Sacred Rivers, Shared Sorrows

Remembrance as Healing in Black-Indigenous Solidarity

On this Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we gather not merely to celebrate a single leader but to honor the interlocking histories of Black and Indigenous peoples whose compassion for one another created bonds stronger than the violence that sought to destroy them both. In Florida, at Riverbend Park along the Loxahatchee River, communities will commemorate the January 24, 1838 battle where approximately 300 Red and Black Seminoles faced down 1,500 U.S. troops under Major General Thomas S. Jesup—the largest army assembled during the Second Seminole War. This was the last standing battle of that conflict, and its remembrance embodies something essential: that remembering our wounds together, with diverse spiritual traditions guiding our healing, becomes a wellspring of strength.

The Loxahatchee commemoration offers a model for how remembrance can serve healing. The ceremony opens with a Powhatan elder’s “Opening of the Way,” followed by traditional Seminole presentation, African libation, and the Muslim prayer Al-Fatiha—”In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful.” This gathering of diverse spiritual voices around a site of historical trauma demonstrates what becomes possible when we honor both our pain and the multiplicity of ways our traditions teach us to transform suffering into wisdom.

Rivers of Refuge

The battles along the Loxahatchee River concluded a decade of warfare that began with an act of extraordinary violence: the destruction of Negro Fort at Prospect Bluff in 1816. This fort had been the largest community of free Black people in North America before the Civil War, housing over 900 Native warriors and 450 armed Black fighters. When U.S. forces destroyed it with a catastrophic explosion, nearly 300 people perished in moments. Yet what rose from those ashes was not despair but determination—survivors fled south into Florida, where they found refuge and alliance with Seminole peoples.

The communities that emerged—Black Seminoles, Seminole Maroons—represent one of history’s most remarkable examples of compassion across difference. Scholar Kevin Mulroy has documented how these communities lived as “vassals and allies” with Seminoles, maintaining separate towns under their own leaders while developing unique cultural and spiritual practices. According to Mulroy’s research in Freedom on the Border, Black Seminoles “practiced a religion that was a blend of African and Christian rituals, to which traditional Seminole Indian dances were added.” Their communion services incorporated elements resembling the Seminole black drink, a traditional purifying tea.

This was compassion made tangible. When the Seminoles offered what U.S. officials called “protection” to escaped slaves, what they were really offering was kinship. The relationship between Black and Indigenous peoples in Florida was built on mutual recognition of shared humanity in the face of shared threat. The bond between them proved so strong that the U.S. military found it nearly impossible to divide them, even when offered substantial financial incentives to betray one another.

Spiritual Diversity as Survival

What made these alliances endure was not merely political necessity but spiritual kinship. Across the Americas, communities of formerly enslaved Africans who escaped bondage—known as maroons—created spaces where diverse spiritual traditions not only coexisted but nourished one another. These were not abstract theological dialogues but lived practices of mutual care where healing traditions from multiple continents merged to address the traumas of enslavement, displacement, and war.

In Jamaica, the traditional Maroon religion known as Kumfu developed through the fusion of West and Central African religious practices. Ethnographer Kenneth Bilby documented how Kumfu is “founded upon Akan religion but syncretized with other African beliefs”. The supreme deity Nyan-ko-Pong represented the Jamaican Maroon conception of Nyame from Akan religion, while ancestor spirits called “duppies” or “jumbies” provided guidance and protection. The Kromanti dance tradition continues to this day, practiced “even by self-identified Christians”, demonstrating how spiritual practices transcended rigid doctrinal boundaries when communities needed all available sources of strength.

The legendary Nanny of the Maroons embodied this spiritual diversity. English soldier Philip Thicknesse described her as possessing supernatural abilities—testimony to how Obeah spiritual practices provided both “courage and morale” and organizational frameworks for resistance. Obeah, drawing from multiple African spiritual systems, became what one scholar calls “a complex of healing and harming practices” that sustained communities under siege.

In Brazil, the quilombo of Palmares—at its peak housing approximately 11,000 people—maintained what historian Stuart Schwartz describes as syncretic religion, “an amalgamation of beliefs and practices pulled together from Bantu (Central African), indigenous, and Catholic sources”. Churches were common in Palmares because many residents came from Portuguese Angola or the Christian Kingdom of Kongo, yet African religious practices were also preserved. The Palmarinos worshiped “both African gods and Catholic saints, and they created new symbols of religious significance”. This was not confusion or compromise but creative synthesis—communities drawing on every available spiritual resource to sustain hope and healing.

In Cuba, historian Aisha Finch’s award-winning study Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba demonstrates how “dances, religious ceremonies, family gatherings, and Sunday markets brought together enslaved people from multiple different plantations for ritual work, feasting, merry-making, and other forms of enjoyment”. These gatherings created what Finch calls “insurgent geographies” that provided “a fascinating insight into how African cultural and religious practices played a key role in mobilizing slaves, and bolstering their courage to stand up and fight”.

