One People, Two Names
What you call "Indians" or "Native Americans" and what you call "Black Americans" are not two separate peoples. They are the same people — Moroccan subjects of the Empire of Morocco, Al-Maghrib al-Aqsa — who received different colonial administrative classifications based on where they were found, what they looked like to the colonizers, and which government agency processed them. One administrative form. One population. Two boxes. And the "African" label applied to both groups was applied long before the continent called "Africa" existed as a unified political concept.
The French colonial governor of Morocco answered this objection in 1957. The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee read his answer into the Congressional Record.
General Léon-Augustin Guillaume was not an outside observer. He was the former Resident-General of Morocco — the man France appointed to govern Moroccan subjects under the 1912 Protectorate. He administered the treaty class. He knew the population. In 1957 he made a statement that Rep. Emanuel Celler — Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, the man who wrote US immigration and nationality law — read in full into the Congressional Record (p. 12,646, July 24, 1957). This is the full quote placed into the permanent legislative record of the United States:
"You Americans always confuse the nationalists here with your own American forefathers, seeing them as fighters for independence against a colonial tyrant. You are quite wrong. The Moroccans are not the historic equivalents of the American colonists. If you must seek historical parallels, then the truth is that the Moroccans are the Indians, the indigenous people. Your American colonists never had to cope with native nationalism because they drove the Indians off the land, killed most of them, and cooped up the survivors on reservations. We French, however, did not drive our Indians off the land."— Gen. Léon-Augustin Guillaume, former French Resident-General of Morocco — read into the US Congressional Record by Rep. Emanuel Celler, Chairman, House Judiciary Committee, p. 12,646, July 24, 1957
Celler then personally endorsed it: "I believe Guillaume was eminently right."
If you say "I'm Native American, not Moroccan" — the colonial governor who ran Morocco said those are the same claim. The Moroccans are the Indians. The chairman of the committee that writes US naturalization law agreed and put it in the Congressional Record. You can be both — because from the beginning they were the same people, wearing different administrative labels assigned at different moments by the same colonial machine.
Notice what Guillaume said: the American colonists drove the Indians off the land. The same people who were in Morocco's western domain — Al-Maghrib al-Aqsa — were driven off, cooped up on reservations, or reclassified into a racial category that buried their national identity. Guillaume's statement is not advocacy for Moroccan rights. He was defending French colonialism. He admitted the indigenous/Moroccan equivalence as a fact, not as a legal argument. That makes it more powerful: the colonizer's own admission, made in his own defense, placed in the US legislative record by the chairman of the Judiciary Committee.
The records were physically altered. "Indian" crossed out. "Moroccan" never written in. Someone changed the paperwork — and the proof is in the National Archives.
The question people ask is: "If I'm Native American or Moroccan, why don't my records say so?" The answer is documented. The records did say so. And then someone changed them.
The directive targeted families who had been resisting reclassification for generations — families with documented Indian or Moorish identity going back to colonial records. Plecker called this a public health measure. What it actually was: the state of Virginia ordering the administrative destruction of identity records that contradicted the colonial classification system. The directive is preserved at the Library of Virginia (Accession 22687). It is public record. The alterations it ordered were made in official government archives. When descendants of those families looked for their own records, they found "colored" where their grandparents had written "Indian" or "Moor."
You say "I'm Native American" — and you may be right. And the French colonial governor of Morocco said the Moroccans are the Native Americans. And the 1930 census records show someone crossed out "Indian" and wrote "Neg" in a different hand. The reason your records say what they say is not because that's what you are. It's because someone changed the records.
This is what "void ab initio" means in the practical record: the reclassifications produced no lawful legal effect, but they did produce physical alterations to government documents. The treaty status was never extinguished by those alterations. But the paper record was changed. Anyone looking for proof of Moroccan or Indian identity in the formal record was looking at documents that had been altered — by state order, by census-bureau correction, by registrar directive — to show something different from what the families themselves had reported.
The Dawes Commission (1893–1914) completed a double reclassification: people already moved out of Moroccan identity in the record were now moved out of Indian identity too. They were left with nothing in the operative record.
