Native American Allies on the Underground Railroad

Native American communities were not a monolith. Some nations held enslaved people of African descent, as historian Tiya Miles has documented. Others helped people escaping slavery. That help is little known, in part because Western history leans on written records and overlooks oral tradition, as historian Roy Finkenbine has noted.

Oral histories

Both Native and African American communities passed history down orally, and those traditions tell of generations of help for self-emancipators. In western Michigan, the McSabe family of the Odawa nation handed down stories of guiding more than 20 freedom seekers north by night to the Upper Peninsula — cooperation between two groups pushed to society's margins.

Routes through Native lands

Escape routes often ran through Native communities:

• the Tuscarora path, a main route from the Carolinas and Virginia to Pennsylvania and New York;
• the Michigan Road through Indiana, linking many Potawatomi villages;
• the two great crossings — the Ohio River and the Canadian border — through lands of the Shawnee, Anishinaabeg, Wyandot and Iroquois Confederacy.

These nations very likely knew of freedom seekers in their territory; how much they knew remains to be discovered.

Maroons and a North Carolina project

Maroon communities — settlements built by people who escaped slavery — kept up their own cultures and often lived in close relationship with Indigenous peoples. Those ties are the focus of a digital archive project at North Carolina A&T State University, supported in part by a Network to Freedom grant.

• Lead researcher: Dr. Kimberly Cheek, inspired by historian Dr. Arwin Smallwood's work on Africans, Native Americans and Europeans in eastern North Carolina.
• Sources: records including 18th- and 19th-century runaway advertisements, which sometimes mention ties to Indigenous people.
• Focus: the Lumbee, Tuscarora, Meherrin and Nottoway, communities with shared cultural ties, some of whose members opposed slavery. Henry Berry Lowry, who claimed Tuscarora descent, led a multiracial band of Lumbee and African Americans that fought the Confederacy and planters during and after the Civil War.
• Products: an ArcGIS story map tracing escape routes and the communities along them, and later a virtual reality experience.

Most of what is known about Native routes and cooperation with freedom seekers comes from the Midwest and Northeast. Work like this aims to recover lost pieces of the Underground Railroad in the South.

Sources

Based on Venus Amadi, "Uncovering Tribal Connections to the Underground Railroad," National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, National Park Service, written for Native American Heritage Month; a work of the United States government in the public domain. It cites Tiya Miles, Roy Finkenbine's 2022 lecture "The Indigenous Underground Railroad," and the North Carolina History Project.