This timeframe, however, presents a problem for explaining Native American ancestry in blacks. By 1715, few Africans had arrived in North America through the slave trade.
In fact, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, only about 29,800 Africans had disembarked from slave ships by 1714 (half before 1700 and half after)—a very small part of the 388,000 or so Africans who would eventually arrive here and from whom most of us are descended.
The first of three large waves of Africans would surface in this country only after 1714. By 1750, for instance, some 145,970 had arrived. But most of these, as we can see, arrived after 1714.
Therefore, for most of us, the odds of being descended from an African who arrived in North America before 1700 and mated with a Native American, although possible, are very small.
The real major exception in American history to the absence of contact between Native Americans and African Americans is with the so-called Five Civilized Tribes—the Creek, the Choctaw, the Cherokee, the Chickasaw and the Seminole.
They were located in the Southeast, in parts of what are now Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Florida, until they were forcibly moved to Indian Territory, which became the state of Oklahoma in 1907, in the dreadful Trail of Tears during the 1830s.
They were known as “civilized,” in part because they owned black slaves.
But even in these tribes, the number of slaves was quite small: According to the 1860 census, four of these tribes (the largest being the Cherokee) owned 7,369 slaves, compared to a total of 3.9 million slaves in the United States that same year.
Nevertheless, black slaves made up about 12.5 percent of the total population in Indian Territory in 1860, a sufficient ratio within a recent enough period to mate rather broadly and leave a significant genetic legacy among African Americans today.
Claudio Saunt stresses that these figures are undercounted, but the total numbers are tiny, even if we double them (404 free black people also were living in Indian Territory that same year).
In other words, if you can trace your ancestry to black ancestors living in what is now Oklahoma between 1840 and 1908, your chances of being among the “genetic 5 percenters” is much higher than for any other African Americans.
And chances are you probably do have a significant amount of Native American ancestry. If you don’t descend from ancestors who lived with these Native American tribes or in Oklahoma, the odds are much greater you have very little Native American ancestry.
Maybe the better question is, why are most Black people not happy just to have “African” in their family?
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