Q: Does the name "Gullah" come from the Guale tribe, do they have Native American blood? Is the Geeche Gullah language mixed with Native American?
A: No, the Gullah are African-American people, and their creole language is a mix of English with West African languages. Since the Gullah community remained in the same region for generations instead of being broken up and moved from place to place like other enslaved groups, their unique culture survived the hardships of slavery and is still practiced today. The Gullah language (which is still spoken by some families today) is very interesting, but we do not have any resources about it ourselves--here are some good websites about the Gullah people and their language where you can learn more:
Gullah/Geechee Heritage
Gullah Language and Stories
The Gullah Creole
Being Gullah or Geechee
Gullah Storytelling
It is possible that the name "Gullah" could have indirectly come from "Guale," since an area of Georgia was named after the Guale tribe and some Gullah communities live in this region, so they might have adopted the place name as their own. However, it is more likely that the similarity in the names is a coincidence and that the Gullah people took their name from an African source. One of the websites above suggests that the name "Gullah" came from the same source as "Gola" in the West African country of Angola, where many Gullah people originated from. This seems plausible to us! In any case, there is no direct connection between the two communities, whose paths would never have had much chance to cross. The Guale tribe suffered a devastating epidemic in the 1600's century and dispersed into other tribes by the early 1700's, whereas the Gullah people began arriving in the 1700's and gained their freedom from slavery in 1865.
Hope that is interesting, have a great day!
Monday, February 11, 2019
The Gullah-Geechee and the Guale
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I find it very hard t believe that there is no indigenous/First Nations (from US not Canada) connection culturally or genetically to the Gullah at all. Africans would not have known about the indigenous plants, herbs, animals, etc. These people look like a blend of everything. I have found "The Only Land They Knew: The Tragic Story of the American Indians of the Old South" very revealing; it helped shed some light on the hisory of the region, including how the Gullah may have formed. And there were remnant tribes of Yamasee (Yamacraw), Guale, who were absorbed by the Yamasee, and others who remained in low country South Carolina, Georgia, and blended and soon became identified as Negro, Black, mulatto, etc. This was the case with some of my maternal paternal grandparents people, who have roots in that part of South Carolina and Georgia.
ReplyDeleteCertainly, there could have been intermarriage between Gullah people and Native or white neighbors. One interesting thing DNA tests have been revealing is just how much different communities truly intermingled with each other in the past!
DeleteIn this case, the question was whether the Gullah are descendants of the Guale tribe, because their name sounds similar. The answer to that is almost certainly no. The Guale tribe no longer existed as a tribal entity at the time the Gullah arrived. The name "Gullah" most likely has African origins.
Do you have resources or proof of these gullah people "coming" to America from "Africa". Any primary sources such as logs,manifest,plantation records etc. If not bring then saying they're from Africa is nothing more than conjecture.
ReplyDeleteSure! Here's a scholarly article about the West African genetic and historical origins of the Gullah people: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8286328/
DeleteHope that helps!
Unfortunately these studies only focus on South Carolina Gullah. My grandfather and grandmother or both mixed raced Gullah Native Spanish Irish and much more so the high affinity for African heritage is extremely flawed do to where the sample were ccollected. Most people from our Island can't trace or history to the 1600s were we went from Natives to mullatos later to Negros after 1920.
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