Although most of the two million claiming Native American ancestry in the United States are of racially mixed backgrounds, many are still amazed to find that many African Americans are of Indian heritage.

Indian people mixed with European or Asian blood usually have very little problem being accepted by the Native community.

African Americans, however, find it much more difficult to find that same acceptance, even though many of there descendants fought the white man alongside the Natives.  History tells us that many of these African American ancestors walked the "Trail of Tears" alongside our own ancestors.  Still they are often unaccepted.

This is greatly due to the general American prejudice against dark skin people that even seeps down into the very people such racism historically oppressed and disenfranchised.

It hasn't helped that the Buffalo Soldiers, black horse troopers, were used against Native people as a continuing divide and conquer device that began centuries before.  Another thing to consider is that many people do not realize that for generations whites, blacks and native people not only lived together as slaves and slave owners, they had intermarried, especially in the mid 1800's.

In the Southeast many of the run away slaves were taken in by the Seminoles.  They were tribal people fighting oppression and they were treated as such.

After being brought to America as slaves, thousands of Africans fled to the swamps and marshes of Florida.  There they formed an alliance with another group of settlers, refugees from the Creek and other nations who called themselves Seminoles, meaning runaway, and a new race emerged:  The Black Seminoles.

As early as the 1700's, there were over 100,000 black Indians.  The Black Seminole Indian Scouts proved to be some of the most skilled fighters and trackers of the post -- Civil War era.

No amount of gallantry, however, won them the land promised under the treaties signed by both General Zachary Taylor and President James Polk.  In addition, an ungrateful army later cut their rations.  Bitterly disillusioned, many of the scouts left for Mexico, never to return.  Today the remaining members of the Black Seminole nation live primarily along the Rio Grande.

The history of the Southeast is where most inter-mixing of the blacks and natives took place, but it also took place in other places such as with the Wampoanog in the Northeast and the West.  Here a Mountain Man named James Beckwourth, a mulatto who became know as "Bloody Arm", was a well respected warrior who, as legend has it, married into the Crow Nation.

Slavery did not consist of only white people owning black people.  Actually there were many blacks who were free and many natives that were slaves and many Indians who owned black slaves.  During the Revolutionary War many native prisoners were taken for the use of being sold as slaves.

There have been thousands and thousands of intermarriages between blacks and Indians -- with whole Indian tribes disappearing into the black community, often enslaved in the process.  Blacks have similarly been absorbed by Indian tribes.  This was largely do to the fact that until 1909 it was against the law to live in the Southeast and be Native American.  It was better to be passed off as black and in slavery than to be removed to Indian Territory.

As a result, there are many people of African descent, who, despite their outward appearances, identify as strongly with their Native heritage as any other.

In 1879, black Cherokees petitioned for full citizenship in the Cherokee Nation, declaring, "It is our country.  There we were born and reared.  There are our homes.  There are our wives and children, whom we love as dearly as though we were born with red, instead of black skins."  Citizenship was granted.