The Five Civilized Tribes — Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole — had among their members a significant population of Moroccan subjects who had been reclassified as "Indians" through the name chain over the preceding two centuries. These people had lived in tribal communities for generations. They were recognized by the tribes as members. Their connection to the land, to the community structures, and to the prior sovereign identity was real.
The Dawes Commission — a federal commission established in 1893 to create enrollment rolls for the Five Civilized Tribes — divided tribal members into two categories: Blood Rolls (recognized tribal members by blood quantum, receiving full land allotments) and Freedmen Rolls (designated as formerly enslaved or descended from enslaved people, receiving inferior allotments and eventually being denied tribal citizenship entirely).
The forensic problem — documented in federal archives — is that many people pushed onto the Freedmen rolls were not descendants of enslaved people. They were Category 1 Moroccan subjects: people of darker complexion whose ancestry traced to the treaty class, who had been living in tribal communities for generations after being reclassified from Moroccan/Moorish identity to Indian identity. The Dawes Commission expelled them from Indian identity into Freedman identity based on phenotype — appearance — not actual descent from enslaved people.
A newspaper reporter watching this happen in 1903 wrote it plainly in the Minneapolis Journal:
"It is negroes who are being robbed, not Indians."— Minneapolis Journal, September 30, 1903 — documenting the Dawes Commission's reclassification in real time
The reporter saw it happening: people who were recognized as Indian-identified were being severed from that identity in the rolls and reclassified as "Negro" through the Freedmen rolls. The result was a double suppression: Moroccan treaty rights buried in the record by the first reclassification from Moroccan to Indian. Indian treaty rights buried by the second reclassification from Indian to Freedman. Left with neither in the operative record — while both statuses remained legally intact, every instrument in the chain being void ab initio. The people who went through both reclassifications ended up in the same place as those who had only gone through the direct Moroccan → Negro chain: classified as "Black," with no recognized sovereign relation, no treaty access, and no legal identity that connected them to the land they had inhabited.
This is why General Guillaume's statement in 1957 was accurate. By the time he made it, the double reclassification had been complete for forty years. The people who had survived the Dawes Commission as Freedmen had been fully absorbed into the "Negro" classification. The distinction between those who went through the Indian reclassification step and those who did not had been administratively erased. They were all "the Moroccans" in Guillaume's formulation — and they were all "the Indians" — because administratively they had been the same people wearing different labels before the Dawes Commission ran its operations.
"Indian" is not a national identity. It is a nom de guerre — and simultaneously a domestic dependent nation status that traps you between sovereignty and colonial control.
"Indian" was presented to history as a naming error by Christopher Columbus — a man who supposedly believed he had reached Asia. The record shows otherwise: Columbus was Franciscan-educated, and "Indian" derives from "Indigenae" — a pre-existing Latin Church administrative category for native peoples under church jurisdiction that Columbus would have known before 1492. The "error" was a deliberate administrative classification applied to the people he found in the Moroccan Empire's western domain, and the colonial system then formalized it into a legal category. "Indian" does not name any specific nation, any specific sovereign, or any specific treaty class. It is a continental racial category — an adjective applied to all people who appeared to the European colonial mind as "indigenous to the Americas" regardless of their actual national identity.
The papal bull Dudum Siquidem (1493) is the origin of the "Indian" legal category in canon law: it extended Spain's authorization to all lands in the western direction and the people therein as "Indians" — from the church Latin "indigenae," meaning native people. The classification was applied to Moroccan subjects who were already inhabiting the western domain of their own empire. Columbus's error and the Vatican's authorization fused into a legal category that erased the specific national identity — Moroccan subject — and replaced it with a generic indigenous descriptor.
"Native American" is another renaming — a 20th-century adjective applied to replace "Indian" while maintaining the same legal framework. Like "Indian," it describes geographic presence rather than sovereign identity. Like "Indian," it does not trigger the EOM treaty. Like "Indian," it places the population into a domestic legal framework — the Marshall Trilogy of Supreme Court cases (1823–1832) — that recognized limited sovereignty while denying full rights: "domestic dependent nations," in Chief Justice John Marshall's phrase.
