The Cultural Heritage of the
St. David's Islanders

During my sabbatical year of 2008-2009, I launched a new ethnographic research project about the cultural heritage of a group of people known as St. David’s Islanders in Bermuda.  I conducted numerous interviews in Bermuda with St. David’s Islanders and others, including government officials.  I also interviewed members of several tribal nations associated with the Bermudian story when I accompanied a group of St. David’s Islanders to Connecticut for the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation’s Feast of Green Corn and Dance, an annual Powwow that boasts participants from 500 tribal nations. 

As a cultural anthropologist, my research focuses on the complex and diverse consequences, cultural, linguistic, etc., of the nexus of people of Native American and African descent in the Americas.  It is my scholarly goal to shed light on the cultural traditions and oral histories of peoples who have been obscured or omitted from the anthropological and historical records. My previous research focused primarily on the topic of relationships between the Seminole Indians of Florida and the Africans (Black Seminoles, as they became known) who allied with them after escaping enslavement on the plantations of Georgia, Alabama, and the Carolinas.  While I plan to continue with this research, I am now seeking to explore other Native American-African interrelationships in the Americas.

The ancestors  of the community of ethnically mixed (African, European and Native American) Bermudians from St. David’s Island include Native Americans and Africans who came initially as enslaved peoples in the 17th century, as well as European indentured servants and military men. The descendants’ oral histories about their Native American ancestors’ specific tribal origins prove (in the majority of cases) difficult to confirm through archival documentation; most Native Americans were designated with the generic term “Indian” in property records and other historical documents.

An early 1990s revival of interest in their Native American heritage led to the formation of the St. David’s Island Indian Committee.  Since 2002, their “kinship” with the Mashantucket Pequot, Narragansett, Mashpee Wampanoag and other tribal nations from New England has been celebrated in biennial ‘Reconnection’ ceremonies. 

The anticipated products of my year of research are publications and presentations that illuminate the fascinating details of the St. David’s Islanders’ cultural and ethnic self-identification, their isolation growing up on St. David’s Island, and the ridicule they endured because of an ethnic mixture that set them apart from other Bermudians phenotypically and linguistically.