"Documentary genocide": town clerks write "Negro" where they once wrote "Indian" (Rhode Island towns, 1700s to 1880)

SUMMARY"Documentary genocide": town clerks write "Negro" where they once wrote "Indian" (Rhode Island towns, 1700s to 1880) [Connections: Northeast & Mid-Atlantic, Nov 5, 2026]

RECORDHerndon and Sekatau, a historian working with a Narragansett tribal historian, found that town officials "stopped identifying native people as 'Indian' in the written record," and that record keepers, including census takers, put "Negro," "black" or "African" in place of "Indian" or "Narragansett." Sekatau calls this "documentary genocide." The RIHS essay adds that birth, military, school and marriage records sometimes labeled people "colored," "mulatto," "mustee" or "black" even where earlier records said "Indian."

PATTERNReclassification happened clerk by clerk, in town books, long before any census policy

LENS (WW9)"Renamed Black. Born Aboriginal." This is a peer-reviewed study of exactly that

OPENPull the article's own named examples (person, town, year, old label, new label) from JSTOR to make individual sub-receipts

SOURCEWikipedia, Ella Sekatau (summary of the article); RIHS bibliography entry; RIHS Encompass essay. Primary citation: Ruth Wallis Herndon & Ella Wilcox Sekatau, "The Right to a Name: The Narragansett People and Rhode Island Officials in the Revolutionary Era," Ethnohistory 44:3 (1997): 433–462 (JSTOR 483031).