Shades of Difference: African Native Americans
Alastair Bonnett investigates the intriguing and often controversial history of African Native Americans – black Indians – in the light of present-day concerns about citizenship.
A genealogical cottage industry has sprung up in the United States offering to help ‘African ancestored Indians’ locate and reclaim their Indian roots. The hunger to add ‘a bit of Indian’ to one’s individual racial heritage is widespread among whites as well as blacks, but it is one that complicates and compromises the picture of twenty-first-century black Indians – the descendants of freed African slaves belonging to native tribes.
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