Regarding the Erasure of Black Indigenous Peoples in the Gulf South and Across the United States
Publicly issued at heritagetruth.org
Date of Public Release: Tuesday, February 10th, 2026
STATEMENT OF TRUTH, CONTINUITY, AND NOTICE OF HISTORICAL CORRECTION
Regarding the Erasure of Black Indigenous Peoples in the Gulf South and Across the United States
We issue this statement as descendants of Black Indigenous peoples of the Gulf South and the United States, including but not limited to the Chahta, Yamasee, Akokisa, Atakapa Ishak, Powhatan, True Creek, True Cherokee, Seminoles, Maroons, Caddoan groups and all other Black Indigenous nations, peoples, and all confederated peoples whose names were erased, altered, or replaced by colonial laws and record-keeping.
This statement serves as formal notice that the historical record as it presently stands is FALSE by omission, FRAUDULENT by reclassification, and VIOLENT in its consequences — and that we are pursuing, to the fullest extent possible, the correction of these wrongful erasures, the restoration of truth, and the recognition of our continued existence in our ancestral homelands.
WE ARE NOT “EXTINCT.” WE ARE STILL HERE.
Our peoples did not vanish.
We were reclassified.
Across the Gulf South — and throughout what is now called the United States — Black Indigenous communities existed long before European invasion, maintained land relationships, burial grounds, governance, and kinship systems, and were explicitly documented by Spanish, English, and French colonizers as dark-skinned, Black, or very dark Indigenous peoples.
Yet today, our nations are routinely described as “extinct,” “absorbed,” or “assimilated,” while our descendants live on the same land — burying our dead in ancestral cemeteries, tending family land, and carrying memory where the archives were deliberately emptied.
This contradiction is NOT an accident.
It is PAPER GENOCIDE
THE MECHANISM OF ERASURE WAS LAW — NOT JUST TIME
The erasure of Black Indigenous peoples did not occur because we disappeared. It occurred because governments decided we no longer existed as Indigenous peoples.
The following entities are directly responsible for creating, enforcing, and benefiting from this erasure:
Spain
Through the Spanish caste system (indio, pardo, mulato, negro), Spain reclassified Black Indigenous peoples out of Indianness, stripping land rights and political recognition while extracting labor and allegiance through missions and colonial law.
Mexico
By inheriting and continuing Spanish colonial classifications and land policies, Mexico formalized the exclusion of Black Indigenous descendants from recognition and land continuity during secularization and settlement.
"The United States"
Upon annexation and statehood, the United States imposed a rigid racial binary that collapsed Black Indigenous peoples into “Black” only, denied Indigenous status, dissolved land claims, enabled dispossession, and later declared our nations “extinct” — while their descendants remained.
State and local governments, including Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Virginia, and others, which:
- Centered “founding” narratives on colonial institutions
- Replaced Indigenous governance with colonial proxies
- Ignored pre-existing Black Indigenous settlements
- Annexed, relocated, or administratively erased Black towns and communities
- Preserved cemeteries as the only remaining proof — while denying the people they belonged to
This was not neutral administration.
It was intentional legal erasure.
RECORDS WERE CHANGED. WE WERE NOT.
Communities such as Mound Bayou, Moss Hill, Princeville— like so many others — are routinely framed as post-emancipation Black settlements without acknowledging the deeper Black Indigenous presence that predated emancipation, colonization, and even the formation of the United States itself.
Across the land:
- Indigenous Black settlements were renamed
- Nations were declared “replaced”
- Towns were “moved,” “absorbed,” or erased from maps
- Communities were labeled “freedmen” to sever them from Indigenous continuity
- Cemeteries were left behind as silent witnesses
The story told is one of import for servitude.
The truth is one of forced reclassification and administrative disappearance.
YOU COULD NOT ERASE OUR CEMETERIES
Where records were altered, burial grounds remained.
Black Indigenous families continued to bury their dead on ancestral land — in places now labeled “African American cemeteries,” stripped of their Indigenous context, yet standing as undeniable proof of continuous presence.
Cemeteries are material evidence that:
- These peoples existed
- These nations endured
- These communities were land-based
- These lineages did not disappear
The dead remember what governments tried to forget.
THIS WAS NOT DONE TO ONE PEOPLE — IT WAS DONE TO MANY
This statement is not solely for the one Nation.