The presence of Islam within these communities added yet another dimension to this spiritual diversity. Scholar Sylviane Diouf’s Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas demonstrates that “Islam flourished during slavery on a large scale” and that Muslim slaves “drew on their organization, solidarity and the strength of their beliefs to play a major part in the most well-known slave uprisings”. While orthodox Islamic practice faced tremendous obstacles, its influence persisted through prayer traditions, naming practices, and ethical frameworks that shaped resistance movements throughout the Americas.

The Healing Power of Collective Remembrance

How do communities transform memories of violence into sources of strength? The answer lies in ritual practices that honor pain while refusing to let it define us. Research on collective trauma and spirituality illuminates why diverse spiritual traditions gathering together creates unique healing possibilities.

Studies of trauma-healing rituals demonstrate that “collective mobilisation of social support, the collective forgiveness and the strength of the psycho-education appear central for the effect of the ritual”. When communities gather to remember together, emotional intensity creates “commitment to and solidarity within the group”. For communities that have experienced collective trauma—whether through slavery, genocide, or forced removal—spiritual practices that acknowledge both suffering and survival become essential to healing.

Pastoral psychologist E.D. Cho emphasizes the importance of “intercultural, collective, and contextual understanding” of trauma. Bryant-Davis adds that “for many cultural communities, the site of greatest trauma is not psychobiological changes but those in the spiritual domain. Addressing thoughts while ignoring the soul wound, the community wound, and the community solution is insufficient”. This is precisely what the Loxahatchee commemoration honors—gathering multiple spiritual traditions to address wounds that are simultaneously individual, communal, and cosmic.

Sacred Practices Across Traditions

The Loxahatchee ceremony weaves together distinct spiritual practices, each bringing its own wisdom about transformation and healing.

African Libation Ceremonies represent what Yorùbá tradition calls “a sacred act of remembrance, peace, and spiritual alignment” . The pouring of water or other liquids connects the visible and invisible worlds, honoring ancestors while seeking their guidance for present struggles. The concept of tùtù (coolness) represents harmony and emotional balance that comes through proper remembrance. During slavery, when literacy was forbidden, libation traditions were passed down orally—”a preservation of tradition and a legacy of the palpable loss and abuse of the African peoples”. Today, the Middle Passage Ceremonies and Port Markers Project has installed markers at over 175 ports, each ceremony pouring libation to commemorate the 2-6 million Africans who perished in the transatlantic crossing.

Native American Commemorative Practices bring their own profound wisdom. The Haudenosaunee Condolence Ceremony—”rooted in prayer and song”—teaches that healing begins with wiping away grief. Its origin story speaks of Aionwahta: “If there is anyone in the world who feels as brokenhearted as I do, I will go see them. I will take an eagle feather and wipe the dust of death from their ears”. This practice of clearing the eyes, ears, and throat allows mourners to see clearly, hear truth, and speak healing words. The Medicine Wheel framework positions healing in the south direction (heart) through ceremony, and introspection in the west direction (mind). The Healing Turtle Island Initiative represents a 21-year ceremony project aiming to “heal the historic and ongoing trauma of colonialism in North America”.

Islamic Prayers for the Dead complete the spiritual circle at Loxahatchee. The Al-Fatiha—opening chapter of the Qur’an—begins “In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful,” establishing divine mercy as the foundation for all spiritual work. Salat al-Janazah (funeral prayer) honors the deceased, while the concept of Salat al-Gha’ib permits communities to pray for Muslims who died far away—a practice profoundly relevant for commemorating historical atrocities. Islamic trauma healing research shows how “integrating prophetic narratives of those who underwent trauma” with contemporary healing practices creates pathways through suffering to growth.

Remembrance Without Bitterness, Strength Without Vengeance

The tension between remembering violence and pursuing healing requires what reconciliation theology calls the interlocking dynamics of truth, justice, forgiveness, and repentance. Yet this framework must be approached carefully. As South African theologian Robert Vosloo insists: “Without memory we cannot travel the painful road to reconciliation and hope”. Remembrance serves as a “normative bridge” connecting past, present, and future.

True reconciliation, however, cannot bypass justice or rush communities toward premature forgiveness. “The theological understanding of justice, the imperative of metanoia (turning around), forgiveness, and confession all contribute to various conceptions of reconciliation”. The Loxahatchee ceremony models this balance—it does not pretend the violence never happened, nor does it demand that descendants of the oppressed forgive before perpetrator systems have transformed. Instead, it creates space for grief, for testimony, for the pouring of libation and the saying of prayers that acknowledge what was lost while celebrating what survived.

The strength found in these commemorations comes not from denying pain but from refusing to face it alone. When Powhatan elders open the way, when African practitioners pour libation, when Muslim chaplains recite Al-Fatiha, and when Seminole representatives offer traditional prayers, they demonstrate that no single tradition holds all the wisdom needed for healing. Our wounds are too deep, our losses too vast, for any one spiritual framework to fully address. But together, honoring the multiplicity of ways humans have learned to transform suffering, we find strength adequate to the task.

