One People, Two Names
What you call "Indians" or "Native Americans" and what you call "Black Americans" are not two separate peoples. They are the same people, Moroccan subjects of the Empire of Morocco, Al-Maghrib al-Aqsa, administratively separated only. Different colonial labels were applied based on where they were found, what they looked like to the colonizers, and which government agency processed them. One administrative form. One population. Two boxes. The separation is in the paperwork. It is not in the blood, the land, or the treaty. And the "African" label applied to both groups was applied long before the continent called "Africa" existed as a unified political concept.
The French colonial governor of Morocco answered this objection in 1957. The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee read his answer into the Congressional Record.
General Léon-Augustin Guillaume was not an outside observer. He was the former Resident-General of Morocco, the man France appointed to govern Moroccan subjects under the 1912 Protectorate. He administered the treaty class. He knew the population. In 1957 he made a statement that Rep. Emanuel Celler, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, the man who wrote US immigration and nationality law, read in full from the floor of the House of Representatives while Congress was in active session (Congressional Record, p. 12,646, July 24, 1957). Celler was not submitting a written note after the fact. He was standing in the House chamber, speaking to his fellow members of Congress, and he chose to place Guillaume's equation of Moroccans with Native Americans directly into the permanent legislative record. That is a deliberate act, the chairman of the committee that writes naturalization law, in session, making clear he understood who was being discussed. This is the full quote he read into the record:
"You Americans always confuse the nationalists here with your own American forefathers, seeing them as fighters for independence against a colonial tyrant. You are quite wrong. The Moroccans are not the historic equivalents of the American colonists. If you must seek historical parallels, then the truth is that the Moroccans are the Indians, the indigenous people. Your American colonists never had to cope with native nationalism because they drove the Indians off the land, killed most of them, and cooped up the survivors on reservations. We French, however, did not drive our Indians off the land."— Gen. Léon-Augustin Guillaume, former French Resident-General of Morocco, read into the US Congressional Record by Rep. Emanuel Celler, Chairman, House Judiciary Committee, p. 12,646, July 24, 1957
Celler then personally endorsed it: "I believe Guillaume was eminently right."
If you say "I'm Native American, not Moroccan", the colonial governor who ran Morocco said those are the same claim. The Moroccans are the Indians. The chairman of the committee that writes US naturalization law agreed and put it in the Congressional Record. You can be both, because from the beginning they were the same people, wearing different administrative labels assigned at different moments by the same colonial machine.
Notice what Guillaume said: the American colonists drove the Indians off the land. The same people who were in Morocco's western domain, Al-Maghrib al-Aqsa, were driven off, cooped up on reservations, or reclassified into a racial category that buried their national identity. Guillaume's statement is not advocacy for Moroccan rights. He was defending French colonialism. He admitted the indigenous/Moroccan equivalence as a fact, not as a legal argument. That makes it more powerful: the colonizer's own admission, made in his own defense, placed in the US legislative record by the chairman of the Judiciary Committee.
The records were physically altered. "Indian" crossed out. "Moroccan" never written in. Other records were destroyed entirely, at moments that were not accidental. Someone changed the paperwork, and someone burned it, and the timing tells you why.
The question people ask is: "If I'm Native American or Moroccan, why don't my records say so?" The answer is documented. Some records did say so, and then someone altered them. Others were destroyed before they could be read at all. The alteration and the destruction worked together: what the fire did not reach, the pen rewrote.
In January 1921, a fire in the Department of Commerce building in Washington, D.C., destroyed approximately 99% of the 1890 census records. The Census Bureau then ordered the surviving 1% destroyed to "save storage space." The destruction was total and officially authorized.
The timing: 1921 is the year the Emergency Quota Act passed, the first major US immigration restriction law, which introduced national-origin quotas that would have directly affected how Moroccan-subject identity was processed at the border. The 1920 census had just eliminated the "mulatto" sub-classification for the first time, collapsing all mixed-heritage individuals into a single "Negro" category. The one census most likely to have recorded Moroccan-subject identity markers, the only one taken under the formal protégé system, the last one to use the heritage sub-classifications, was destroyed the same year the US government moved to restrict immigration by national origin. No census records from the formal protégé period survive.
