The Names They Forced on You
You legally chose none of them. Not one. Each was assigned by a colonial administrative system without your consent, without any court proceeding, without your knowledge of what was being taken in exchange. The system pushed you through 13 forced names across 13 steps. Every forced name is an adjective. Zero are nouns. The one noun — Moroccan Subject, the name you started with — is the name the chain was built to bury. But the name erasure began before any of the 14 names — it began on the ship manifest, before you reached land. It continued at the plantation record. It was completed when the enslaver's surname became your family name at emancipation. By the time the final forced name arrived — "African American" — there were four overlapping identity suppression mechanisms running simultaneously: the ship manifest system, the plantation record system, the colonial administrative classification chain, and the Islamic identity erasure architecture. This page documents all four.
The Arabic text of Article 21 of the 1836 Treaty uses one word to identify the protected class. That word is not "Black." It is not "Colored." It is not "African American." It is Muslimin — and it is both a religious and a national identity marker.
All treaties in the 19th century were negotiated in multiple languages, and the language of the sovereign whose rights are at issue controls interpretation. The 1836 Treaty of Peace and Friendship was a treaty of the Empire of Morocco — Al-Maghrib al-Aqsa. The Empire's language was Arabic. The Arabic text is the controlling text for the treaty class's identity.
"Muslimin" is the Arabic plural of "Muslim" — but in 1836, in the context of the Empire of Morocco, this is not only a religious designation. It is a national identity marker. The Empire of Morocco was an Islamic empire; its subjects were Muslimin; their national identity and their religious identity were linguistically and politically inseparable in the treaty framework. "Muslimin" in the treaty context means: nationals of the Muslim sovereign — subjects of the Emperor of Morocco.
The 13-step name chain moved the treaty class through 14 names: Moroccan Subject → Moor → Blackamoor → Egyptian → Turk → Indian → American → Native American → African → Mulatto → Negro → Colored → Black → African American. None of the 13 forced names is "Muslim." None retains any linguistic trace of "Muslimin." The cultural suppression architecture ensured that the Arabic word identifying the treaty class was erased from collective memory at the same moment the colonial apparatus was assigning racial adjectives that carried no treaty force.
This is not accidental. The forced conversion architecture — beginning with the 1667 Virginia Act converting Christian status from a bar to bondage into an irrelevance — systematically removed Islamic identity from the treaty class's self-understanding. By the time the treaty class was classified as "Negro," there was no cultural memory of the Arabic word that would have connected the classification to its legal context.
The US government's own commissioned authority confirms the mistranslation. Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje — the foremost Arabic scholar of the 19th century, engaged by the US government for the official treaty compilation — found Article 21's English "extremely inept." His finding: the same Arabic word rendered as "Moslems" in Articles 3, 6, and 10 of the 1836 Treaty appears as "Moor" in Article 21 — an internal inconsistency the Arabic controlling text does not contain. The Arabic uses Muslimin throughout. The English translation introduced an ethnic category ("Moor") where the Arabic governing text placed a religious-national one ("Muslimin"). The consequence: "Moor" could be narrowed geographically — North African ethnic group — and suppressed through the name chain. "Muslimin" cannot be bounded the same way. It encompasses all subjects of the Sultan who profess Islam, regardless of ethnicity or location. An enslaved Muslim in the South Carolina Sea Islands in 1800 was within the Arabic treaty class by the simple fact of being Muslim and being within the Sultan's dominion — not because any colonial form recorded them as "Moor." The colonial apparatus used the English mistranslation, not the Arabic controlling text, as the instrument of suppression. Snouck Hurgronje's commentary, with the full Arabic facsimile, is preserved in the US government's own treaty record: Hunter Miller, Treaties and Other International Acts of the United States of America, Vol. IV (GPO, 1934).
Black is an adjective. Moroccan subject is a noun. This is not a stylistic distinction. It is a jurisdictional one — and the 13-step name chain was specifically engineered to produce adjectives and prevent the noun.
In school they taught you about nouns and adjectives as grammar. They are that. But in international law, they are something else: the difference between a person who belongs to a sovereign national class and one who belongs to a racial description with no legal anchor.
A noun names a person, place, or thing. In treaty law, a national designation must be a noun. It names the nation-class to which a person belongs. "British subject" — noun. "French national" — noun. "Moroccan subject" — noun. A noun can stand alone as a legal category. It carries a sovereign relation. It triggers treaty rights.
