Welcome back to The Deep Dive. It is Monday,
January 19, 2026. Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
Exactly. And, you know, when you think of this
day, your mind usually goes to a very specific
place. Oh, yeah. Black and white photos. Marches.
The I have a dream speech, for sure. You hear
those clips on the news, see a few posts about
civil rights. It's a whole rhythm. A vital rhythm,
of course. But the source material we're looking
at today, it's asking us to pivot. Yeah. To look
somewhere else entirely. Yeah, we're literally
turning the map away from, say, the Lincoln Memorial,
and we're zooming way in. We're going to a, well,
a pretty swampy riverbank in Jupiter, Florida.
Riverbend Park. It's on the Loxahatchee River.
And I'm looking at the photos here in the file,
and honestly, if you didn't know the story, it
just looks like a beautiful Florida park. Totally.
Cypress trees, Spanish moss, that kind of tea
-colored water. But the gathering that's happening
there today is... Well, it's something else.
It really is. It's a commemoration of the Battle
of the Loxahatchee. That was January 24, 1838.
But this is not your typical historical reenactment.
No guys in wool uniforms firing blanks. Not at
all. The guest list for this ceremony is what
really... what really jumped out at me in the
research. It's incredible. It reads like a setup
for a riddle or something. You've got a Powhatan
elder. A traditional seminal cultural presenter.
Someone performing a West African libation ceremonial.
And then, to top it all off, a Muslim prayer
leader. On the surface, it seems, I don't know.
disjointed, like they just invited anyone and
everyone. Right. Like an interfaith panel that
got lost. But the sources are so clear on this.
It is not random at all. This exact mix of traditions,
it's actually a historical reconstruction. They're
recreating a survival strategy from that very
spot almost 200 years ago. And that's our mission
for this deep dive. We're going to unpack how
these black and indigenous communities in the
19th century, how they didn't just fight together.
Which they absolutely did. But how they healed
together. We're digging into what the researchers
are calling insurgent geographies and the soul
wound. And the main takeaway here really is that
this alliance wasn't just military. It wasn't
just, you know, guns and tactics. It was spiritual.
It was a fusion. They essentially welded these
different beliefs together into a kind of spiritual
armor. OK, so let's ground this in the history
first, because I think for a lot of us, there's
this vague idea that, you know, sometimes escaped
enslaved people would run off and join Native
American tribes. But this paints a picture of
something much more organized and frankly, a
lot more. Formidable? Oh, it was a geopolitical
threat. The U .S. government wasn't just annoyed
by this. They were terrified. And to really get
the Loxahatchee battled in 1838, you have to
rewind. You have to go back to 1816 and look
at something called Negro Fort. The name itself
is just so stark. It just leaps off the page.
It was a literal name on military maps. Prospect
Bluff, Florida. And you have to understand, we're
not talking about a couple of huts in the woods.
This was a fully militarized fort. The British
had built it and then left it behind after the
War of 1812. And the population numbers in the
sources for that time, they're just staggering.
Roughly 900 native warriors and 450 armed black
fighters. Wait, hang on. Let's just pause on
that. That's over a thousand people living free
outside the U .S. slave system. And armed. Yeah.
With cannons, with artillery, running their own
affairs. Wow. It was the single largest community
of free black people in North America. And for
the plantation owners in Georgia, in the Carolinas,
this was an existential nightmare. Of course.
If word gets out that there's a fortress of free
armed black people just south of the border.
The whole system is at risk. It's a beacon. And
it was a beacon that, in their eyes, had to be
put out. So the U .S. Navy attacks in July 1816.
And the details, they're just horrific. They
are. The Navy couldn't really storm the walls,
so they fired what's called a heated shot. They
did what? They literally put a cannonball in
a furnace until it was red hot and then just
fired it at the fort. Oh, my God. And it hit
the powder magazine. The room with all the gunpowder.
The explosion. It was basically the 19th century
equivalent of a tactical airstrike. Yeah. The
sources say nearly 300 people died instantly.