The directive targeted families who had been resisting reclassification for generations, families with documented Indian or Moorish identity going back to colonial records. Plecker called this a public health measure. What it actually was: the state of Virginia ordering the administrative destruction of identity records that contradicted the colonial classification system. The directive is preserved at the Library of Virginia (Accession 22687). It is public record. The alterations it ordered were made in official government archives. When descendants of those families looked for their own records, they found "colored" where their grandparents had written "Indian" or "Moor."
Instead, within three years of independence, the United States and the newly recognized Kingdom of Morocco jointly moved to declare two things obsolete: Article 15 of the Madrid Convention — the consent mechanism, the rule requiring individual agreement before any Moroccan subject could be reclassified — and "Moroccan Nationality" for the protégé class. The 1959 Note executed this. It inverted Article 15's function: the instrument written to protect Moroccan subjects from reclassification without consent became the vehicle for declaring that the entire protégé class had been extinguished, without any individual exit procedure having been followed, without the treaty's requirements being met, and without a single subject being asked.
The logical contradiction at the center of this act is total.
International law recognizes states as successors to their predecessor's treaty obligations. The Kingdom of Morocco achieved independence precisely by asserting that it was the successor to the pre-Protectorate Moroccan state, the Sultan's empire, the Empire of Morocco. That is the claim that gave the Kingdom of Morocco international standing. That is the claim that brought foreign governments to recognize it. If the Kingdom of Morocco is the Empire of Morocco's successor, then Empire of Morocco subjects, including the protégé class in Al-Aqsa/America, are Kingdom of Morocco nationals by operation of law. You cannot inherit the throne and disown the heirs.
But that is exactly what the 1959 Note did. By jointly declaring "Moroccan Nationality" for the protégé class obsolete, the Kingdom of Morocco made two incompatible claims at the same moment: (1) we are the successor to the Empire of Morocco, that is our basis for existence; and (2) the Moroccan Nationality of Empire of Morocco subjects in America is obsolete. Both cannot be true. If claim (1) is true, claim (2) is an abandonment of nationals, a violation of international law. If claim (2) is true, claim (1) fails, there is no Empire of Morocco to succeed to, and the Kingdom of Morocco's recognition claim collapses.
This is a double paper genocide with the USA as co-defendant.
The first paper genocide was the 14-name chain: Moroccan identity reclassified through administrative instruments, census alteration, Plecker directives, Dawes rolls, until no Moroccan identity appeared anywhere in the operative record.
The second paper genocide was the 1959 Note: even the legal framework that would have allowed the treaty class to reclaim that identity, Article 15's consent mechanism, the protégé system, Moroccan Nationality itself, was declared obsolete by the two governments that were supposed to protect it. Not altered. Not suppressed. Declared dead.
And the Kingdom of Morocco was a willing co-author. A government that had just fought a nationalist independence movement, rooted in Moroccan national identity, used that nationalist victory to obtain international recognition and then immediately joined the USA in declaring that Moroccan national identity did not extend to Moroccan subjects in America. The same nationalism that liberated Morocco in 1956 was weaponized to bury the Empire of Morocco treaty class in Al-Aqsa three years later. That is not an oversight. That is a bilateral decision with a known target.
There is one more thing the 1959 Note inadvertently confirmed: you can only declare obsolete what existed. By agreeing that "Moroccan Nationality" for the protégé class needed to be addressed, needed to be declared obsolete, both governments acknowledged that Moroccan Nationality for that class was real. The act of burial is an adversarial admission that there was something living to bury. Neither government would have bothered if there were nothing there.
It goes deeper still. Seven additional dimensions the vault has confirmed.
First, France predetermined the outcome before the Kingdom of Morocco Nationality Code existed. On February 22, 1956, eight days before the Kingdom of Morocco gained independence, French Minister Pineau stated at the independence negotiations that certain treaty provisions were "excessive privileges no longer appropriate to the present state of affairs." The "obsolete" theory was announced before the Kingdom of Morocco had enacted a single piece of domestic nationality legislation. The Code that supposedly proved Article 15 was no longer needed was drafted in 1958, two years after France had already decided the answer. France predetermined the conclusion, then engineered the documentation to appear to support it, then had the US adopt the predetermined conclusion while citing the documentation France had engineered. The Kingdom of Morocco's own Nationality Code was not evidence of Article 15's obsolescence, it was the product of a conclusion that was reached before it existed.