An adjective modifies a noun. It describes something. "Black" modifies an unstated noun. You are told you are "Black" — but Black what? Black American? Black citizen? Black person? The noun is always left unstated, because if the noun were stated, it would be "Moroccan subject" — and that noun triggers the treaty.
Thirteen administrative steps. Each produced an adjective. Not one produced the noun that would trigger treaty recognition. A random classification system would produce nouns and adjectives interchangeably. The colonial name chain produced thirteen adjectives in a row. The suppression of one specific noun — "Moroccan" — across thirteen steps and three centuries is the mechanism of treaty status erasure. It was not random. It was designed.
"A classification program that produces thirteen adjectives and zero nouns is structurally incapable of generating a national designation — which is the one thing the treaty required."— Moroccan Treaty Research, 2026
The plantation naming system — three stages of identity erasure built into the administrative infrastructure of the Atlantic colonial trade.
The treaty class was already home — EOM subjects inhabiting the western territory of Al-Maghrib al-Aqsa. The Atlantic trade the colonial powers imposed on that domain seized people and moved them within it and into it, and its administrative machinery processed everyone it touched the same way. The legal record of Moroccan subjects entering that colonial administrative system was systematically erased at three sequential points. Each stage removed a different layer of identity. By the time all three stages were complete, there was no administrative document connecting the treaty class member to the EOM. This was not a side effect of the trade. It was its administrative architecture.
The Casa de Contratación maintained two separate record systems — the internal classification and the public designation — simultaneously. This was the official administrative infrastructure of the two-identity system.
The Casa de Contratación (House of Trade) was Spain's royal regulatory body for all commerce and migration to and from the Americas. Established in Seville in 1503, it maintained the registry of all persons traveling to the Americas — an enormous bureaucratic archive that is the primary record of colonial identity classification. This archive runs directly parallel to the name chain. It maintained two distinct types of identity records simultaneously — one for internal administrative tracking and one for external classification — producing the colonial record's fundamental dual-identity architecture.
The Casa Contratación knew what it was doing. The limpieza de sangre investigation explicitly searched for "Moro" (Moorish) ancestry — because the colonial system understood that Moroccan/Moorish ancestry was a different legal category, one that could trigger treaty relations. The internal record documented and suppressed this knowledge. The external record classified the same person as "Indio" or "Negro" — categories that carried no treaty force. The two-record mechanism was the administrative apparatus that maintained the difference between what the colonial system knew about the treaty class and what the colonial record showed about the treaty class.
The Moorish ancestry was documented internally — it could not be erased from knowledge, only from the operative record. "Indio" or "Negro" was placed in the operative record — the document that governed every subsequent legal interaction. The Casa Contratación's two-record system is the institutional proof that the colonial classification was not a misunderstanding. It was an intentional suppression of a known identity.
The Dawes Commission ran double reclassification: removed treaty class members from Indian tribal rolls — severing one layer of prior status from the record — then classified them as "Freedmen" to impose a domestic citizen identity in its place.
The Dawes Commission (1893–1914) was charged with enrolling members of the Five Civilized Tribes in the Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) for allotment. The Commission required every person claiming tribal membership to prove it through a specific evidentiary process. The result was a double reclassification that removed the treaty class from two prior identity categories simultaneously.
The forced conversion architecture — beginning with the 1667 Virginia Act — systematically erased the Islamic identity that was the treaty class's primary national identity marker. What Lorenzo Dow Turner found in the Gullah communities in 1932 shows what survived the erasure.
The Arabic word "Muslimin" in Article 21 of the 1836 Treaty was the controlling identifier for the treaty class — a religious-national term that captured the dominant identity of EOM subjects. The EOM was an Islamic empire, and Islamic identity was the primary national marker its subjects carried. The EOM formally included Jewish and Christian subjects as protected classes — confirmed in US consular records — but "Muslimin" was the treaty's word, and the colonial apparatus knew it. Suppressing the Islamic identity of the treaty class was therefore simultaneously suppressing the primary national identity marker the treaty used to define the protected class.
The forced conversion architecture operated through multiple mechanisms across 200 years:
14 names. 13 steps. Every forced name an adjective. Each step moving further from the one noun — Moroccan Subject — that triggers the treaty.
