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The Black Seminoles are Black Indians associated with the Seminole people in Florida and Oklahoma. They are the descendants of free blacks and escaped slaves – maroons – who allied with Seminole groups in Spanish Florida. Historically the Black Seminoles lived in distinct bands; some were slaves of particular Seminole leaders, but they experienced more freedom than in white society, including the right to bear arms. Today, Black Seminole descendants live primarily in rural communities within the reservation of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma; its two Freedmen's bands are represented on the General Council of the Nation. Other centers are in Florida, Texas, the Bahamas and Northern Mexico. Since the 1930s, the Seminole Freedmen have struggled with cycles of exclusion from the Seminole Tribe of Oklahoma.〔Mulroy (2004), pp. 474-475.〕 In 1990, the tribe received the majority of a $46 million judgment trust by the United States, for seizure of lands in Florida in 1823, and the Freedmen have worked to gain a share of it. In 2004 the US Supreme Court ruled the Seminole Freedmen could not bring suit without the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, which refused to join it on the claim issue. In 2000 the Seminole Nation voted to restrict membership to those who could prove descent from a Seminole Indian on the Dawes Rolls of the early 20th century, which excluded about 1200 Freedmen previously included as members. ==Origins== The Spanish strategy for defending their claim of Florida at first was based on organizing the indigenous people into a mission system. The mission Native Americans were to serve as militia to protect the colony from English incursions from the north. But a combination of raids by South Carolina colonists and new European infectious diseases, to which they did not have immunity, decimated Florida's native population. After the local Native Americans had all but died out, Spanish authorities encouraged renegade Native Americans and runaway slaves from England's southern colonies to move to their territory. The Spanish were hoping that these traditional enemies of the English would prove effective in holding off English expansion. As early as 1689, African slaves fled from the South Carolina Lowcountry to Spanish Florida seeking freedom. These were people who gradually formed what has become known as the Gullah culture of the coastal Southeast.〔 〕 Under an edict from King Charles II of Spain in 1693, the black fugitives received liberty in exchange for defending the Spanish settlers at St. Augustine. The Spanish organized the black volunteers into a militia; their settlement at Fort Mose, founded in 1738, was the first legally sanctioned free black town in North America.〔Landers ''Black Society in Spanish Florida'', p. 25, citing Royal Decree of Charles II. 〕 Not all the slaves escaping south found military service in St. Augustine to their liking. More escaped slaves sought refuge in wilderness areas in Northern Florida, where their knowledge of tropical agriculture—and resistance to tropical diseases—served them well. Most of the blacks who pioneered Florida were Gullah people who escaped from the rice plantations of South Carolina (and later Georgia). As Gullah, they had developed an Afro-English based Creole, along with cultural practices and African leadership structure. The Gullah pioneers built their own settlements based on rice and corn agriculture. They became allies of Creek and other Indians escaping into Florida from the Southeast at the same time.〔 In Florida, they developed the Afro-Seminole Creole, which they spoke with the growing Seminole tribe. Following the British defeat of the French in the Seven Years' War, in 1763 the British took over rule in Florida, in an exchange of territory with the Spanish for former French lands west of the Mississippi. The area was still considered a sanctuary for fugitive American slaves, as it was lightly settled. Many slaves sought refuge near growing American Indian settlements. In 1773, when the American naturalist William Bartram visited the area, the Seminole had their own tribal name, derived from ''cimarron'', the Spanish word for runaway. ''Cimarron'' was also the source of the English word ''maroon'', used to describe the runaway slave communities of Florida, the Great Dismal Swamp maroons who had developed on the border of Virginia and North Carolina, and maroons on colonial islands of the Caribbean, and other parts of the New World.〔Sturtevant "Creek into Seminole" 102–105; Wright, 106, Mahon ''History of the Second Seminole War'' 7; Simmons, ''Notices of East Florida'', 54–55. 〕 Florida had been a refuge for fugitive slaves for at least 70 years by the time of the American Revolution. Communities of Black Seminoles were established on the outskirts of major Seminole towns.〔 (【引用サイトリンク】title=The USF Africana Heritage Project: Black Seminoles, Maroons and Freedom Seekers in Florida, Part 1 ) 〕 A new influx of freedom-seeking blacks reached Florida during the American Revolution (1775–83), escaping during the disruption of war. During the Revolution, the Seminole allied with the British, and African Americans and Seminole came into increased contact with each other. The Seminole held some slaves, as did the Creek and other Southeast Indian tribes. During the War of 1812, members of both communities sided with the British against the US in the hopes of defeating American settlers; they strengthened their internal ties and earned the enmity of the war's American General Andrew Jackson.〔Wright ''Creeks and Seminoles'' 85–91.〕〔Mulroy ''Freedom on the Border'' 11.〕 Spain had given land to some Muscogee (Creek) Native Americans. Over time the Creek were joined by other remnant groups of Southeast American Indians, such as the Miccosukee and the Apalachicola, and formed communities. Their community evolved over the late 18th and early 19th centuries as waves of Creek left present-day Georgia and Alabama under pressure from white settlement and the Creek Wars.〔 〕 By a process of ethnogenesis, the Indians formed the Seminole. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Black Seminoles」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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