It is for Black Indigenous peoples across the United States, including those now labeled only as “Black,” “freedmen,” “people of color,” or “formerly enslaved,” when in truth they are descendants of the original peoples of this land.
For the True Creek peoples whose towns were replaced.
For the True Cherokee whose identity was rewritten.
For the Powhatan and their confederated nations.
For all Black Indigenous nations whose names were struck from the record so the land could be taken more easily.
We are not people of nowhere.
We are in our ancestral homelands.
And it must also be stated that though every mechanism available was used to separate us from the truth of who we are, we have been called back to ourselves.
Languages were disrupted. Names were altered. Kinship systems were fractured. Records were rewritten. Physical descriptions were changed. Our children were taught false origins. Our elders were silenced. Our spiritual systems were demonized or stripped for parts and what could not be erased was appropriated, but this will not stand.
This separation was not incidental. It served the theft not only of land, but of essence — of the life, knowledge, and divinity that colonizers themselves recorded seeing in us.
Early colonial accounts describe our peoples as powerful, physically distinctive, spiritually formidable, and inseparable from the land. Those same accounts later shift — not because we changed, but because the truth became inconvenient. Descriptions were revised. Dark-skinned Indigenous peoples were recast as “vanished,” “absorbed,” or redefined out of existence, while a different image was elevated and institutionalized as the acceptable face of ALL of “Native America.”
There are also historical records — uncomfortable, often suppressed — that document acts of ritualized violence and cannibalism committed against our people during early colonization, carried out not as survival, but as domination, desecration, and terror. These acts were part of a broader campaign to break spirit, to steal power, and to reduce human beings into objects that could be consumed, owned, renamed, and erased. This attempt to absorb the Divine essence of our people through the consumption of our flesh is documented well into the 20th century.
These truths are rarely taught because they expose the depth of what was taken — and why so much effort has been spent convincing us that we came from somewhere else, that we are disconnected, that we are merely remnants of something lost.
WE REJECT THAT LIE.
Our continued presence in our ancestral homelands is not accidental.
It is survival in defiance of design. It is continuity in defiance of BARBARISM.
NOTICE OF CORRECTION AND INTENT
It is henceforth formally stated that:
- We reject the false narrative of extinction
- We reject falsities and racial reclassification as historical truth
- We assert the continuity of the Black Indigenous peoples and all their confederated nations
- We demand correction of public records, histories, and narratives
- We seek acknowledgment, protection of burial grounds, land continuity, and recognition
- We put governments and institutions on notice that these lies are known, documented, and no longer uncontested
This is a declaration of truth. It is not open for debate.
You are hereby notified.
Let it be stated plainly and without ambiguity:
Those responsible for the erasure of Black Indigenous peoples know the truth.
They have always known.
The historical record contains their own documentation — caste laws, census practices, land grants, mission records, removals, reclassifications, and declarations of extinction issued while descendants remained on the land. The contradiction between what was written and what was lived is not new to them. It was designed by them. It was intentional.
This proclamation therefore serves not as an introduction of new information, but as a formal acknowledgment that the truth is no longer deniable, or avoidable.
We affirm the following:
- That the erasure of Black Indigenous peoples was intentional, systematic, and government-driven
- That it has been maintained through silence, omission, and misclassification
- That its consequences are ongoing
- And that continued inaction now constitutes willful perpetuation of a known falsehood
Accordingly, we place all responsible governments, institutions, agencies, historical bodies, and record-keeping authorities on notice.
From the date of public release of this proclamation, a period of twelve (9) months is hereby afforded for:
- The initiation of formal historical corrections
- The acknowledgment of Black Indigenous continuity
- The correction of narratives asserting extinction where descendants demonstrably exist
- The acknowledgment of the destructions of our Indigenous communities through intentional misclassification, intentional flooding, race based violence, and systematic erasure
- The engagement in good-faith processes toward recognition, protection of burial grounds, and restoration of truth in public records
This timeframe is not a request.
It is an opportunity.
Silence beyond this period will not be interpreted as ignorance.
It will be understood as refusal and we will govern ourselves accordingly.
The responsibility now rests with those who inherited, enforced, and benefited from these falsehoods. The burden of proof no longer lies with the descendants of the erased. We have carried that burden for centuries.
We have spoken.
We have documented.
We have remembered.
The record is now corrected.
What happens next is a matter of choice.
The world will know which choice was made.
This document is issued as a public proclamation and formal notice.
It is not a request for validation and is not open for debate.