Culture
The Black Seminole culture that took shape after 1800 was a dynamic mixture of African, Native American, Spanish, and slave traditions. Adopting certain practices of the Native Americans, maroons wore Seminole clothing; strained koonti, a native root; and made sofkee, a paste created by mashing corn with a mortar and pestle.
Initially living apart from the Native Americans, the maroons developed their own unique African-American culture. Black Seminoles inclined toward a syncretic form of Christianity developed during the plantation years. Certain cultural practices, such as "jumping the broom" to celebrate marriage, hailed from the plantations; other customs, such as some names used for black towns, reflected African heritage.
As time progressed, the Seminole and Blacks had some intermarriage, but historians and anthropologists have come to believe that generally the Black Seminoles had independent communities. They allied with the Seminole at times of war. The Seminole known as King Phillip was known to have married a Black Seminole woman and had a mixed-race child with her. The Southeast Indians generally had matrilineal systems, in which they believed that children belonged to the mother's clan. While the children might integrate customs from both cultures, the Seminole believed them to belong to the mother's group more than the father's. Under the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, adopted in slavery law in the colonies, the children of mixed unions took the mother's social status, so any children born to a slave were also considered slaves, even if the parent had escaped.
Read more about this topic: Black Seminoles
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“I am writing to resist the view that Europe and civilization are going to Hell. If I am being “crucified for an idea”Mthat is, the coherent idea around which my muddles accumulated—it is probably the idea that European culture ought to survive, that the best qualities of it ought to survive along with whatever cultures, in whatever universality. Against the propaganda of terror and the propaganda of luxury, have you a nice simple answer?”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion. But you’d never know it by talking to kids or listening to the messages they get from the culture and even from their schools.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1953)
“Unthinking people will often try to teach you how to do the things which you can do better than you can be taught to do them. If you are sure of all this, you can start to add to your value as a mother by learning the things that can be taught, for the best of our civilization and culture offers much that is of value, if you can take it without loss of what comes to you naturally.”
—D.W. Winnicott (20th century)