness by teaching doubt of state gods. ref
- Around 2,341 to 2,270 years ago, Epicurus, a Greek philosopher known for composing atheistic critics and famously stated, “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him god?” ref
This last expression by Epicurus, seems to be an expression of Axiological Atheism. To understand and utilize value or actually possess “Value Conscious/Consciousness” to both give a strong moral “axiological” argument (the problem of evil) as well as use it to fortify humanism and positive ethical persuasion of human helping and care responsibilities. Because value-blindness gives rise to sociopathic/psychopathic evil.
“Theists, there has to be a god, as something can not come from nothing.”
Well, thus something (unknown) happened and then there was something. This does not tell us what the something that may have been involved with something coming from nothing. A supposed first cause, thus something (unknown) happened and then there was something is not an open invitation to claim it as known, neither is it justified to call or label such an unknown as anything, especially an unsubstantiated magical thinking belief born of mythology and religious storytelling.
Dylan Violette (CopperViolette)
Psychology Minor and Philosophy Student who’s interested in archaeology, history, and astronomy.
Current Research Interests: The Archaic Era in North America; Long-Distance Trading Across the Americas; Eurasian Prehistory. Current Research Focus: The Eastern Archaic and the Megalithic Builders (10,000 – 1,177 B.C.E.).
Dylan Violette and I decided to blog jointly and will start doing videos together as well. Cory has had to step away from our joint endeavors we did for years, as he has issues he needs to focus on, and my friend Dylan is willing to step in and help me continue making thoughtful videos together.
Our Joint Academia Articles:
While hallucinogens are associated with shamanism, it is alcohol that is associated with paganism.
The Atheist-Humanist-Leftist Revolutionaries Shows in the prehistory series:
Show two: Pre-animism 300,000 years old and animism 100,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism”
Show tree: Totemism 50,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism”
Show four: Shamanism 30,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism”
Show five: Paganism 12,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism”
Show six: Emergence of hierarchy, sexism, slavery, and the new male god dominance: Paganism 7,000-5,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism” (Capitalism) (World War 0) Elite and their slaves!
Prehistory: related to “Anarchism and Socialism” the division of labor, power, rights, and recourses: VIDEO
Pre-animism 300,000 years old and animism 100,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism”: VIDEO
Totemism 50,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism”: VIDEO
Shamanism 30,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism”: VIDEO
Paganism 12,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism” (Pre-Capitalism): VIDEO
Paganism 7,000-5,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism” (Capitalism) (World War 0) Elite and their slaves: VIEDO
Paganism 5,000 years old: progressed organized religion and the state: related to “Anarchism and Socialism” (Kings and the Rise of the State): VIEDO
Paganism 4,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism” (First Moralistic gods, then the Origin time of Monotheism): VIEDO
I do not hate simply because I challenge and expose myths or lies any more than others being thought of as loving simply because of the protection and hiding from challenge their favored myths or lies.
The truth is best championed in the sunlight of challenge.
An archaeologist once said to me “Damien religion and culture are very different”
My response, So are you saying that was always that way, such as would you say Native Americans’ cultures are separate from their religions? And do you think it always was the way you believe?
I had said that religion was a cultural product. That is still how I see it and there are other archaeologists that think close to me as well. Gods too are the myths of cultures that did not understand science or the world around them, seeing magic/supernatural everywhere.
I personally think there is a goddess and not enough evidence to support a male god at Çatalhöyük but if there was both a male and female god and goddess then I know the kind of gods they were like Proto-Indo-European mythology.
This series idea was addressed in, Anarchist Teaching as Free Public Education or Free Education in the Public: VIDEO
Our 12 video series: Organized Oppression: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of power (9,000-4,000 years ago), is adapted from: The Complete and Concise History of the Sumerians and Early Bronze Age Mesopotamia (7000-2000 BC): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szFjxmY7jQA by “History with Cy“
Show #1: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of Power (Samarra, Halaf, Ubaid)
Show #2: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of Power
Show #3: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of Power (Uruk and the First Cities)
Show #4: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of Power (First Kings)
Show #5: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of Power (Early Dynastic Period)
Show #6: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of Power
Show #7: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of Power (Sargon and Akkadian Rule)
Show #9: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of Power (Gudea of Lagash and Utu-hegal)
Show #12: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of Power (Aftermath and Legacy of Sumer)
The “Atheist-Humanist-Leftist Revolutionaries”
Cory Johnston ☭ Ⓐ Atheist Leftist @Skepticallefty & I (Damien Marie AtHope) @AthopeMarie (my YouTube & related blog) are working jointly in atheist, antitheist, antireligionist, antifascist, anarchist, socialist, and humanist endeavors in our videos together, generally, every other Saturday.
