What makes the Seminoles different is that blacks – estelusti in the Seminole language of Muscogee – were part of the tribe from the beginning, owning land, serving as interpreters and negotiators with the whites, teaching the others how to grow rice.
“It was an Afro-Indian tribe, a multiethnic reliance,” said anthropologist Joseph Opala of James Madison University in Virginia.
Even their name says so. “Seminole” is a corruption of the Spanish word “cimarron,” meaning “runaway,” he said.
In Florida, the Seminoles still could not completely evade the U.S. Army, which was intent on forcing tribes throughout the American South to move west of the Mississippi in the 1820s and 1830s to make room for white settlers. Hundreds of Seminoles agreed to leave and were taken west by boat across the Gulf of Mexico and then on barges up the Mississippi and Arkansas rivers to Oklahoma.
Some bands battled on deep in the swamps. Today, their ancestors make up the Seminole Tribe of Florida – a tribe that never has signed a peace treaty with the U.S. government.
Relations between black and blood Seminoles were strained during the long era of segregation in America, when, even in Indian territory, blacks went to separate schools.
But for the last 40 years, the Seminoles have lived together mainly in harmony – until the federal money came.
Wayne Shaw, chairman of the Seminole general council, takes a lazy drag off his cigarette and shakes his head.
“There’s no such thing as a black Seminole,” he says.
Since the $42 million arrived, the opinion has been heard often in Seminole County, red-dirt scrubland where many of the 15,000 blood and black Seminoles live side by side in houses and shacks, the black Seminoles outnumbered 9-to-1.
From the start, the tribal council decided only blood Seminoles were entitled to a share of the money, which it doles out in small amounts to tribal members who apply for help with expenses such as home repair and school tuition.
Two years ago, the tribal council formalized the distinction between black and blood, changing the tribe’s constitution to double the blood requirement for tribal council representation to one-fourth Indian ancestry.
Federal law gives Indian tribes the right to decide who is a member and who is not. Every tribe’s freedom of action is limited by its treaties with the United States and by its own constitution, which can’t be changed without federal approval.
The treaty of 1866 made black Seminoles full members; and the federal government has refused to ratify the constitutional amendments that effectively banished black Seminoles from the tribe.
The Seminole Nation sued and, in the meantime, held a new election for tribal positions, with only blood Seminoles allowed to vote. Ken Chambers, a half-blood Seminole whose followers wear T-shirts that say “Seminole By Blood,” was elected chief.
And they don't identify with slavery because it's a "shamefully part of global black history"(bytchass self haters) so they basically have no heritage or lineage.
(this article is from the 1950s)
Indians downfall was their immune system