The Mashpee Wampanoag: Indigenous Survival, Enslavement, and Racial Reclassification in New England
The history of the Mashpee Wampanoag offers a powerful lesson about the dangers of taking racial labels in American historical records at face value.
The Mashpee Wampanoag are an Indigenous people of southeastern Massachusetts, particularly Cape Cod. Their ancestors occupied this region long before European colonization, and the Mashpee community survived centuries of warfare, enslavement, land loss, government interference, intermarriage, and changing racial classifications.
What makes the Mashpee especially important for genealogical research is the documentary evidence showing people within this established Indigenous community being identified not only as Indian, but also as Black and Mulatto.
In some cases, different racial classifications even appeared within the same household.
This does not mean that every person labeled Black or Mulatto was simply an American Indian who had been reclassified. African and European intermarriage occurred within the Mashpee community and must be considered.
But the evidence establishes an important principle:
A historical racial classification such as Black, Negro, Mulatto, or Colored does not, by itself, tell us where a person's ancestors came from.
Who Are the Mashpee Wampanoag?
The Mashpee Wampanoag are part of the larger Wampanoag people whose ancestral homeland encompassed southeastern Massachusetts, Cape Cod, nearby islands, and portions of present-day Rhode Island.
When English colonists established Plymouth in 1620, they were settling within Wampanoag territory.
Despite the enormous disruptions caused by colonization, the Mashpee Wampanoag remained rooted in their homeland.
During the Tribe's federal acknowledgment process, the U.S. Department of the Interior examined extensive historical, genealogical, political, social, and anthropological evidence concerning the Mashpee.
The Department concluded that the Mashpee had existed as a community distinct from surrounding populations since the 1620s.
The federal government also reported that approximately 97 percent of the Tribe's modern membership could trace ancestry to members of the historical Mashpee population documented in John Milton Earle's nineteenth-century report.
In 2007, the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe received formal federal acknowledgment.
This makes Mashpee an especially valuable genealogical case study. We are dealing with a documented Indigenous community whose historical continuity has been extensively investigated.
Wampanoag People Were Enslaved by Colonizers
One of the most important—and frequently overlooked—parts of Wampanoag history is that Indigenous people in colonial New England were themselves enslaved.
King Philip's War, also known as Metacom's War, devastated Native communities throughout southern New England between 1675 and 1676.
According to the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe's historical timeline, more than 40 percent of the Wampanoag population was killed, while large numbers of healthy Wampanoag men were sold into slavery.
Other historical evidence documents Native captives being transported from New England into Atlantic and Caribbean slave markets or subjected to local servitude.
This history complicates one of the assumptions commonly encountered in American genealogy:
Enslaved does not automatically mean African.
Africans were unquestionably subjected to massive systems of racialized chattel slavery throughout colonial America and the later United States.
But they were not the only people enslaved.
American Indians were also captured, sold, transported, and forced into servitude.
Therefore, discovering an enslaved ancestor does not, by itself, establish the geographic origin of that ancestor.
That question has to be answered through genealogy.
The 1860 Mashpee Census Is Remarkable
One of the most fascinating pieces of evidence comes from the 1860 federal census of Mashpee, Massachusetts.
During the Mashpee Wampanoag federal acknowledgment process, the U.S. Department of the Interior examined this census closely.
The standard color classifications used by the federal census included:
White
Black
Mulatto
But the Mashpee enumerator departed from those categories.
According to the Department of the Interior's analysis, 289 people in Mashpee were explicitly identified as “Ind.” for Indian.
The population also included:
17 White
12 Black
5 Mulatto
This alone is significant.
The enumerator was identifying hundreds of Mashpee residents as Indians within a census system whose standard racial categories did not adequately capture their identity.
But what happened inside individual households is even more revealing.
Black Father. Indian Mother. Indian Children.
The Department of the Interior discovered something particularly important when examining Mashpee households.
In multiple families where the male head of household was classified Black or Mulatto, his wife—and children when present—were classified Indian.
Think about the implications.