Second, the Kingdom of Morocco drafted that Code without knowing the documents that showed it was legally insufficient. The US government's own 1939 diplomatic record (FRUS 1939 Doc 713) confirmed that Article 15 "requires a separate naturalization treaty" to terminate, a distinct bilateral agreement that was never negotiated, never drafted, never signed. A second document (FRUS 1939 Doc 725) confirmed the Madrid Convention has "no terminable date." Both documents were held in US diplomatic archives. France, as Morocco's official representative under the 1956 Exchange of Letters, knew both documents existed. France never disclosed them to Morocco. The Kingdom of Morocco drafted the 1958 Nationality Code treating Article 15 as terminable through domestic legislation, without knowing the US had already determined in 1939 that this approach was legally insufficient. The Kingdom of Morocco's agreement to the "obsolete" theory was not informed consent. It was consent obtained through material concealment by the party whose interests were served by Morocco not knowing what those documents said.
Third, the "1959 Note" was never formally transmitted to Morocco. The Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS 1958–1960, Volume XIII) covers the entire US-Morocco period with 27 documents. Not one of them reproduces a formal diplomatic note to Morocco declaring the 1836 Treaty obsolete. The "1959 Note" appears NOWHERE in the official diplomatic record as a numbered document. What exists is a footnote editor's characterization, an editor describing what a note "said, in part", in the official US treaty compilation. FRUS Doc 360 (NSC, October 29, 1959) reveals how the "note" was handled: "we had advised the French that we contemplated issuing a statement...and the French were resigned to it." The US notified France. Morocco's government's formal receipt of any note is not documented in FRUS. Under Article 25 of the 1836 Treaty, notice of abandonment must be given to "the other" party, not to France. France's authority over Empire of Morocco treaty matters had been declared "lapsed" by the Sultan himself in 1943. The US notified a party whose authority the Empire of Morocco sovereign had revoked sixteen years earlier. A note that was never formally transmitted to the other party is not a notice. It is an internal memorandum wearing a diplomatic costume.
Fourth, seven years before declaring the treaty "obsolete," the United States argued it was operative before the International Court of Justice. In 1952, the ICJ case Rights of Nationals of the United States of America in Morocco (France v. United States), the US appeared before the World Court, quoted Article 21 of the 1836 Treaty verbatim in its own Counter-Memorial, described the treaty as covering "native Moroccans" with active protections, and defended those protections as operative obligations. The US was not merely acknowledging the treaty, it was fighting to preserve treaty rights for its own nationals under the same instrument. Seven years later, the same State Department declared that same treaty "obsolete and without effect." The US argued at the ICJ in 1952 that the 1836 Treaty was alive. In 1959 it declared the treaty dead. International law calls this estoppel: a party cannot take one legal position before a tribunal and then take the opposite position when convenient.
Fifth, the United States still calls the treaty "unbroken" today. On April 24, 1987, twenty-eight years after the "1959 Note", President Ronald Reagan stated: "It is the longest unbroken friendship treaty of the United States." A treaty formally terminated in 1959 by a diplomatic note is not "unbroken" in 1987. The word "unbroken" was not accidental, it was the word Reagan chose to describe the treaty's status in the present tense. In 2025, H.Res.251 (119th Congress) was introduced stating: "the Treaty of Peace and Friendship remains the longest unbroken diplomatic relationship in United States history." Present tense. In Congress. Sixty-six years after the supposed termination. The US government's own conduct, from Reagan's statement to the current Congressional resolution, treats the 1836 Treaty as continuously in force. The US cannot assert in international proceedings that the treaty was terminated in 1959 while its own President and Congress call it "unbroken" and say it "remains" in force.
Sixth, Article 15's elimination targeted exactly and only the Empire of Morocco treaty class in the Americas. At the moment of the 1959 Note, three populations could theoretically be affected by Article 15: Kingdom of Morocco nationals inside the Empire of Morocco (whose status was fully addressed by the Kingdom of Morocco's own Nationality Code); recent Kingdom of Morocco diaspora abroad (whose Kingdom of Morocco documentation addressed their situation); and the Empire of Morocco treaty class in the Americas, people whose Moroccan subject status derived from the 1836 Treaty, who had been in the Americas for generations, whose identity had been reclassified through the 14-name chain, and for whom Article 15 was the only surviving legal basis to assert that their Moroccan nationality had never been lawfully extinguished. The Kingdom of Morocco's Nationality Code did not reach this class; the Kingdom of Morocco is not the Empire of Morocco; a 1958 state cannot retroactively address a treaty relationship established in 1836 by a different sovereign. Article 15 was already redundant for the first two populations. For the third, the Empire of Morocco treaty class in Al-Aqsa/America, it was the last protection standing. The 1959 Note eliminated exactly that protection. A measure whose stated justification applied to populations that did not need it, and whose actual effect fell on the population the justification did not address, is not a general policy. It is a targeted instrument. The vault finding names it directly: the 1959 Note's circular pretext was constructed specifically to eliminate the protection of the Empire of Morocco treaty class in the Americas, and the impossibility of its stated justification proves that class was still there, still protected, and still present when the Note was issued.