We'll wipe off the map in a second. Men, women,
children. But here's the pivot. This is the crucial
part of the story. The survivors, they don't
surrender. They don't go back. They keep going.
They flee south, deeper into Florida. And that's
where they meet the Seminole people who are also
being pushed south by colonial expansion. This
is where that alliance really hardens. Now, the
text uses this very specific kind of old fashioned
phrase for their relationship. It says vassals
and allies. I want to unpack that because I think
it could be misinterpreted. Yeah, you could think
it means the Seminoles just own the black refugees
or the other way that it was all one big. perfectly
integrated family. Right. And it was much more
nuanced and honestly more interesting. Think
of it like a federation. The Black Seminoles,
they were often called Maroons, they had their
own separate towns. With their own leaders. Their
own leaders, their own crops. They were vassals
in that they paid a tribute, you know, some corn
or livestock, to the Seminole chiefs for protection.
But politically, they were autonomous. But militarily,
they were one unit. Inseparable. We actually
have letters from U .S. General Jessup, and he's
basically complaining to Washington about it.
He writes that this is a Negro war just as much
as an Indian war. And the army tried to break
them apart. They tried to weaponize racism. They
offered the Seminoles huge bribes, cash, goods,
land guarantees, if they would just turn over
the black refugees. Which would have been the
easy out for the Seminoles. Give them up. Save
your own skin. It's the classic prisoner's dilemma.
But they didn't do it. The bond was too strong.
And the sources suggest the glue holding them
together wasn't just a common enemy. It was cultural.
A real exchange. A deep cultural exchange. For
instance, the Black Seminoles adopted something
called the Black Drink. I saw that. It sounds
pretty ominous, but it's basically a very strong
tea. Yeah. A super caffeinated tea. It's made
from Yepon holly leaves, which is actually the
only native plant in North America with caffeine.
For the Seminoles, it was a ritual purifier.
You drink it before a big council meeting or
a battle. To clear your head. And to purge your
body. I mean, sometimes it literally makes you
vomit. The idea is to sharpen the mind. So you
have these African descendants. Maybe they're
holding on to Christian hymns or Islamic traditions
from back home. But they're using a Native American
ritual to sanctify their community. Exactly.
It's a perfect example of what scholars call...
creolization or fusion they weren't giving up
who they were they were adding seminal tools
to their toolkit they were building a culture
that could survive the swamp which brings us
to the second big theme here this idea of spiritual
diversity as an actual survival strategy the
sources talk about marinage this process of forming
runaway communities yeah and the argument is
that these communities were basically like open
source spiritual workshops That is a great way
to put it. A spiritual Swiss army knife. Yeah.
If you're living in a swamp, being hunted by
the most powerful army around, you don't have
the luxury of religious purity. You need stuff
that works. And we see this all over the Americas,
not just Florida. The file brings up Jamaica,
the Kung Fu religion. Right. The Jamaican Maroons,
led by the legendary Queen Nanny. She practiced
obeah. which is a spiritual system from West
Africa. But the Kung Fu religion blended that
with anything else that helped bind the community.
Nanny wasn't just a general. She was a spiritual
technician. Using rituals to organize, to build
courage. To give her fighters the belief that
they were literally bulletproof. Wait, literally?
In their minds, yes. And in war, morale is everything.
If you believe the spirits have shielded you,
that you can catch bullets in your hands, you
fight with the kind of ferocity that just terrifies
a regular soldier. Then there's Palmares in Brazil.
I was just floored by the scale of this place.
11 ,000 people. 11 ,000 people. In the 1600s,
it was basically a black city -state in the Brazilian
jungle that lasted for almost a century. Because
a lot of the people there came from Congo or
Angola. They'd already been exposed to Catholicism.
So in Palmares, you had churches. You had chapels,
statues of saints. But those saints were being
honored right alongside African gods. The historian
Stuart Schwartz calls it a creative synthesis.
It wasn't confusion. It was deliberate adaptation.