Dr. King’s Vision of Interconnected Liberation

Martin Luther King Jr. understood this interconnection profoundly. In Why We Can’t Wait (1963), he wrote: “Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shores, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society.” King recognized that Black liberation and Indigenous sovereignty were not separate struggles but intertwined destinies.

This vision has contemporary resonance. Scholar Kyle T. Mays, in An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States, documents historical solidarity from photos of Kwame Ture with Dennis Banks and Russell Means, to Angela Davis with Oren Lyons, to Nelson Mandela with Clyde Bellecourt. The Standing Rock resistance in 2016—when Black Lives Matter activists traveled to support Water Protectors with the declaration “there is no Black liberation without Indigenous sovereignty”—represents the continuation of alliances forged in places like the Loxahatchee River.

Black Seminole history itself embodies this interconnection. The alliance between formerly enslaved Africans and Seminole peoples created what one contemporary account describes as communities where “separate but allied” groups fought together for freedom. Their descendants today—whether in Oklahoma, Texas, Mexico, or the Bahamas—maintain traditions that blend African, Indigenous, and other influences. They hold annual reunions on Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, gathering “on the land where their ancestors lived and died, they hold a spiritual ceremony with prayers to honor them”. The Mascogo descendants in Coahuila, Mexico celebrate Juneteenth with food traditions from American, African American, Mexican, and Native American cuisines while singing spirituals.

Lessons for Our Interfaith Moment

What does the history of Black-Indigenous spiritual solidarity teach us about interfaith practice today? Several lessons emerge:

First, the deepest interfaith bonds often form not through formal dialogue but through shared struggle and mutual care. The Black Seminoles and Seminoles did not hold theological conferences—they shared food, fought together, mourned together, and created new spiritual practices that honored both traditions while transcending either alone.

Second, diversity of spiritual practice strengthens rather than weakens communities facing crisis. When maroon communities in Jamaica, Brazil, Cuba, and Florida drew on African religions, Christianity, Islam, and Indigenous practices simultaneously, they were not confused or syncretic in some pejorative sense. They were being strategic and wise—recognizing that survival required every available spiritual resource.

Third, remembering violence together, through diverse spiritual lenses, creates unique healing possibilities. The Loxahatchee ceremony’s combination of Indigenous protocols, African libation, and Islamic prayer does not dilute the power of any single tradition. Rather, it acknowledges that the trauma being commemorated affected multiple communities, and thus requires multiple forms of spiritual address.

Fourth, true compassion across difference requires acknowledging distinct histories while recognizing common cause. Black and Indigenous peoples in the Americas have different experiences of colonialism and different relationships to land and displacement. Honoring these distinctions while also recognizing shared struggles against white supremacy and settler colonialism creates space for authentic solidarity.

Finally, strength comes not from erasing difference but from letting diverse traditions speak their own truths while listening deeply to others. When the Loxahatchee ceremony moves from Powhatan opening to Seminole presentation to African libation to Muslim prayer, it does not attempt to homogenize these traditions into some generic spirituality. Each practice maintains its integrity and particularity, and precisely through this particularity, the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

Toward a Future Rooted in Remembrance

James Cone, founder of Black Liberation Theology, taught that “any theology that is indifferent to the theme of liberation is not Christian theology”. We might extend this: any interfaith practice that is indifferent to histories of oppression and the spiritual traditions forged in resistance to that oppression remains incomplete. The maroon communities of the Americas, with their remarkable fusion of African, Indigenous, Islamic, and Christian traditions, offer us a model of what interfaith practice can become when it serves healing and liberation rather than mere tolerance or peaceful coexistence.

This MLK Day, as communities gather at the Loxahatchee and at Middle Passage markers and at sites of memory throughout the Americas, we are called to remember that compassion across difference has always been possible, even—perhaps especially—in the darkest times. The spiritual bonds forged between Black and Indigenous peoples in the face of genocidal violence were not abstract theological achievements. They were practical expressions of mutual care: sharing food when food was scarce, offering shelter when shelter meant risking one’s life, teaching healing practices when trauma threatened to overwhelm, and creating ceremonies that honored both traditions while building something new.

To pour libation for those who perished at Negro Fort, to offer tobacco for those who fell at the Loxahatchee, to recite Al-Fatiha for all who died resisting enslavement—these practices honor not only our ancestors but the future they made possible through their survival and their solidarity. They teach us that remembrance need not breed bitterness, that honoring pain does not mean surrendering to it, and that the diversity of our spiritual traditions is not an obstacle to unity but its very foundation.

The sacred rivers of the Americas—from the Apalachicola to the Loxahatchee—run red with the blood of those who fought for freedom. But they also run clear with the tears of those who mourned together, the prayers of those who healed together, and the hopes of those who imagined, against all evidence, that their children might inherit a world where compassion proved stronger than violence. This is the world we are called to build—not by forgetting what happened, but by remembering it so fully, in all our diverse spiritual languages, that we find strength adequate to the transformation required.

For more information on the project, please visit the Florida Black Historical Research Project Commemorative.