Seventh, the 1959 Note is void on sixteen (16) independent grounds, every one sourced from US government documents alone. Any single ground defeats the Note. Sixteen simultaneously create a compounding legal impossibility with no escape pathway.
| # | Basis | Void because |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Art. 25, 8 Stat. 484 | 12-month notice never given to Empire of Morocco; US notified France |
| 2 | US Const. Art. II §2 | No Senate 2/3 vote to terminate |
| 3 | FRUS 1939 Docs 713/725 | Proper 3-instrument method identified in 1939, never completed |
| 4 | FRUS 1939 Doc 725 | Madrid Convention has "no terminable date" |
| 5 | FRUS 1939 Doc 713 | Art. 15: consent of the Government of Morocco required for all naturalization; consent never given |
| 6 | FRUS 1914 Docs 1628/1629 | US acceptance of French protectorate was constitutionally inadequate |
| 7 | FRUS 1955–57 v18 Doc 199 | US treated treaty as operative October 1956 (Cannon–Balafrej); cannot call it obsolete 3 years later |
| 8 | Empire of Morocco/Kingdom of Morocco distinction | Kingdom of Morocco is not the Empire of Morocco treaty party; Kingdom of Morocco acquiescence ≠ Empire of Morocco consent |
| 9 | ICJ 1952; Franco-British Convention 1937 | Instrument class below the minimum required to end MFN-derived rights |
| 10 | ICJ 1952; 8 Stat. 484 Arts. 20–21 | Treaty-based rights survived the 1937 multilateral convention; weaker 1959 note cannot reach what the stronger instrument could not |
| 11 | Act of Algeciras (1906) Art. 123; FRUS 1914 Doc 1629 | Senate-ratified Algeciras preserved "all prior treaties"; Knox confirmed Senate approval required for modification |
| 12 | Algeciras Art. 1; Madrid Conv. Art. 15 | US issued note while administering Empire of Morocco domain territory (Al-Aqsa/Americas) without Sultan's consent, classification authority void from inception |
| 13 | Act of Algeciras (1906) Arts. 1 & 123; VCLT Art. 41 | 13 signatory powers; 1959 Note bilateral only (US + Kingdom of Morocco); 12 signatory powers never notified; bilateral modification of multilateral treaty void where it affects other parties' rights |
| 14 | Madrid Conv. Art. 15 (self-defeating) | Art. 15 is itself the consent mechanism; declaring it "obsolete" destroys the only channel for the Empire's consent, so the bond is suspended, not terminated |
| 15 | Madrid Conv. Art. 15 (contingent coexistence) | Art. 15 operates only on voluntary foreign naturalization with the Empire's consent; none given, so the sovereign bond coexists and was never displaced |
| 16 | Madrid Conv. Art. 15 (foreign-country predicate) | Art. 15 requires naturalization in a country foreign to the Empire; Al-Aqsa/Americas is the Empire's acknowledged western domain, not foreign, so the trigger never fires, Art. 15 total collapse |
The "1959 Note" declaring the treaty obsolete: was never formally transmitted to Morocco; was coordinated with France, whose authority the Sultan had revoked in 1943; relied on a Kingdom of Morocco Nationality Code drafted without the documents showing it was legally insufficient; was issued seven years after the US argued the same treaty was operative before the ICJ; and is called "unbroken" by the US President in 1987 and "still in force" by Congress in 2025. The burial was performed with a note that doesn't exist in the diplomatic record, on a treaty the United States still officially calls alive.