Exactly. They might pray to St. George, you know,
the dragon slayer. But in their minds, they're
associating him with Ogun, the Yorbar god of
iron and war. They're layering the powers. It's
a strategy of abundance. If one doesn't work,
maybe the other will. The sources also talk about
insurgent geographies in Cuba, the idea of these
secret Sunday markets. Yes, this is so fascinating.
People from different plantations who maybe even
spoke different African languages would meet
in these hidden spots. It wasn't just to trade
chickens. It was to trade rituals, to dance.
That physical space, that temporary geography
became a place where they could remember who
they were. And the sources really emphasize that
we can't forget Islam in this mix, which I feel
is often erased from the narrative of American
slavery. Massively erased. A significant percentage
of enslaved Africans were Muslim. And Islam provided
this, this rigorous ethical framework. Prayer
five times a day, cleanliness, no alcohol. In
the absolute chaos and degradation of slavery,
that discipline was a form of mental armor. A
way to hold on to your dignity. Precisely. So
let's bring it all back to the Loxahatchee River
today in 2026. This ceremony. It's not just a
feel -good moment. They are intentionally recreating
this soup of traditions. Yes. They're trying
to access the how -to of healing. The organizers
are arguing that you can't heal a wound this
deep with just one tradition. You need the whole
toolkit. So let's walk through the specific rituals
because the symbolism is so powerful. First,
the African libation. I've seen this done, pouring
water or gin on the ground. But what's the actual,
what's the mechanic? What's it supposed to do?
In the Yoruba worldview, the goal is tutu. It
means coolness. Coolness. Yeah. Heat is chaos.
Anger, war. Coolness is harmony, peace. When
you pour the water, you are literally and spiritually
cooling the earth. You're opening a channel to
the ancestors saying, we're here. We're calm.
We're ready to listen. And the text connects
us to the Port Markers Project, honoring those
lost in the Middle Passage. Right. I mean, think
about it. The millions who died at sea, they
never had a funeral. No rites. They were just
gone. The libation is a way of retroactively
saying you are not lost. You are ancestors. It
brings them back into the community. Okay, then
the ceremony shifts. It goes to a Native American
practice, specifically the Haudenosaunee condolence
ceremony. This one is amazing to me because it's
so physical. The metaphors are about the body.
They're incredibly visceral. It comes from the
story of Anwada, who you might know as Hiawatha,
and it recognizes that deep grief. physically
disables you. How so? The ritual involves things
like wiping the dust of death from the ears so
you can hear again, clearing the throat so you
can speak without being choked by grief, clearing
the eyes so you don't see the world through a
constant blur of tears. I love that. It's so
practical. You can't have a conversation about
healing if you literally can't speak because
your throat is closed up. You have to fix the
body first. Exactly. Grief is a physical blockage.
You have to remove it before you can do the work
of living. And finally, the Islamic prayer, they
use the Al -Fatiha, which is the opening of the
Quran, but also a very specific prayer, Salat
al -Ga 'ib. The prayer for the absent. This is
key. Normally, in Islamic law, the body has to
be present for the funeral prayer. Right. But
Salat al -Ga 'ib is the exception. It's for when
someone dies far away or their body is lost at
sea in a battle, a disaster. Which is chillingly
perfect for this context. It's the exact spiritual
tool you would need. You have ancestors who died
in the Florida swamps. Their bodies never recovered.
You have ancestors at the bottom of the Atlantic.
This prayer lets the community perform that final
duty to give them that dignity across time and
space. So when you layer all these together,
the cooling water to calm the earth, the clearing
of the senses of the living confession, the prayer
for the missing dead, it's like a comprehensive
psychological intervention. And that's where
the modern psychology comes in. that sources
talk about the soul wound or historical trauma.
Standard Western therapy is so individual. Right.
Tell me about your problems. Exactly. But for
these communities, the trauma is collective.