Why Does Power Bring Responsibility?
Think, how often is it the powerless that start wars, oppress others, or commit genocide? So, I guess the question is to us all, to ask, how can power not carry responsibility in a humanity concept? I know I see the deep ethical responsibility that if there is power their must be a humanistic responsibility of ethical and empathic stewardship of that power. Will I be brave enough to be kind? Will I possess enough courage to be compassionate? Will my valor reach its height of empathy? I as everyone, earns our justified respect by our actions, that are good, ethical, just, protecting, and kind. Do I have enough self-respect to put my love for humanity’s flushing, over being brought down by some of its bad actors? May we all be the ones doing good actions in the world, to help human flourishing.
I create the world I want to live in, striving for flourishing. Which is not a place but a positive potential involvement and promotion; a life of humanist goal precision. To master oneself, also means mastering positive prosocial behaviors needed for human flourishing. I may have lost a god myth as an atheist, but I am happy to tell you, my friend, it is exactly because of that, leaving the mental terrorizer, god belief, that I truly regained my connected ethical as well as kind humanity.
Cory and I will talk about prehistory and theism, addressing the relevance to atheism, anarchism, and socialism.
At the same time as the rise of the male god, 7,000 years ago, there was also the very time there was the rise of violence, war, and clans to kingdoms, then empires, then states. It is all connected back to 7,000 years ago, and it moved across the world.
Cory Johnston: https://damienmarieathope.com/2021/04/cory-johnston-mind-of-a-skeptical-leftist/?v=32aec8db952d
The Mind of a Skeptical Leftist (YouTube)
Cory Johnston: Mind of a Skeptical Leftist @Skepticallefty
The Mind of a Skeptical Leftist By Cory Johnston: “Promoting critical thinking, social justice, and left-wing politics by covering current events and talking to a variety of people. Cory Johnston has been thoughtfully talking to people and attempting to promote critical thinking, social justice, and left-wing politics.” http://anchor.fm/skepticalleft
Cory needs our support. We rise by helping each other.
Cory Johnston ☭ Ⓐ @Skepticallefty Evidence-based atheist leftist (he/him) Producer, host, and co-host of 4 podcasts @skeptarchy @skpoliticspod and @AthopeMarie
Damien Marie AtHope (“At Hope”) Axiological Atheist, Anti-theist, Anti-religionist, Secular Humanist. Rationalist, Writer, Artist, Poet, Philosopher, Advocate, Activist, Psychology, and Armchair Archaeology/Anthropology/Historian.
Damien is interested in: Freedom, Liberty, Justice, Equality, Ethics, Humanism, Science, Atheism, Antiteism, Antireligionism, Ignosticism, Left-Libertarianism, Anarchism, Socialism, Mutualism, Axiology, Metaphysics, LGBTQI, Philosophy, Advocacy, Activism, Mental Health, Psychology, Archaeology, Social Work, Sexual Rights, Marriage Rights, Woman’s Rights, Gender Rights, Child Rights, Secular Rights, Race Equality, Ageism/Disability Equality, Etc. And a far-leftist, “Anarcho-Humanist.”
I am not a good fit in the atheist movement that is mostly pro-capitalist, I am anti-capitalist. Mostly pro-skeptic, I am a rationalist not valuing skepticism. Mostly pro-agnostic, I am anti-agnostic. Mostly limited to anti-Abrahamic religions, I am an anti-religionist.