A nineteenth-century Mashpee household could effectively appear in the census as:
Father — Black
Mother — Indian
Children — Indian
Another could appear:
Father — Mulatto
Mother — Indian
Children — Indian
All of these people were living within the historical Mashpee community.
That is direct evidence of how complicated racial classification could become inside an Indigenous population.
It also demonstrates why researchers should be extremely cautious about translating nineteenth-century racial terminology directly into continental ancestry.
Does “Black” Automatically Mean African?
No.
The word Black in a historical document is a racial classification. It is not a geographic birthplace and it is not a DNA test.
The same caution applies to terms such as:
Negro
Colored
Mulatto
These classifications certainly were commonly applied to African-descended people. But their appearance in an individual record does not independently establish the person's complete ancestry.
The Mashpee records demonstrate this problem clearly because Black, Mulatto, and Indian classifications existed within the same established Indigenous community.
That means researchers should avoid simplistic assumptions such as:
BLACK = AFRICAN
MULATTO = AFRICAN + EUROPEAN
ENSLAVED = AFRICAN
Historical genealogy is more complicated than that.
But Does This Mean Every Black Mashpee Person Was Really an Indian?
No.
This distinction is equally important.
There was genuine intermarriage between Wampanoag people and African-descended people.
European ancestry also entered Mashpee families.
Therefore, some Mashpee people classified as Black or Mulatto possessed African ancestry in addition to their Wampanoag ancestry.
Other African-descended individuals may have married into Mashpee families.
And some Indigenous descendants may have experienced changing racial classifications across generations.
These are different historical processes.
Researchers should not automatically characterize every Black or Mulatto classification as racial erasure.
The genealogy has to establish what happened.
What Does Racial Reclassification Actually Look Like?
The strongest evidence for racial reclassification comes when we can trace the same individual or the same documented family line through multiple records.
Imagine finding:
1800 — Indian
1820 — Indian
1850 — Mulatto
1870 — Colored
1880 — Black
If genealogical evidence demonstrates that these records concern the same person or direct family line, researchers have something far more significant than a single racial designation.
They have evidence of a classification changing over time.
Researchers should therefore investigate potential sequences such as:
Indian → Mulatto → Colored → Black
Indian → Mulatto → Negro
Indian → Black
or even:
Indian → Black/Mulatto → Indian
But these patterns should never be assumed.
They must be proven by connecting the family across historical records.
What About “Paper Genocide”?
This brings us to a term increasingly used in discussions about eastern Indigenous genealogy: paper genocide.
The term generally describes the disappearance or erasure of Indigenous identity through administrative records.
For example, if a documented Indian family gradually becomes classified as Mulatto, Colored, Negro, or Black in government records, later generations researching that family may encounter no obvious indication that earlier generations were Indigenous.
Mashpee provides an important case study for investigating this phenomenon.
However, we should distinguish among several concepts:
racial classification
racial reclassification
racial erasure
and
deliberate paper genocide
They are not necessarily the same thing.
Changing racial labels can be documented through genealogy.
Proving deliberate governmental erasure requires additional evidence concerning laws, policies, administrative practices, or governmental intent.
Responsible historical research requires making that distinction.
Why This Matters for Black American Genealogy
The Mashpee Wampanoag case should change the way we approach genealogy.
If you discover an ancestor classified as Black, Negro, Mulatto, or Colored, don't stop there.
Keep going backward.
Ask:
Who were their parents?
Then:
Who were their grandparents?
Then:
How were those earlier generations classified?
Where did they live?
Who did they marry?
Who owned the land around them?
What churches did they attend?
What community were they associated with?
Were earlier relatives identified as Indian?
Did the family live within or adjacent to a historical Indigenous community?
Did they appear on Indian censuses or Indian population schedules?
Did their racial classification change between federal and state records?
Did their neighbors and marriage partners belong to documented Indian families?
Those questions can completely change the direction of genealogical research.
Follow the Family, Not Just the Racial Label
This is why serious Indigenous genealogy requires more than searching federal census records.