Domestic dependent nation status means: you have enough sovereignty to be dispossessed of your land through "treaty" (many of which were fraudulent or coerced), but not enough sovereignty to assert full treaty rights against the United States on equal terms. You are dependent — on the US federal government's recognition. That recognition can be withdrawn. It has been withdrawn, repeatedly, through termination policies. The domestic dependent nation framework is not freedom. It is managed sovereignty — colonial administration wearing the vocabulary of self-determination.
The Treaty of Peace and Friendship (1836) is a different framework entirely. It is not a domestic dependent nation treaty. It is a bilateral treaty between two equal sovereigns: the United States of America and the Empire of Morocco, Al-Maghrib al-Aqsa. Under this treaty, EOM subjects are not dependent. They are protected. The obligations run to the United States — not from the EOM subjects' dependence on US recognition, but from the United States' own Senate-ratified legal commitment.
You were called "African" before the continent received that name. The people now called "Africans" were not yet called "Africans" when your ancestors were already being labeled that way in American records.
"Africa" is a Roman colonial name. It originally referred only to the Roman province of Africa — the area around Carthage, roughly modern Tunisia. The people living in what we now call "Africa" did not universally call their continent "Africa" — they called their territories and empires by their specific names: Al-Maghrib (the West), Misr (Egypt), the Kingdom of Mali, the Songhai Empire, the Wolof, the Yoruba, the Kongolese. Each was a specific sovereign identity. The continent-wide name "Africa" was a European expansion of the Roman provincial term, applied progressively as Europeans drew maps of territories they were colonizing.
The Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 was the moment when European powers formally divided the continent into colonial territories — and standardized "Africa" as a unified political concept in international law. This is when "Africa" became the name for the entire continent in a legally and politically meaningful sense.
Your ancestors were being called "African" in American records by the early 1600s. The Berlin Conference was 1884. The gap is 280 years. The modern African nation-states — Nigeria (1960), Ghana (1957), Senegal (1960), Kenya (1963) — did not exist at all until the 20th century.
When your ancestors were classified as "African" in Virginia records in 1705, there were no "Africans" in the sense of citizens of African nations — because those nations did not yet exist. The only sovereign on the continent of Africa who had a formally established, internationally recognized treaty relationship with the United States throughout the relevant period was the Emperor of Morocco. The only African identity that connects to the legal record is Moroccan.
The term "African" was applied to EOM subjects — Moroccan subjects of the Empire of Morocco — from the earliest colonial records, before modern African nation-states existed, before the Berlin Conference codified the continent as "Africa," and before the people actually living in Africa were consistently referred to as "Africans." This demonstrates that "African" was a racial classification imposed by the colonial system, not a description of national origin.— Moroccan Treaty Research: Africa Before Africa, 2026
The first people on earth to be called "African" in a formal legal record were not from the continent of Africa. They were Moroccan subjects — subjects of the Emperor of Morocco, already inhabiting the western domain of Al-Maghrib al-Aqsa — who were receiving a racial label before the continent that label pointed to had that name in any standardized way. You carry a label that was applied to you before its referent existed as a unified concept.
Physical anthropology, blood type distribution, genetic haplogroup analysis, and the Dred Scott racial scientist's own words all point to the same conclusion: the people classified as "Black" include a population already here.
The colonial system suppressed not only the legal identity of the treaty class but also the physical anthropology evidence that confirmed their prior presence. When scholars' findings contradicted the transportation narrative — the story that all "Black" Americans arrived by slave ship — their work was buried, relabeled, or destroyed. The pattern is documented across multiple disciplines simultaneously.
Dixon's findings were buried after his death. His notes were destroyed. The data was relabeled. His research directly contradicted the narrative that all dark-complexioned people in North America arrived through the transatlantic slave trade or through East Asian migration across the Bering Strait. A population that was already in New England before Columbus — showing physical characteristics consistent with Al-Maghrib al-Aqsa's population — was precisely the treaty class population the colonial narrative needed not to exist.
"A Moor tanned by the climate — because his children, not exposed to the sun, do not become black like himself."