It's in the culture. It gets passed down. You
can't just therapy your way out of the aftermath
of a genocide by yourself. You need a collective
ritual for a collective wound. That's it. By
doing these ceremonies together, they validate
the grief. They turn that memory of violence
into a source of strength, not just... not just
pain or a desire for revenge. That part about
vengeance is interesting. The sources mention
reconciliation theology, and they have this warning
about premature forgiveness. This is such a critical
point, especially on MLK Day. Society wants to
rush to the I have a dream part, the resolution.
The happy ending. But this theology says, not
so fast. You have to witness the wound first.
You have to acknowledge the horror. If you jump
straight to forgiveness without telling the truth,
it's hollow. It's a form of gaslighting. The
Loxahatchee ceremony creates a space where the
grief can just be before anyone even talks about
moving on. It makes me think of how MLK himself
is often sanitized. The text quotes his book,
Why We Can't Wait. He wasn't just talking about
lunch counters. No, he was looking at the very
foundation of the country. He wrote explicitly
that the nation was born in genocide against
indigenous people. He saw the connection. He
understood that the violence against black bodies
and the violence against native land, it was
the same root violence. And we saw that solidarity
flare up again so powerfully just a few years
ago. Standing Rock, 2016. That was a modern Loxahatchee
moment, for sure. You had Black Lives Matter
activists flying to North Dakota to stand with
the Sioux Water Protectors. Their slogan was,
there is no black liberation without indigenous
sovereignty. They saw it was the same fight.
The spirit of the Black Seminoles right there
in the 21st century. There's also a, well, a
more delicious example of this fusion in the
file. The Mascogos. The Mascogos. I love this
part of the story. These are the descendants
of the Black Seminoles who just kept going. They
didn't stop in Florida. They crossed the Rio
Grande into Mexico. And there's a community of
them in Coahuila right now. And their culture
is like this incredible time capsule. It is.
They celebrate Juneteenth, which is a very African
-American holiday. But their food, it's this
amazing fusion of... Soul food, Mexican cuisine,
and native ingredients. So you have cornbread,
but it's made with local Mexican techniques.
It's insurgent geography on a dinner plate. Wow.
It proves the alliance wasn't just temporary.
It became a whole new identity. Exactly. So we've
covered a ton of ground here. A cannon blast
in 1816 to a prayer circle in 2026. Florida swamps
to Mexican plateaus. What's the big takeaway?
Why does this matter to someone not at Riverbend
Park today? I think. I think it really redefines
what we mean by solidarity. We live in such a
polarized time. And we're often told that to
be allies, we have to be the same, agree on everything,
erase our differences to find common ground.
But the black Seminoles didn't do that. They
did the exact opposite. They leaned into their
differences. The African person practiced obia.
The Seminole person drank the black drink. They
didn't try to merge into one big generic thing.
They stood side by side, fully African and fully
indigenous. and found strength in that. It's
that strategy of abundance again. If my prayers
aren't working today, maybe I can borrow yours.
Right. And the glue wasn't just politics. It
was shared sorrow. They were willing to mourn
together. And that's a very intimate thing, you
know, to let someone else see your grief and
to help carry theirs. That builds a bond that's
stronger than any manifesto. The sources leave
us with this really haunting image of the rivers,
that the rivers of this country run red with
blood, but they also run clear with tears. It's
a reminder that the land remembers. The Loxahatchee
River is a witness, and the ceremony today is
about acknowledging that witness. It's about
saying, we remember what happened here, and we
are still standing. So here's the thought to
take with you from this deep dive. We spend so
much energy trying to find people who agree with
us. We curate our bubbles. But maybe, maybe we're
looking for the wrong thing. The history of the
Black Seminole suggests that the strongest alliances
They aren't formed by people who agree on everything.
They're formed by people who are willing to mourn
together. Maybe real solidarity is less about
sharing an opinion and more about sharing a burden.
Something to think about this MLK Day. And hey,
before you go, maybe take five minutes. Look
up the history of the land you're standing on
right now. You might be surprised who and what
is buried right under your feet. Thanks for listening
to The Deep Dive. We'll see you next time.