How the Black Seminoles are Bringing Back Their Language
Born, raised, and based in Brackettville, Texas, a small town of about 1,700 and 34 miles from the Mexican border, Windy Goodloe is the acting secretary of the Seminole Indian Scouts Cemetery Association (SISCA). The organization is responsible for the preservation of the national landmark cemetery that, according to Windy’s estimate, is home to the graves of at least 50 Seminole Negro Indian Scouts, men who were enlisted to use their land knowledge and scouting skills to defend territory on behalf of both the Mexican and US government in return for money, food, and land. The Scouts never lost a man in battle, and today, these headstones boast four Congressional Medal of Honor recipients and represent hundreds more ancestors of the Black Seminole community.
But the history of Black Seminoles and their language, Afro-Seminole Creole (ASC), goes back many years before what is now Brackettville, or what Windy affectionately calls “Brackett.” ASC, sometimes referred to as Seminole Creole by speakers, is a Creole language whose foundations are based in English. ASC and its close linguistic relative, Gullah (or Sea Islands Creole), as well as several other English-based Creoles, all came from the same “parent Creole” of the West African Coast, known as Guinea Coast Creole English. During the Middle Passage period, when millions of Africans were enslaved and taken to the US states of the Carolinas and Georgia, the language had an “incubation time,” allowing it to develop linguistically before coming into contact with several other language influences when its speakers moved southward.
When self-emancipated speakers of Gullah migrated down into Creek Nation territories in Florida, they brought their language with them. They began to live and work among the Seminoles, a subset of the Creeks who broke off because of moral disagreements around chattel slavery, the practice of owning enslaved people as personal property. It is out of this language contact that ASC was born and later taken to Oklahoma, Texas, and Mexico when Seminole groups were displaced by the United States government in the 1850s, and where Seminole Scouts continued to use the language throughout their service.
Language as history
Entrenched in the rich military history of Brackettville, Windy proudly identifies herself as a direct descendent of Seminole Negro Indian Scouts on both her maternal grandmother and grandfather’s sides, traceable back as far as four generations. From Windy’s knowledge, her grandmother knew ASC but primarily spoke English on the US side of the border, while her grandfather’s first languages were Spanish and ASC. When they had children merely one generation later, use of the language had declined so much that the next generation had no association with or knowledge of the language at all. Windy remembers her aunt recounting hearing the language spoken among older members of her family during her childhood and thinking of it as a “secret language,” one that would be muted and switched to “proper English” when the kids came in. During her own childhood, Windy was raised with the idea that their history and language would be forgotten: “The thing that I’ve always heard since I was a kid was that the kids wouldn’t care, and that we were gonna lose our history because no one was gonna be around to keep it.”
Windy’s deep-dive into the role of ASC in the history of Black Seminoles did not begin in earnest until later in life. She cites the catalyst as the arrival of a Mexican researcher studying the reverse migration and border-shifting along the Southern border that occurred about a century ago, a story that is incomplete without the history of Black Seminole Scouts and their families. “She came and just injected this passion into the history,” Windy describes.
As the research dug up significant names and dates related to the Black Seminoles, Windy recalls feeling the historical connections emerge. “You just start answering that question and peeling back the layers and peeling them back and there’s this whole history that people just assume you knew.” Today, SISCA hosts events and celebrations for holidays that are important to the community’s history and cultural heritage, such as Seminole Days and Juneteenth. Windy believes these days are valuable because “you do absorb a lot about the history and culture. But when you sit down and say ‘OK, I want to be a part of making sure that other people learn this,’ there is a shift.”
This shift was what prompted Windy to add language revitalization to SISCA’s ongoing efforts. Earlier this year, she joined Wikitongues along with four other rising language activists who are also on the cusp of launching revitalization projects in their communities. While Windy is starting ASC language classes, Hangi Bulebe is developing Kihunde language education programs in Goma, Bintou Camara is building a Nalu language and culture center, and Sonya Rock is working to publish a children’s book in her own language, Gitxsanimaax. In Moscow, Kamran Ali is translating Wakhi language documentation into Wakhi itself. Wikitongues is helping each find funding and set measurable language goals to implement over the next year. “Learning the language, that is something that directly connects me to my ancestors in a way that a lot of other things can’t,” Windy says, echoing the sentiments of several other language activists in her cohort.
Realizing the relevance of the language to the larger historical picture that SISCA and the Brackettville community have been working to preserve for decades, Windy leaned into the connections with the Black Seminole community across the border in El Nacimiento that her research partner helped establish. She built a website dedicated to Black Seminole cultural heritage, started a Facebook page, and organized others in the community who expressed interest in being involved. Several Seminole Creole language videos were published online around 2016, including Windy’s aunt Bertha speaking the language on Wikitongues’ YouTube channel. Recorded songs, as well as high-quality linguistic documentation through previous work with the linguist Dr. Ian Hancock, afforded members something to begin working with once community interest around ASC picked up steam. “It sort of happened really organically,” Windy says of the beginnings of the language revitalization movement. “It was just rolling, and we were really just trying to keep up with it.”
Looking ahead
Windy describes the ASC community as “very elder-focused” and hyper-aware of the library of knowledge that gets lost when age or ailment takes over. After losing three elder ASC speakers over the course of just six months in the COVID-19 pandemic, Windy recalls the sense of urgency for preserving the language that was reignited: “It just showed us that you don’t have the time that you think you have. The loss of those three significant people just really scared me, and made it urgent.”
Moving forward, Windy has high hopes for ASC language revitalization initiatives. In the immediate future, she has her sights set on the upcoming first-ever ASC language class, whose participants will gather at the Carver School Grounds on Juneteenth after a series of community celebrations. Long-term, Windy sees the goal of the classes as being to expand the community of ASC speakers to at least 20 people by the end of 2022, followed by a 10% growth of speakers using ASC fluently as a second language every succeeding year. In addition to developing oral proficiency in the language, she also envisions the class working on translating texts, short stories, and reading materials between ASC and English, as well as into Spanish for the Black Seminole community in El Nacimiento.
When asked what she believed ASC language revitalization would bring to the community, Windy immediately pointed to a hope that learning the language will bring the Black Seminole communities closer to one another, especially in the case of the border-separated Brackettville-El Nacimiento connection. “One of the things that a lot of people that don’t live here in Brackett feel is a disconnect,” Windy notes. “I think learning the language is a direct connection to their history, to themselves, to their family. Language is that direct throughline, right back to your past. So for people who don’t live in Brackettville, it’s a way for them to feel close without having to be here.”
Overall, Windy describes a feeling of surreality in being able to bring the language of her heritage back to herself and her community: “Learning the language is a way to honor our ancestors because that was something that they gave us.” She is proud to be around to see the history of the Black Seminole community be appreciated as an integral part of American history, and to be a part of its continued preservation. “For so many years, there was that wanting to assimilate to dominant culture and not wanting to make waves, but we’re living in a day and time where we can celebrate our culture and still be a part of what it is to be American and not feel like we’re having to choose.”
If you would like to contribute an oral history to the Wikitongues archive, you can find recording instructions here. If you are interested in launching a language revitalization movement, download the Language Sustainability Toolkit and leave a comment so we can get in touch on how to work together and support your work.
