The Black Indians of California 👀

Georg Heinrich Freiherr von Langsdorff was a man of many different trades; he was a German naturalist, explorer, and even Russian diplomat and physician. Langsdorff was a part of Russia’s first circumnavigation of the Earth from 1803 to 1805 and later in the following years went on to explore in more detail the northwest coast of North America. It is from the latter that Langsdorff leaves key insight into what some of the native people of the Americas look like in his book Langsdorff's Narrative of the Rezanov Voyage to Nueva California in 1806. Langsdorff describes the indians of the San Francisco Bay area in California as follows:

These Indians are of middling or rather short stature, and their color is of such a dark brown that it approaches black. This color is owing very much to their filthy mode of living, to the power of the sun's rays, to their custom of smearing their bodies with mud and ember-dust, and their slovenly way of wearing their scanty covering. Their lips are large, thick, and protruding, their noses broad, flat, and negro-like. Their features in many respects resemble those of the negro, and their color also, but their black hair, however, is in the highest degree different, being long and straight. Left to grow naturally, it would often hang down even below the hips, but they commonly cut it to the length of four or five inches, when it sticks out like bristles, and this to the eyes of a European is very repellent.

Black Indigenous American Book