Karla Ingemann never imagined she’d become an archivist.
"I was going to be a soap opera writer," she said. "I’m a little dramatic."
Then she started working in Bermuda's national archives.
"I worked here for a couple of months, I was like: 'This is the most drama I have ever seen in my life.'"
Ingemann, Bermuda’s national archivist, helps scholars from around the world research the history of Bermuda. But there was a lot she didn’t know about her own history – or her family’s ties to Native America.
"We didn’t really know we were Indian," Ingemann said.
One day, a tall man came into the archive. He said he thought Ingemann might be descended from enslaved Native Americans in New England who were trafficked to Bermuda centuries ago.
"No, I’m not," she told him. "I’m just Black."
"No, no, no, you’re not," he responded. "Look it up."
The man was Tall Oak Weeden of the Narragansett Indian Tribe in Rhode Island. He’d traveled to Bermuda to research what happened to Native peoples captured in the 1600s and 1700s and sold into slavery on the island.
This is history most people in the U.S. -- and Bermuda -- never learned in school.
But it's a story that starting to emerge. Now scholars and descendants of the enslaved in New England and Bermuda are shining a special light on this overlooked history.
Ingemann says Tall Oak inspired her to research her family’s history. She discovered that on her mother's side, she was a descendant of Jacob Minors.
"He’s the most well-known Indian here," Ingemann said.
Minors, a prominent maritime pilot, died in the 1870s. The description beneath a portrait of Minors describes him as “probably descended from one of the Pequod captives,” referring to the Pequot tribe in New England.
“We survived,” Ingemann said. “I feel like we’re badass. We survived and still managed to say we’re Indian, even a little bit. That little nugget was passed down orally from generation to generation, and it left someone – a little nerd – to come and do the work and say, ‘Actually yes. You were right. All of this is true.’”
Records paint incomplete picture
Ingemann says plenty of documents, hundreds of years old, make clear that both Native American and African captives were part of Bermuda’s early enslaved population. Native people show up in probate inventories, estate records, shipping logs, letters and correspondence.
"If you look through the records, the early ones, in their property records, they would have like 'two spoons, a cow, Indian Tom,'" Ingemann said.
She stands in a room with historical documents laid on a table – documents about Native peoples.
"This is an article of agreement concerning the sale of an Indian slave," she said. "May 23, 1655. An act for further or better regulating Negroes, mulattos, Mustees and Indians. So back then they have a lot of different categories. They must have been archivists then, too."
She points out several other materials that mention of Native peoples, including a document that says: "An Indian man slave called Tom belonging to the estate of Captain John Dickerson of Southampton.”
Ingemann reflected on the records.
“We have shipping records, we have court records and they would always call them ‘Indian something.’ It’s there,” she said. “There is definite evidence they were here. There’s no doubt about it.”
Through the generations, Natives have “become absorbed” in Bermuda, she said, “and they look like this now,” pointing to herself.
Across the ocean in New England, Brown University historian Linford Fisher is one of the nation’s leading experts on Native enslavement in America. His new book is called "Stealing America: The Hidden Story of Indigenous Slavery in U.S. History." Fisher says there are several reasons why this story has been so hidden for so long.
"Americans are really good at avoiding hard histories, and this is something that is uncomfortable," Fisher said. "But I think there’s other really practical reasons, too. One of them has to do with the sources themselves."
Historians have based their scholarship on written records. But Fisher said written materials represent the values of the people who wrote them, and can be biased. Language may also obscure the facts. For example, enslaved Native Americans are often called servants.
"And I think generations of historians were like, 'Oh, there were Native American servants in households.' And no big deal, right?" Fisher said.
Even numbers can mask truths. For example, when historians look at the 1698 census in Bermuda, it may seem at first like there were no Indigenous people on the island. But, Fisher says, dig into the probate records and you find a different story.
"In the census itself there’s two categories: There’s white and there’s Black," Fisher said. "And that’s it! There’s no room in that official census for Indigenous people. Amazingly, when you get into probate records and inventories of estates and plantations, suddenly all these Indigenous people begin appearing."
There’s also the question of where historians have chosen to focus their studies. Yale University historian Ned Blackhawk, who is Western Shoshone, says scholars have done important research on enslaved Africans imported to America.
"And it's only recently that scholars have begun to really explore this alternative form of what we might call the Triangle Trade, where Native peoples from the Northeast were trafficked to portions of the Caribbean," Blackhawk said. "We’ve never really tracked the resources that left the colonies.”
How to paint a more complete picture
So stories are missing. And that’s not uncommon.
Early on, when the history of the Holocaust was being written, scholars relied heavily on German state records. But in the 1970s, the way that history was told, shifted. Scholars began to include the oral testimony of survivors.
Oral histories have been central to Indigenous culture for thousands of years. It's those stories that sent Tall Oak Weeden on a journey to discover Native Americans' connections to their Bermudian relatives – a journey that ultimately took him to Bermuda's national archives. Weeden, who died in 2022, was essential in the reconnection effort between New England tribes and Bermudians.
"My dad was a historian," said his son, David Weeden, who's historic preservation officer for the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe in Massachusetts. "Most of his life he spent time with elders learning the old ways as much as could. So he was a keeper of knowledge for local, regional tribes. And that was always a major part of his life: research."
David Weeden said growing up, when there were gaps in lessons he learned at school, his father taught him to respect the oral histories.
"He was very intentional in trying to make sure that we were well-informed of who we are," he said. "He and my mother always told us: 'Walk with your head high. You have a lot to be proud of.'"
There are various reasons for those historical gaps, according to Akeia de Barros Gomes, director of the Center for Black History at the Newport Historical Society in Rhode Island.
“Indigenous folks from the Dawnland, sub-Saharan Africans were not a part of the creation of the discipline of history,” she said. “We weren’t in the room during the Enlightenment when this discipline was being created, when its methodology was being created. The way we’ve always told and maintained our histories is from elders, from storytellers. And those have been passed down.”
‘Waking up’
In addition to archival records and oral histories, other clues led Bermuda’s Native community to reconnect with New England tribes.
One surprising clue emerged in the 1960s when a team of World Health Organization dentists discovered children in Bermuda’s St. David’s community with spade teeth, an indicator of Native ancestry. About 15 years ago, genetic testing identified a small number of people with Native DNA. And over the past decade, archaeological digs have uncovered artifacts suggesting Indigenous presence in Bermuda.
Linford Fisher said historians should look to sources beyond the written word to paint a more complete picture of history.
"I think the historical field needs to do much more to recognize the value, the power and the importance of non-archival, non-written records," he said. "If you think about it, what is written in the archive probably started off orally anyway."
Back in Bermuda, Karla Ingemann said uncovering the story of Native enslavement helps all people in the U.S. and Bermuda to better understand who they are.
"America is now waking up, as are we," she said. "And we’re not going back to forgetting. I don’t care what you say."
