Former slaves claimed indigenous identity to legitimize their land despite African origins

Evidence

The choice of this name was not the first use of indigenous symbolism by Dessalines. After going into rebellion in late 1802, Dessalines briefly adopted the term “Army of the Incas” for his troops, who also sometimes called themselves “Sons of the Sun,” though these terms eventually gave way to the less poetic term “Indigenous Army.” The former slaves who made up the army, and most of the population of the new nation, were of course no more native to the island than were the French colonizers whose expulsion the proclamation of independence demanded. Dessalines’s use of symbols derived from indigenous peoples was an attempt to assert a legitimate claim to a land in which a majority of the nation’s inhabitants were exiles, having been brought there from Africa against their will. But it also suggested that this claim was based on resistance to, and the ultimate victory over, the brutality of colonialism, something which the enslaved shared with those wiped out by the Spanish centuries before they ever arrived. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 1056

Categorization

• QUESTION: How did Dessalines’s troops themselves receive the Inca/Sun-of-the-Sun naming? Was it adopted top-down only?
• XREF: connects to: Southern white families’ land claims were founded on Native American removal — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 23