This is what "void ab initio" means in the practical record: none of these acts, the census alteration, the directive, the fire, the 1959 Note, produced any lawful legal effect on the treaty. The sixteen-ground void table above is sourced entirely from US government documents. The treaty status was never extinguished. But the paper record was changed, the records were burned, and the two governments that should have protected the treaty class agreed instead to close the door, one of them without ever formally notifying the other party it was doing so, and both of them in the face of a document the US President would call "unbroken" for the rest of the 20th century.
The Dawes Commission (1893–1914) completed a double reclassification: people already moved out of Moroccan identity in the record were now moved out of Indian identity too. They were left with nothing in the operative record.
The Five Civilized Tribes, Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, had among their members a significant population of Moroccan subjects who had been reclassified as "Indians" through the name chain over the preceding two centuries. These people had lived in tribal communities for generations. They were recognized by the tribes as members. Their connection to the land, to the community structures, and to the prior sovereign identity was real.
The Dawes Commission, a federal commission established in 1893 to create enrollment rolls for the Five Civilized Tribes, divided tribal members into two categories: Blood Rolls (recognized tribal members by blood quantum, receiving full land allotments) and Freedmen Rolls (designated as formerly enslaved or descended from enslaved people, receiving inferior allotments and eventually being denied tribal citizenship entirely).
The forensic problem, documented in federal archives, is that many people pushed onto the Freedmen rolls were not descendants of enslaved people. They were Category 1 Moroccan subjects: people of darker complexion whose ancestry traced to the treaty class, who had been living in tribal communities for generations after being reclassified from Moroccan/Moorish identity to Indian identity. The Dawes Commission expelled them from Indian identity into Freedman identity based on phenotype, appearance, not actual descent from enslaved people.
A newspaper reporter watching this happen in 1903 wrote it plainly in the Minneapolis Journal:
"It is negroes who are being robbed, not Indians."— Minneapolis Journal, September 30, 1903, documenting the Dawes Commission's reclassification in real time
The reporter saw it happening: people who were recognized as Indian-identified were being severed from that identity in the rolls and reclassified as "Negro" through the Freedmen rolls. The result was a double suppression: Moroccan treaty rights buried in the record by the first reclassification from Moroccan to Indian. Indian treaty rights buried by the second reclassification from Indian to Freedman. Left with neither in the operative record, while both statuses remained legally intact, every instrument in the chain being void ab initio. The people who went through both reclassifications ended up in the same place as those who had only gone through the direct Moroccan → Negro chain: classified as "Black," with no recognized sovereign relation, no treaty access, and no legal identity that connected them to the land they had inhabited.
This is why General Guillaume's statement in 1957 was accurate. By the time he made it, the double reclassification had been complete for forty years. The people who had survived the Dawes Commission as Freedmen had been fully absorbed into the "Negro" classification. The distinction between those who went through the Indian reclassification step and those who did not had been administratively erased. They were all "the Moroccans" in Guillaume's formulation, and they were all "the Indians", because administratively they had been the same people wearing different labels before the Dawes Commission ran its operations.
"Indian" is not a national identity. It is a nom de guerre, and simultaneously a domestic dependent nation status that traps you between sovereignty and colonial control.
"Indian" was presented to history as a naming error by Christopher Columbus, a man who supposedly believed he had reached Asia. The record shows otherwise: Columbus was Franciscan-educated, and "Indian" derives from "Indigenae", a pre-existing Latin Church administrative category for native peoples under church jurisdiction that Columbus would have known before 1492. The "error" was a deliberate administrative classification applied to the people he found in the Moroccan Empire's western domain, and the colonial system then formalized it into a legal category. "Indian" does not name any specific nation, any specific sovereign, or any specific treaty class. It is a continental racial category, an adjective applied to all people who appeared to the European colonial mind as "indigenous to the Americas" regardless of their actual national identity.
The papal bull Dudum Siquidem (1493) is the origin of the "Indian" legal category in canon law: it extended Spain's authorization to all lands in the western direction and the people therein as "Indians", from the church Latin "indigenae," meaning native people. The classification was applied to Moroccan subjects who were already inhabiting the western domain of their own empire. Columbus's error and the Vatican's authorization fused into a legal category that erased the specific national identity, Moroccan subject, and replaced it with a generic indigenous descriptor.
"Native American" is another renaming, a 20th-century adjective applied to replace "Indian" while maintaining the same legal framework. Like "Indian," it describes geographic presence rather than sovereign identity. Like "Indian," it does not trigger the Empire of Morocco treaty. Like "Indian," it places the population into a domestic legal framework, the Marshall Trilogy of Supreme Court cases (1823–1832), that recognized limited sovereignty while denying full rights: "domestic dependent nations," in Chief Justice John Marshall's phrase.
