BOOK REVIEW

Black Indians by William Loren Katz

Black Indians by William Loren Katz

Introduction

I powerfully suggest this determined and fascinating publication, as I would his possibly more powerful, if more general work, “The Black West”, released previous in 1971. Both are large reminders that History is reliant on who controls get access to the passages of scholarship. It is absolutely not the deprived categories, and as time improvement the outlook of finding out clues of such persons recedes.

Katz apparently displays the hypocrisy and myopia of European mind-set by utilizing the notes of Christopher Columbus. When he set down in 1492 he composed that he “took some of the natives by force”. Later he noted they were “tractable” and “peaceable”, “there is not in the world a better nation”. However he furthermore supplemented that they should be “made to work” and “adopt our ways." (Katz , 1997, pp45)

Katz recalls us in his introduction that in 1920 historian Carter G Woodson called the connection between the native Americans and blacks as “ one of the utmost unwritten sections in the annals of the United States”. It wasn't that the annals was garbled, it was that it was wittingly or unwittingly ignored. Katz cites George Catlin, for demonstration, decorating several captive Seminoles, encompassing the well renowned one of Chief Osceola, at Fort Multrie in 1837, but falling short to decorate or mention “that Osceola's bodyguard of fifty-five warriors encompassed not less than fifty-two Black Seminoles”. Indeed, subsequent in the publication it appears that the chief's wife was furthermore black. Discussion

A number of sections are dedicated to the Seminoles, who, as asserted by Katz, were initially refugees themselves from the Creek territory, and who gladly acknowledged and assimilated other Native Americans into their culture.

Maybe I manage him a disservice but I could not gladly realize why they were refugees so I looked up the authorized Seminole website to find out. “The Seminole Tribe (that is, the political entity) did not live until it was conceived by the Seminoles in 1957. The Seminole persons (that is, the heritage group), are the descendants of numerous Native Americans who have inhabited Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and components of South Carolina, Tennessee, and Mississippi for not less than 12,000 years. They dwelled as hundreds of distinct tribes when the Spaniards (the first Europeans to go in North America), reached in 1510. But they were constituents of the ...