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Based on a review of the literature, this paper presents an overview of the scholarship on relations between persons of African descent and Native Americans in the Americas. Study of these relations, spread over a number of different disciplines, shaped by the changing interests of these disciplines, has been episodic and seldom continuous. These studies have examined relations between Blacks and Indians in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the northern and the southern areas of what is now the United States. There have also been studies of mixed-race persons, some of which romanticize Black/Indian relations or attempt to show one suffered more than the other. Other studies use the Indian experience to understand Blacks and the black experience to understand Indians. Finally, there are studies that focus on relations among all three peoples.
KEY WORDS: African American, Black, Native American, Indian, Miscegenation, Race
Two facing pages in the introductory section of William Katz's Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage (1986) reveal a great deal about the study of relations between Native Americans and African Americans. Katz quotes Carter G. Woodson in a 1920 issue of the Journal of Negro History:
One of the longest unwritten chapters in the history of the United States is that treating of the relations of the Negroes and the Indians. The Indians were already here when the white men came and the Negroes brought in soon after to serve as a subject race found among the Indians one of their means of escape.
On the facing page under the Library of Congress publication data, Black Indians is classified under "juvenile literature." Katz published the first booklength work on relations between Blacks and Indians in the long history of the study of race relations in the United States, yet he wrote the book for young people, not for the scholarly community. To find a book that even approximates Katz's seminal work, it is necessary to go back to Laurence Foster's Negro-Indian Relationships in the Southeast (1935), but as the title suggests, Foster limited his study one region of the United States. Despite the continuing study of race, of race relations, and a growing interest in persons of mixed race ancestry (Forbes 1988; Zack 1993; Jones 1994; Reddy 1994; Gordon 1995), a book-length...