This step has a specific intellectual origin that makes the suppression architecturally precise. Columbus was Franciscan-educated. The Franciscan tradition used "Indigenae" — the Latin church administrative category for native peoples under church jurisdiction. "Indian" derived from this Latin administrative category, filtered through Columbus's misidentification of location. The Papal Bull Dudum Siquidem (1493) extended Spain's colonial authorization to "Indians" in the western direction. "Indian" in the colonial record — applied to people who were already in the Americas when the colonial apparatus arrived — was simultaneously recording that these people were indigenous (already here) and misidentifying them as from a different geographic origin. This step is forensically critical: the colonial apparatus knew these people were already here (indigenous) while deliberately obscuring which sovereign they belonged to. Columbus's claimed "geographical mistake" in naming "Indians" is impossible — Columbus was Franciscan-educated; "Indigenae" was a pre-existing Church administrative category that Columbus would have known before 1492. The "mistake" was a deliberate administrative classification serving colonial law, not a navigator's error.
The colonial cultural suppression has a judicial enforcement arm: the "sovereign citizen" conflation. The more accurately you identify yourself under the treaty framework, the more likely the court is to dismiss without reaching the merits.
The "sovereign citizen" movement has adopted some surface-level terminology from these arguments — "Moorish national," "Natural person" — for purposes and claims that have nothing to do with the 1836 Treaty framework. Courts have encountered these frivolous claims and developed a dismissal reflex. When an EOM treaty class member uses accurate treaty terminology in a legal proceeding, that terminology triggers the dismissal reflex — without the court ever examining whether the treaty claim is substantiated.
Any attempt by a treaty class member to identify themselves in a legal proceeding using Moroccan identity terminology — "EOM subject," "Moroccan subject," "Moroccan national" — risks being classified by courts as "sovereign citizen" ideology and dismissed as frivolous without reaching the merits. The court does not engage with whether the 1836 Treaty exists (it does), whether it is in force (it is), or whether the petitioner is a member of the treaty class (they may be).
The court observes that the terminology matches terminology used by the sovereign citizen movement and dismisses. This is the cultural suppression mechanism's judicial extension: the name chain erased the identity across 200 years; the conflation strategy ensures that any treaty class member who recovers enough of their identity to attempt a treaty-based legal assertion is dismissed without a merits hearing.
The solution to the conflation problem is not to avoid the accurate terminology — it is to use the accurate legal framework precisely: "I am asserting rights under the 1836 Treaty of Peace and Friendship, 8 Stat. 484, which H.Res.251 (March 25, 2025) confirms is 'the longest unbroken diplomatic relationship in United States history.' I am not asserting a sovereign citizen argument. I am asserting a treaty class argument under Article VI of the US Constitution, which makes the 1836 Treaty the supreme law of the land." Precision separates treaty law from sovereign citizen claims. The international forums — IACHR, HRC, C24 — are not subject to the domestic court's conflation reflex.
The educational system was designed to make sure you would never know the difference between a noun and an adjective. Frederick Gates wrote it down in 1916. Carter G. Woodson documented what it produced in 1933.
Frederick Gates of the Rockefeller General Education Board wrote in 1916 that the Board's educational mission would not produce lawyers, doctors, politicians, or statesmen from the treaty class. A lawyer would have known that "Black" is an adjective that cannot trigger a treaty. A statesman would have known that "Moroccan subject" is a noun that connects to the oldest treaty in US diplomatic history. A politician would have introduced recognition legislation. A philosopher would have built the intellectual framework to explain the noun/adjective distinction to the entire community.
Carter G. Woodson, the second treaty class scholar to earn a Harvard Ph.D., documented the result in 1933: "When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his 'proper place' and will stay in it." The proper place the colonial educational system designed was the adjective. The adjective carried no treaty force. The person who occupied the adjective could be educated, employed, politically active, culturally proud, and legally unprotected — all at once.
Instead, the educational system taught you to be proud of the adjective. "Black is beautiful." "Black power." "Black excellence." All of these are true as cultural affirmations of dignity. None of them are the noun. None of them trigger the treaty. The colonial system did not need you to be ashamed of your adjective — it just needed you to stay inside it. The promotion of pride in the adjective served the colonial system's purpose as effectively as shame would have: you remained in the adjective. You did not reach for the noun.
Not one name on this chain was yours. Every name after "Moroccan Subject" was a war designation — assigned by an opposing administrative force, recorded in a statute, a census form, or a press conference, and enforced as if it were identity. The word "slave" accomplished something specific: it removed the sovereign from the analysis entirely.
