Mark Mallory

The Black Seminole community emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when African fugitives from slavery formed maroon communities within the nascent Seminole nation. When the United States invaded Seminole homelands, Black Seminoles fought as guerillas, their conflict threatening to spill over into a broader revolt of enslaved people. Black Seminoles were later themselves instrumental in the displacement and dispossession of Kickapoo, Nʉmʉnʉʉ (Comanche), and Indé (Apache) groups from the Rio Grande borderland for Mexican and U.S. authorities, working as military scouts in exchange for promises of land. Representations and narratives drawn from this history have employed Black Seminole history to think through the complex relationships between slavery (and its afterlife) and settler colonialism more broadly, developing various symbolic roles for Black Seminoles—as an unconquered male resistance force, an icon of racial mixture and solidarity, or a virulent symbol of Black and Native complicity in one another’s oppression. Many of these depictions reductively categorize Black Seminoles, in mutually exclusive terms, as either Black or Native.

I am a PhD candidate in History and an oral history volunteer with the Seminole Indian Scouts Cemetery Association. I received my MA in History from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 2021. Working in close collaboration with Black Seminole community members from Texas and Coahuila, my research examines the contested representation and frequent erasure of Black Seminoles. I employ a transnational reading and listening practice that engages archival materials, published works, and oral accounts from Mexico and the United States. Using English, Spanish, and Afro-Seminole Creole, I have collected in-depth oral accounts from a range of community members from the Texas-Coahuila borderlands since 2021, primarily women and community elders. Drawing on contemporary oral accounts of Black Seminoles, WPA “slave narratives,” and transcripts of accounts from previous research, I explore the tension between lived experiences of Black Seminoles and representations of their lives and histories found in songs, films, children’s books, paintings, stage plays, school curricula, museum exhibits, tourism materials, public monuments, and government documents since the mid-nineteenth century. To better understand Black Seminole lived experiences over time, I also consider a wide range of archival and non-archival evidence, such as architecture, foodways, music, artistic expression, and linguistic development/revitalization.

Chair: Dr. Angela Pulley Hudson