Just looking at me or any of my siblings, you would not be able to detect any of our American Indian features, except you knew what to look for, as one lady did who was half Native American and half-White. When I told her that my grandfather was half Lumbee Indian, she said she could tell by my eyes and high cheek bones. I’ve always known from my childhood, that I had an Indian last name, as well as an Indian great-grandfather named Ander Goins (the original spelling), who left the reservation in the Pembroke area and migrated to South Carolina. There he met and married an African American woman named Annie, my paternal great-grandmother. Back in February, as I wrote some pieces pertinent to my African American heritage and history, I felt an inward witness and heard an inward voice saying, “What about the Native American part of your make-up? You have never acknowledged or wrote about that part of your heritage.” From that moment on, I was determined to correct my negligence and failure to cite and celebrate the history and heritage of the Native Americans.
Before the Europeans came to America on the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria in 1492 or even long before they came on the Mayflower in 1620, my Native American ancestors were the indigenous people of this land. It is estimated that before their numbers were decimated by diseases (brought by Europeans) and before they were systematically conquered and diminished by war with the White Europeans, as well as tribal wars against themselves, they numbered in the tens of millions throughout North and South America.
Tribes and cultures like the Incas, Aztecs, and quite a few others, even in North America rivaled the Europeans in the Pre-Conquistador Era. Long before men like Hernando Cortez, Francisco Pizarro, and many other Europeans arrived to the Americas with their vastly superior weapons and Catholic priest, who accompanied them with a perverted form of Christianity designed to convert, as well as subjugate, the so-called heathens and thereby render them more docile and exploitable. Many of the Indian tribes and cultures were highly developed in the fields of agriculture, mathematics, architecture, astronomy, and a few other fields of science. The Native American tribes were arguably the greatest friends that the enslaved Africans had in America apart from the White abolitionists, who lived up North beyond the Mason Dixie Line and certain free states in the Midwest and western states. Many of the run-away slaves in the south fled to the safety of the Native American tribes and reservations.
They were accepted by their red brothers with open arms and became a part of their tribes and cultures. Some married Indian women; there are legends and stories in Indian folklore of many who became great warriors.
A few of the run-away male slaves even rose to the position of chief or war chief through their bravery and battle field exploits.
In my inquisitive nature as an unlicensed, non-accredited, and very amateur anthropologist, who has developed a propensity to study and stare at people, I have seen many Native Americans with a complexion and texture of hair that perhaps indicated that somewhere in their family tree and linage there was a Black person.
As an African-American who is twelve and a half percent Native American, I can no longer watch the westerns and cheer for the cowboys and Calvary when they come to the rescue.
My Native American blood, although it might be small, is forcing me to revise my historical perspective, as well as enlarge my ethnic or cultural concerns.
I am discovering that there is room in me to house a place of compassion for my red relatives who were the most plundered and systemically exploited people in the American narrative.
Other than my African-American slave ancestors, there is no other group of people in America who has endured such atrocities, indignities, and injustices at the hand of a racist and intrusive culture and government as the Native Americans.
Going forward, I will make it a part of my historical quest to seek out as much information as I can about the rich heritage and history of the original people of this land.
I must now add to my list of heroes and great Americans like Frederick Douglas, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, W.E.B. DuBois, Martin Luther King, Jr, and others, the likes of Osceola, Chief Joseph, Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Geronimo, and quite a few others.
These Native American icons are just as much a part of the American narrative as our Founding Fathers or any other revered character of American history. It is about time that we give them their due.