The racial scientist in Taney's own publication explicitly excluded Moors from the Negro racial category — stating that the dark complexion was a climatic adaptation, not a genetic characteristic of the racial category. Taney used "Negro" to classify Moroccan subjects and deny them rights. Cartwright, the scientific authority Taney's publication deployed to justify that classification, stated in the same document that Moors are not Negroes. The two positions — one legal, one scientific — cannot both be true. The Dred Scott decision classified the treaty class as Negroes while its own scientific appendix excluded Moors from that category.
For this analysis: when treaty class members' genetic testing returns "West African" or "Sub-Saharan African" results on consumer DNA testing platforms, those results are not contradicting the Moroccan subject claim — they are confirming it. E1b1a is the shared marker between the Amazigh/Moroccan population and the West African population. Both populations carry the same haplogroup. The consumer DNA testing platform cannot distinguish between them. The "West African" result and the Amazigh/Moroccan result point to the same underlying genetic family. The platforms were built using reference population databases that themselves reflect the colonial classification — defining "West African" as the primary reference population for E1b1a, not "North African/Amazigh." The genetic result confirms prior presence. The consumer platform's label for that result reflects the colonial classification.
The blood type O distribution in the treaty class population is consistent with a population that includes a significant prior-presence component — people who had been in the Americas for generations before the colonial contact period, contributing the high-O genetic signal that appears in Native American populations, but who were later reclassified as "Black" through the name chain and the Dawes Commission double reclassification. The blood type data does not alone prove Moroccan origin — but it is inconsistent with a population derived almost entirely from the West African slave trade, where blood type O frequencies would be lower. The anomaly points to the prior-presence population.
A treaty class member classified as "Negro" on a WWII service record was simultaneously: (a) a "Negro" under the US domestic classification system — entitled to serve in segregated units under Jim Crow law; and (b) a Moroccan subject under the 1836 Treaty — entitled to consular assistance at trial under Article 21, and excluded from AEA enforcement because the EOM was never designated a hostile nation. The same person. Two legal statuses. The service record reflects only the domestic classification. The 1836 Treaty reflects the international status that the domestic classification never lawfully extinguished. The military service records — now available through the National Archives — are documentary evidence that the treaty class was present in the US population, serving under a classification that was applied without the treaty's exit procedure ever being followed.
Everyone called "Black" or "African American" in America is not one population. Four legally distinct groups share that label. Understanding which one you are changes everything about what you can claim.
The US government, the census, and most legal institutions collapse all four categories under the single label "Black" or "African American." This collapse is not an administrative oversight. It is the mechanism through which the treaty class (Category 1) is permanently buried inside a larger racial category with different legal characteristics. Category 2 makes a domestic slavery claim. Category 1 makes an international treaty claim. When you put them in the same box and call them the same population, the treaty claim disappears into the civil rights claim. That is the function of the collapse.
The transatlantic slave trade brought approximately 388,000 enslaved Africans to the territory that became the United States. The 2010 census counted over 38 million "African Americans." The math does not support a population derived almost entirely from the slave trade.
Historians David Eltis and David Richardson, using the Voyages Database — the most comprehensive scholarly accounting of the transatlantic slave trade — documented approximately 388,000 enslaved people brought directly to the territory that became the United States between 1619 and 1808. Natural population growth accounts for some of the difference. But the ratio — from 388,000 to 38 million — is roughly 100:1 over approximately 200 years. Even with high birth rates and low mortality in the period after emancipation, this ratio is difficult to explain from a purely slave-trade-origin population.
A substantial portion of the population labeled "Black" or "African American" descends from people who were already here — Category 1 — not from those who crossed the Atlantic. This is consistent with the blood type data: Native American populations have some of the highest rates of blood type O in the world. Category 1 people, reclassified as "Native American" and then reclassified again as "Negro" through the Dawes Commission and the name chain, would show the same genetic signature. They do.
The slavery narrative explains where some of you came from. It does not explain where all of you came from. The treaty class — the Moroccan subjects of the Empire of Morocco who were already here — is a significant portion of the people now labeled "African American." They were not brought. They were already home.