Researchers should examine:
Federal censuses
State censuses
Indian censuses and schedules
Birth records
Marriage records
Death certificates
Church registers
Land deeds
Probate records
Court proceedings
Military records
Town records
Guardianship records
Tribal records
and federal Indian records.
A single record may tell you what one government official called your ancestor.
A collection of records can tell you who your ancestor actually was.
What About Dark-Skinned or “Copper-Colored” Wampanoag?
Historical writers used a variety of complexion terms when describing Native Americans, including brown, tawny, copper-colored, dark, and reddish-brown.
But physical appearance should never become the primary evidence for ancestry.
A dark-skinned person was not automatically African.
A light-skinned person was not automatically European.
And describing someone as copper-colored does not independently prove Indigenous ancestry.
Phenotype can be historically interesting, but genealogy must remain the foundation.
For the Mashpee specifically, the strongest evidence currently available concerns Indigenous community continuity, enslavement, intermarriage, and changing racial classifications.
Claims about the exact appearance of early Wampanoag populations should therefore be tied to period-specific primary sources whenever possible.
The Bigger Lesson of Mashpee History
The Mashpee Wampanoag demonstrate just how complicated America's racial history actually was.
Here we have a documented Indigenous community that survived for centuries.
Members of the broader Wampanoag population were enslaved by colonizers.
African- and European-descended people intermarried with Wampanoag people.
Government records identified people within the historical Mashpee community as Indian, Black, and Mulatto.
And in some households, people classified Black or Mulatto had wives and children classified Indian.
That should immediately make us cautious about reading historical racial labels as definitive statements of ancestry.
The Mashpee evidence does not prove that every Black American descends from racially reclassified American Indians.
It proves something more precise and historically defensible:
A historical classification of Black, Negro, Mulatto, or Colored does not, by itself, rule out Indigenous American ancestry.
Likewise, finding an enslaved ancestor does not automatically establish African origin because Indigenous Americans were also enslaved.
Historical racial labels are clues.
They are not genealogical conclusions.
If we truly want to understand where our families came from, we have to trace the family.
Generation by generation.
Document by document.
Record by record.
Could Your Family Have a Similar Story?
If your family has oral traditions of American Indian ancestry—or if your ancestors appear in historical records as Black, Negro, Mulatto, Colored, Free Person of Color, or Indian—the only reliable way to determine what those classifications meant is to trace your genealogy.
At Native Black Ancestry, we specialize in researching Black American families with potential Indigenous ancestry, investigating historical racial reclassification, identifying tribal connections when the documentary evidence supports them, and tracing family lines through censuses, vital records, land records, tribal records, court documents, and other historical sources.
Book a Genealogy Consultation
If you want help investigating your own family's history, visit:
Book a genealogy consultation and let us examine your family line through the historical record.
Don't assume your ancestry from a racial label. Trace the records and discover what your family's documents actually say.
Sources & Further Reading
U.S. Department of the Interior / Bureau of Indian Affairs — Federal Acknowledgment of the Mashpee Wampanoag
Bureau of Indian Affairs — Mashpee Wampanoag Federal Acknowledgment Repository
U.S. Department of the Interior, Office of Federal Acknowledgment — Mashpee Wampanoag Proposed Finding
This is particularly important for the 1860 census evidence concerning the 289 residents identified as Indian and households containing Black or Mulatto heads with family members identified as Indian.
Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe — A Brief Timeline of Wampanoag History
Includes the Tribe's account of King Philip's War and the enslavement of Wampanoag people.
U.S. Department of the Interior / Bureau of Indian Affairs — Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe Land-Into-Trust Decision
Includes historical discussion of Wampanoag/Pokanoket displacement, enslavement, and servitude following King Philip's War.
Mashpee Wampanoag Educational Resources
Additional Scholarship
Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip's War. Yale University Press, 2018.
Daniel R. Mandell, King Philip's War: Colonial Expansion, Native Resistance, and the End of Indian Sovereignty. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.
Christine M. DeLucia, Memory Lands: King Philip's War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast. Yale University Press, 2018.
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