Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage
The foundational work. Katz documents five centuries of African–Native American alliance, kinship, and shared struggle — the history the textbooks left out.
Resources & References
Study the Record. Strengthen the Claim.
Everything on this site is grounded in documented history. These are the archives, institutions, journalists, and scholars whose work illuminates the Afro-Indigenous story — start here, then go deeper.
Shelf 01
Search Tools & Archives
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Oklahoma Historical Society
The Dawes Rolls — Searchable Database
The starting point. Search the Final Rolls of the Five Tribes (1898–1914) by name and nation, free of charge, and order enrollment cards and application packets.
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U.S. National Archives
Dawes Records at the National Archives
Enrollment cards (M1186), application jackets (M1301), and the Final Rolls (T529) — plus the Guion Miller, Wallace, Kern-Clifton, and Baker rolls for broader Cherokee research.
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Encyclopedia Virginia
“Colored Persons and Indians Defined” (1930) — Primary Document
Read the actual statutory text of Virginia's one-drop rule — the legal machinery of paper genocide, preserved in the primary record.
Shelf 02
Institutions & Education
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Smithsonian — National Museum of the American Indian
Black Native Identity and Futurity — “Ancestors Know Who We Are”
The Smithsonian's digital exhibition and essays on Black-Native identity, featuring Afro-Indigenous artists and Freedmen-descendant voices.
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Native Arts and Cultures Foundation
The Black-Indigenous / Afro-Indigenous Experience
Programming and dialogue on the thousands of Americans who carry both Indigenous and African American lineages.
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Zinn Education Project
Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage
Teaching materials built on William Loren Katz's foundational scholarship documenting five centuries of African–Native American kinship.
Shelf 03
Journalism & Reporting
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The Observer / California Black Media
A Growing Number of Black Californians Are Claiming Their American Indian Lineage
On the modern wave of descendants using newly digitized federal records to document direct bloodlines to Native ancestors.
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The New York Times
Descendants of Enslaved People in the Five Tribes and the Fight for Citizenship
Reporting on the families of Indian Territory and their descendants' modern legal battles.
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The Guardian
Black Americans and the Creek Nation
The story of Creek Freedmen descendants pressing the Muscogee Nation to honor the Treaty of 1866.
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The New Yorker
When Tribal Nations Expel Their Black Members
A review essay on the scholarship of Caleb Gayle and Alaina E. Roberts — and the stakes of belonging.
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The Christian Science Monitor
Black Native Americans Were Largely Erased From US History
On the historical erasure of Black Native Americans — and the books restoring them to the record.
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Chattanooga News Chronicle
Historians on Black Indians of African Descent
Perspective on the deep roots of African-descended Indigenous identity in the Americas.
Shelf 04
Essential Books
I've Been Here All the While
A historian — herself a descendant of Chickasaw and Choctaw freedpeople — traces Black freedom on Native land from Removal through allotment, weaving her own family into the national story.
We Refuse to Forget
The story of the Black Creeks and Cow Tom — the Black Creek leader who rose to chief and helped secure the 1866 treaty's citizenship guarantee his descendants still invoke in court today.
An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States
A Black and Saginaw Anishinaabe scholar reframes American history through the intertwined resistance of Black and Indigenous peoples — sometimes together, sometimes apart, always present.
Shelf 05
Descendant Organizations
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Advocacy
Descendants of Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes Association
Led for over two decades by president Marilyn Vann — the organization at the center of the Cherokee and Muscogee citizenship victories.
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Guidance
1st Nation Foundation — Request More Information
Where are you in your journey? Contact us for guidance on searching the rolls, reading the records, and taking the steps to reclaim your Indigenous status.
From Reading to Action