Around 10,000 years ago, ideas went into Africa. Around 10,000 to 9,000 years ago, these ideas from the Middle East were in Siberia then moved to China and to the Americas by around 9,000 years ago. Religious ideas also left the Middle East from 9,000 to 8,000 years ago to Europe. Around 8,000 years ago, new ideas got to Ukraine but didn’t spread far. From 8,000 to 7,000 years ago, ideas again entered Africa with evolved beliefs from the Middle East. By 7,000 years ago, evolved deities from the Middle East moved again to Europe and Ukraine. And 7,000 years ago, the Siberian sun god of the sky, with a warrior culture, armed forts, and pre-kurgans, moved from Siberia to Ukraine and then returned to the Middle East around 6,000 years ago, influencing the Sumerian religious ideas. 6,000 to 5,000 years ago, these new Siberian influenced ideas from the Middle East were also in Africa. Then new evolved ideas moved back out of from Ukraine to the East by 5,500 to 5,000 years ago to Siberia, then China, and the Americas. Ideas from Ukraine went into Europe as well. Then, 5,000 to 4,000 years ago, the new ideas, now somewhat evolved again, from Siberia headed back to Europe, and so did ideas from the Middle East. ETC. This is just a rough outline to grasp some of the details, as I feel I understand them. There is a bit more, but this gives a good idea of how complicated it was.
I think the person, snakes, and two birds seen at Körtik Tepe is the oldest known Neolithic archaeological site in Turkey, more than 12,000 years old, were likely related to the Orion constellation as a shamanic figure holding a snake, referencing the use of the Milky Way to communicate with the gods and ancestors, as well as soul travel via the Milky Way. The big snake to me would reference the Milky Way itself and the two birds, either the star Venus and the moon, or some aspect of the sun, and the moon, but the sun aspect was likely not the noon sun by itself, as I see that as gaining prominence at a later date. And I think the other figures, also related to the Orion constellation, either as a deity or a deity of the stars, put Orion there. I assume, as seen at Tell Fekheriye, Syria, 11,000 to 9,000 years old, involving two standing figures on “step stools of power” that by 11,000 years ago were at least two sky deities, such as something similar to both a sky father and a sky mother deity, at this time, related to the stars, or planets (also seen as stars or star-like). But we must remember that planets were seen as star-related in mythology.
High Gods and a Divine Couple (universal mommy and daddy)?
I think high gods started with a divine couple, a sky god (sky father) “Day sky, often the Sun” and a sky goddess (sky mother) “Night sky, often the Noon” around 11,000 years ago or older, associated with pre-pastoralism animal management, early herding, and proto-pastoralism, of big-horned goats, big-horned sheep, both domesticated around 11,000 years ago, and cattle domesticated around 10,000 years ago or a little older, especially so with cattle, the last three. Then, as farming and agriculture grew and the domestication of grains emerged a little after 10,000 to 9,000 years ago, and along came a new Earth goddess (Earth Mother), who then commonly took the place of the older sky goddess (sky mother) as the wife or consort to the sky god (sky father). This younger divine couple, a sky god (sky father) and Earth goddess (Earth Mother), becomes the norm the world over. Spread largely with the spread of farming and agriculture to me.
The myths of (Sky Father) and Earth Mothers in general are found throughout the world, and I think started in the Middle East, with their origins around 11,000 years ago or older. Though totem couple artifacts are seen in Siberia’s Lake Baikal area with the Ancient North Eurasians Mal’ta–Buret’ culture (24,000 years ago) and seem to trace back to at least Russia, above the area between north of the Black Sea and the Caucasus mountains at the Kostenki site 25,000 years ago, a time when Kostenki is related to the eastern Gravettian culture, because the Kostenki site started with Aurignacian culture. I think the couple theme, though it seems to have evidence dating back to at least 25,000 years ago in portable totem pole-like figurines, was not considered deities until they evolved in the Middle East, due to different lifestyles creating a motivation for different thinking, a transition from hunting and gathering to herding and farming.
Damien Marie AtHope (Said as “At” “Hope”)/(Autodidact Polymath but not good at math):
Axiological Atheist, Anti-theist, Anti-religionist, Secular Humanist, Rationalist, Writer, Artist, Jeweler, Poet, “autodidact” Philosopher, schooled in Psychology, and “autodidact” Armchair Archaeology/Anthropology/Pre-Historian (Knowledgeable in the range of: 1 million to 5,000/4,000 years ago). I am an anarchist socialist politically. Reasons for or Types of Atheism
My Website, My Blog, & Short-writing or Quotes, My YouTube, Twitter: @AthopeMarie, and My Email: damien.marie.athope@gmail.com