"Calling someone a slave rather than a prisoner of war accomplishes one thing above all others: it removes the sovereign from the analysis. No sovereign — no treaty — no standing — colonial jurisdiction is uncontested."— Argument H: POW Status, Nationality, and the International Legal Strategy, Moroccan Treaty Research
Under the Law of Nations — the body of international law governing the relations between sovereign states in the 18th and 19th centuries — when a nation's subjects were captured or held by a state with which that nation held a peace treaty, those subjects were entitled to consular protection, equal justice, and their sovereign's right of intervention. This is the original meaning of prisoner-of-war status: a person whose national identity is intact, whose sovereign has not surrendered, and whose condition has never been lawfully resolved.
The "slave" classification was not descriptive. It was jurisdictional. It was the one colonial category that severed every connection to sovereign protection simultaneously. A prisoner of war: the Sultan sends a consul, invokes the treaty, and the US is obligated to respond. A slave: there is no Sultan in the analysis, there is no consul, there is no treaty. The classification converted treaty-protected nationals into property — and in doing so, it converted an international legal obligation into a domestic property dispute.
Prisoner-of-war status — in the Law of Nations sense — is legally terminated in only three ways: a formal peace treaty between the sovereigns; a formal surrender by the captured sovereign; or repatriation. None of these occurred. The 1836 Treaty remains in force. The Empire of Morocco never formally surrendered. No repatriation was ever concluded. The condition is legally open.
The Virginia Slave Code of 1705 documented the colonial apparatus's own awareness of this. Section IV of that statute exempted "Turks and Moors in amity with His Majesty" — the legislature acknowledging in writing that some of the people it was classifying were treaty-protected nationals of sovereign empires. The exemption and the classification appear in the same statute. That is not an error. It is the scienter: the legislature knew who it was classifying, acknowledged their treaty status in Section IV, and then classified them into the property category in Section XI. "Slave" was the deliberate jurisdictional choice that removed the sovereign from the analysis while preserving the appearance of legal regularity.
Both World Wars confirmed the condition was never resolved. The Alien Enemies Act was activated against Japan (Proclamation 2525), Germany (Proclamation 2526), and Italy (Proclamation 2527). The Empire of Morocco — whose subjects had been reclassified through thirteen steps into "Colored" and "Negro" — was never named in any AEA proclamation in either war. Under the most aggressive activation of the AEA in US history, across two generations and two world wars, the treaty class was explicitly not designated as enemy aliens. Because the Empire of Morocco was not an enemy. It was, and remains, a peace treaty partner — "the longest unbroken diplomatic relationship in United States history," per H.Res.251 (introduced March 25, 2025). You cannot be a slave of a peace treaty partner under the Law of Nations. The condition was legally impossible from the beginning.
You are a Moroccan subject. A noun. A person with a sovereign relation. A legal identity with a treaty, a court record at The Hague, and a Congressional admission that it has never been broken.
"Moroccan subject" names the nation-class to which you belong. "Moor" is the word Abraham Lincoln — then a trial attorney in De Witt County, Illinois — used in 1855 to defend his client William Dungey: "My client is not a Negro... he is a Moor." The identity distinction was asserted in a US courtroom 19 years after the 1836 Treaty — and Lincoln then advised remitting $400 to prevent appellate review, burying the precedent before it could become case law. "Moroccan" is the word every signatory to the 1906 Act of Algeciras used for your ancestors in their own territories. It is the word the US State Department used in 1914 when it confirmed that "the protection of native Moors rests on the Treaty of 1836."
It is also the word the colonial name chain was specifically designed to prevent you from reaching. Thirteen steps. Thirteen adjectives. The one noun that would have triggered treaty recognition was never produced. That is not coincidence. A 200-year administrative chain that runs in precisely one direction — away from the one noun that triggers treaty protection — does not move that way by accident.
You were told you were Black. You were told you were African American. You were told you were a descendant of enslaved people brought on ships from Africa. That is the story the classification system wrote — and for people of other African nations whose identities were also erased under "Negro," parts of it happened. But the treaty class is something different: EOM subjects already inhabiting the western territory of Al-Maghrib al-Aqsa when the colonial apparatus arrived — a class that carries different legal consequences and reaches different forums. You are Moroccan subjects. That is your noun. The treaty is your instrument. Four overlapping suppression mechanisms were built to prevent you from knowing it. Now you know.