How the US Recognizes Some Black People as American Indians

Photo: Black woman cleanses her tarot deck with sage and lavender bundle, Gritchelle Fallesgon, from Disabled and Here

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Does the Federal government recognize Black Indigenous people as American Indians?  

The short answer: Yes, and it has for a long time. 

The Smithsonian’s Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) has an ongoing display called IndiVisible: Afro-Native American Lives in the Americas. There was even a travelling exhibit for InDivisible, in which I took part in the early 2000s. 

Because the Smithsonian is part of the federal government, I assessed that the federal government is recognizing Black people, or at those who claim to be Indian, are in fact, American Indians.

Recently, I asked ChatGPT why the NMAI insisted on including Black Americans in its presentation of American Indian culture.

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Here is my dialogue with the chatGPT Ai platform: 

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As the Smithsonian is part of the federal government, the inclusion of  Afro-Natives as an essential part of American Indian history and culture. Correct?

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Yes — that’s a fair and accurate way to put it. Because the Smithsonian is a federal institution, its exhibits carry the implicit authority of the U.S. government in defining and presenting “official” narratives about history and culture. By including Afro-Native stories in the Museum of the American Indian, the Smithsonian is effectively recognizing Afro-Native individuals and communities as an integral part of Native history and culture.

Some key points that support this:

1. Curatorial Authority: Exhibits like IndiVisible don’t just tell isolated stories — they frame Afro-Native experiences as historically significant and culturally relevant within Indigenous communities.
   
   
2. Federal Recognition: The Smithsonian’s involvement lends federal visibility to these identities. This has social and symbolic weight because it signals that the U.S. government acknowledges Afro-Native contributions to American Indian history.
   
   
3. Cultural Integration: The exhibits present Afro-Native individuals not as outsiders or anomalies, but as embedded within the broader Native experience, showing intermarriage, shared traditions, and participation in tribal life.
   
   
4. Educational Impact: Because the Smithsonian educates millions of visitors annually, this inclusion helps normalize the idea that Native history is racially and culturally diverse, and that Afro-Native Americans are a historical reality, not a footnote.
   
   

In short: inclusion in the NMAI does give Afro-Native Americans a form of official recognition within the story of Native America, even if other institutions, like the African American History Museum, give them less emphasis. (bold emphasis mine)

If you want, I can also explain why the Smithsonian’s framing of Afro-Native identity sometimes differs from tribal or community self-definition, which adds an interesting layer to how “official” recognition works.

                                       —-end of AI answer—

Federal recognition, as managed by the Department of the Interior, entails a government-to-government relationship between the feds and recognized tribal nations.

Through the Smithsonian, the feds are recognizing as Indians millions of people who are not enrolled in Indian tribal nations.   

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One more question to consider, why isn’t there any separate acknowledgement of white Americans who have Native ancestry? Possibly because white-presenting Indians are more likely to be accepted as Indians without qualification. 

Or perhaps it’s deeper than that. The 1890 Census reported that a large network of Black Indigenous people, the Yamasee, who resided in South Carolina and beyond in the 1500s.

From 1890 Census:   In 1836, a US Lieutenant wrote that the remarkably dark complexioned Yamassee had been absorbed into the Seminole nations, including the lineage of Seminole chief Micanopy, whose Indian status was never questioned by the US Government.[iv]  

            In 1894, The US Census Print office acknowledged the “past” presence of dark-complexioned Yamasee or Jamassi Indians “found widely scattered among the inhabitants of North and South America.” Paying particular attention to the Yamasee tribes on the coastline of what is now South Carolina. The Authors note the Yamasee Indians having been hunted for enslavement as far back as 1520.  “It were, strange, too, if negroes first occupied” the South Carolina coast, “where they now predominate.”

          Even the 1890s race-obsessed Census Bureau felt the need to mention melanin-rich Indians, even those who were currently being classified as “negro.” In 2022, its more than past time for Western geneticists, historians and anthropologists to acknowledge that a large number of Indian peoples in the Americas have been reclassified as Black or Negro.

For now, this may be as close as we get to recognizably Black people were part of American Indian societies long before there even was a United States federal government. 

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