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978-0-89587-298-2
0-89587-298-6
$10.95 paperback
191 pages
5 X 7½ inches
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From Felix
Lindsey’s narrative:
I wasn’t
as dark as I am now, but kind of red-like, and when Geronimo saw me he
said, “You ain’t no nigger, you’re an Indian.”
“My
father may have been an Indian, but I’m a nigger because that’s the
race of my mother, and the race I chose,” I said.
Few people
realize that Native Americans were enslaved right alongside the African
Americans in this country. Fewer still realize that many Native
Americans owned African Americans and Native Americans from other
tribes. Recently, historians have determined that of the 2,193
interviews with former slaves that were collected by the Federal Writers’
Project, 12 percent contain some reference to the interviewees’ being
related to or descended from Native Americans. In addition, many of the
interviewees make references to their Native American owners. In Black
Indian Slave Narratives, Patrick Minges offers the most absorbing of
these firsthand testimonies about African American and Native American
relationships in the 19th century.
The selections include an interview with Felix Lindsey, who was born in
Kentucky of Mvskoke/African heritage and who served as one of the
buffalo soldiers who rounded up Geronimo. Chaney Mack, whose father was
a “full-blood African” from Liberia and whose mother was a “pure-blood
Indian,” gives an in-depth look at both sides of her cultural
heritage, including her mother’s visions based on the “night the
stars fell” over Alabama. There are stories of Native Americans taken
by “nigger stealers,” who found themselves placed on slave-auction
blocks alongside their African counterparts.
The narratives in this collection provide insight into the lives of
people who lived in complex and dynamically interconnected cultures. The
interviews also offer historical details of capture and enslavement,
life in the Old South and the Old West, Indian removal, and slavery in
the Indian territory.
about
the editor
Patrick Minges has a doctorate in religious
history from Union Theological Seminary, as well as four master’s
degrees. He worked for 17 years for Amnesty International and Human
Rights Watch. He is currently a middle-school teacher at Southeastern
Alternative School near Midland, Virginia. He lives on a former dairy
farm near Catlett, Virginia.
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