Domestic dependent nation status means: you have enough sovereignty to be dispossessed of your land through "treaty" (many of which were fraudulent or coerced), but not enough sovereignty to assert full treaty rights against the United States on equal terms. You are dependent, on the US federal government's recognition. That recognition can be withdrawn. It has been withdrawn, repeatedly, through termination policies. The domestic dependent nation framework is not freedom. It is managed sovereignty, colonial administration wearing the vocabulary of self-determination.
The Treaty of Peace and Friendship (1836) is a different framework entirely. It is not a domestic dependent nation treaty. It is a bilateral treaty between two equal sovereigns: the Empire of Morocco, Al-Maghrib al-Aqsa, and the United States of America. Under this treaty, Empire of Morocco subjects are not dependent. They are protected. The obligations run to the United States, not from the Empire of Morocco subjects' dependence on US recognition, but from the United States' own Senate-ratified legal commitment.
You were called "African" before the continent received that name. The people now called "Africans" were not yet called "Africans" when your ancestors were already being labeled that way in American records.
"Africa" is a Roman colonial name. It originally referred only to the Roman province of Africa, the area around Carthage, roughly modern Tunisia. The people living in what we now call "Africa" did not universally call their continent "Africa", they called their territories and empires by their specific names: Al-Maghrib (the West), Misr (Egypt), the Kingdom of Mali, the Songhai Empire, the Wolof, the Yoruba, the Kongolese. Each was a specific sovereign identity. The continent-wide name "Africa" was a European expansion of the Roman provincial term, applied progressively as Europeans drew maps of territories they were colonizing.
The Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 was the moment when European powers formally divided the continent into colonial territories, and standardized "Africa" as a unified political concept in international law. This is when "Africa" became the name for the entire continent in a legally and politically meaningful sense.
Your ancestors were being called "African" in American records by the early 1600s. The Berlin Conference was 1884. The gap is 280 years. The modern African nation-states, Nigeria (1960), Ghana (1957), Senegal (1960), Kenya (1963), did not exist at all until the 20th century.
When your ancestors were classified as "African" in Virginia records in 1705, there were no "Africans" in the sense of citizens of African nations, because those nations did not yet exist. The only sovereign on the continent of Africa who had a formally established, internationally recognized treaty relationship with the United States throughout the relevant period was the Sultan of Morocco. The only African identity that connects to the legal record is Moroccan.
The term "African" was applied to Empire of Morocco subjects, Moroccan subjects of the Empire of Morocco, from the earliest colonial records, before modern African nation-states existed, before the Berlin Conference codified the continent as "Africa," and before the people actually living in Africa were consistently referred to as "Africans." This demonstrates that "African" was a racial classification imposed by the colonial system, not a description of national origin.— Moroccan Treaty Research: Africa Before Africa, 2026
The first people on earth to be called "African" in a formal legal record were not from the continent of Africa. They were Moroccan subjects, subjects of the Sultan of Morocco, already inhabiting the western domain of Al-Maghrib al-Aqsa, who were receiving a racial label before the continent that label pointed to had that name in any standardized way. You carry a label that was applied to you before its referent existed as a unified concept.
Physical anthropology, blood type distribution, genetic haplogroup analysis, and the Dred Scott racial scientist's own words all point to the same conclusion: the people classified as "Black" include a population already here.
The colonial system suppressed not only the legal identity of the treaty class but also the physical anthropology evidence that confirmed their prior presence. When scholars' findings contradicted the transportation narrative, the story that all "Black" Americans arrived by slave ship, their work was buried, relabeled, or destroyed. The pattern is documented across multiple disciplines simultaneously.
Dixon's findings were buried after his death. His notes were destroyed. The data was relabeled. His research directly contradicted the narrative that all dark-complexioned people in North America arrived through the transatlantic slave trade or through East Asian migration across the Bering Strait. A population that was already in New England before Columbus, showing physical characteristics consistent with Al-Maghrib al-Aqsa's population, was precisely the treaty class population the colonial narrative needed not to exist.
"A Moor tanned by the climate, because his children, not exposed to the sun, do not become black like himself."
