Len Bagley :
They tell us we all came from Africa, but the records and the land say different. Early explorers described the people here as dark as gypsies, black like the Canaries, Ethiopian-looking. William Penn said the Lenape were dark-skinned, Franklin said Black people were already here. The mounds back it up — Watson Brake, Poverty Point, Cahokia — massive earthworks aligned with the stars. Teepee nomads crossing from Siberia didn’t build those cities. The builders were already here, and the earliest arrivals across that land bridge weren’t pale Asians, they were Afro-Asiatic — Black.
Spain knew it. Their garrisons rounded up Indigenous Black communities, branded us Negro, shipped us across the Gulf and Caribbean. At the same time, the Manila galleons dropped Filipinos, Chinese, Koreans into New Spain — Mexico, Louisiana, Florida. Over time they were mislabeled as “Indians” while we were erased. That’s why so many Mexicans today show Asiatic features, and why modern Asians sometimes get “Native American” on DNA tests even though their families never set foot in America — it traces back to those colonial swaps.
By the 1800s it was Indian Removal, by the 1900s it was paper genocide — Walter Plecker reclassifying Indigenous people as “colored.” The math doesn’t add up either: only a few hundred thousand Africans imported, yet millions of us here by the 1800s. The truth is many “slaves” were Indigenous Black Americans renamed African. Then the Smithsonian dug up our mounds, hid the bones, and reassigned our ancestors to replacement tribes.
Hollywood finished the job, giving the world an Asiatic “Native” image — feathers, teepees, broken English — while our face was erased. But the memory leaked through: tobacco brands like Nigga Patch with Black men in Indian regalia, cornbread once called “Indian bread,” Indian Head cornmeal, Aunt Jemima, the Cleveland Indians mascot first drawn as a Black boy in feathers before it became Chief Wahoo. You don’t market images like that unless people recognized them.
And here’s the part they fear most: just like the mounds prove we are Indigenous, the writings and inscriptions prove we are Hebrews too. It’s not two stories — it’s one.
2025-09-01 13:31:17