The racial scientist in Taney's own publication explicitly excluded Moors from the Negro racial category, stating that the dark complexion was a climatic adaptation, not a genetic characteristic of the racial category. Taney used "Negro" to classify Moroccan subjects and deny them rights. Cartwright, the scientific authority Taney's publication deployed to justify that classification, stated in the same document that Moors are not Negroes. The two positions, one legal, one scientific, cannot both be true. The Dred Scott decision classified the treaty class as Negroes while its own scientific appendix excluded Moors from that category.
For this analysis: when treaty class members' genetic testing returns "West African" or "Sub-Saharan African" results on consumer DNA testing platforms, those results are not contradicting the Moroccan subject claim; they are confirming it. E1b1a is the shared marker between the Amazigh/Moroccan population and the West African population. Both populations carry the same haplogroup. The consumer DNA testing platform cannot distinguish between them — the test cannot determine whether E1b1a arrived through the transatlantic slave trade or through a Moroccan/Amazigh ancestor already present in the Americas before Columbus. The "West African" result and the Amazigh/Moroccan result point to the same underlying genetic family. The platforms were built using reference population databases that themselves reflect the colonial classification, defining "West African" as the primary reference population for E1b1a, not "North African/Amazigh." The genetic result confirms prior presence. The consumer platform's label for that result reflects the colonial classification.
The blood type O distribution in the treaty class population is consistent with a population that includes a significant prior-presence component, people who had been in the Americas for generations before the colonial contact period, contributing the high-O genetic signal that appears in Native American populations, but who were later reclassified as "Black" through the name chain and the Dawes Commission double reclassification. The blood type data does not alone prove Moroccan origin, but it is inconsistent with a population derived almost entirely from the West African slave trade, where blood type O frequencies would be lower. The anomaly points to the prior-presence population.
A treaty class member classified as "Negro" on a WWII service record was simultaneously: (a) a "Negro" under the US domestic classification system, entitled to serve in segregated units under Jim Crow law; and (b) a Moroccan subject under the 1836 Treaty, entitled to consular assistance at trial under Article 21, and excluded from AEA enforcement because the Empire of Morocco was never designated a hostile nation. The same person. Two legal statuses. The service record reflects only the domestic classification. The 1836 Treaty reflects the international status that the domestic classification never lawfully extinguished. The military service records, now available through the National Archives, are documentary evidence that the treaty class was present in the US population, serving under a classification that was applied without the treaty's exit procedure ever being followed.
Everyone called "Black" or "African American" in America is not one population. Four legally distinct groups share that label. Understanding which one you are changes everything about what you can claim.
The four categories below each carry a different legal basis, a different relationship to the 1836 Treaty, and a different ceiling for what can be claimed internationally.
The US government, the census, and most legal institutions collapse all four categories under the single label "Black" or "African American." This collapse is not an administrative oversight. It is the mechanism through which the treaty class (Category 1) is permanently buried inside a larger racial category with different legal characteristics. Category 2 makes a domestic slavery claim. Category 1 makes an international treaty claim. When you put them in the same box and call them the same population, the treaty claim disappears into the civil rights claim. That is the function of the collapse.
The transatlantic slave trade brought approximately 388,000 enslaved Africans to the territory that became the United States. The 2010 census counted over 38 million "African Americans." The math does not support a population derived almost entirely from the slave trade.
Historians David Eltis and David Richardson, using the Voyages Database, the most comprehensive scholarly accounting of the transatlantic slave trade, documented approximately 388,000 enslaved people brought directly to the territory that became the United States between 1619 and 1808. Natural population growth accounts for some of the difference. But the ratio, from 388,000 to 38 million, is roughly 100:1 over approximately 200 years. Even with high birth rates and low mortality in the period after emancipation, this ratio is difficult to explain from a purely slave-trade-origin population.
A substantial portion of the population labeled "Black" or "African American" descends from people who were already here, Category 1, not from those who crossed the Atlantic. This is consistent with the blood type data: Native American populations have some of the highest rates of blood type O in the world. Category 1 people, reclassified as "Native American" and then reclassified again as "Negro" through the Dawes Commission and the name chain, would show the same genetic signature. They do.
The slavery narrative explains where some of you came from. It does not explain where all of you came from. The treaty class, the Moroccan subjects of the Empire of Morocco who were already here, is a significant portion of the people now labeled "African American." They were not brought. They were already home.