The term Creole and its cognates in other languages — such as crioulo, criollo, créole, kriolu, criol, kreyol, kreol, kriulo, kriol, krio, etc. — have been applied to people in different countries and epochs, with rather different meanings. Those terms are almost always used in the general area of present or former colonies in other continents, and originally referred to locally born people with foreign ancestry.
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People of mixed Alaska Native American and Russian ancestry. The intermingling of Promyshlenniki men with Aleut and Alutiiq women in the late 18th century gave rise to a people who assumed a prominent position in the economy of Russian Alaska and the north Pacific rim.[1] [2]
During the early settlement of the colonies, children born of immigrants in the colonies were often referred to as creole. This is found more often in the Chesapeake Colonies[3]
In the United States, the word "Creole" refers to people of any race or mixture thereof who are descended from settlers in colonial French Louisiana before it became part of the United States in 1803 with the Louisiana Purchase. Some writers from other parts of the country have mistakenly assumed the term to refer only to people of mixed racial descent, but this is not the traditional Louisiana usage. Originally it referred to people of French and then Spanish descent who were born in Louisiana, to distinguish them from immigrants. Later Creole was sometimes used as well to refer to people of African descent born in Louisiana. Later the terms were differentiated, by French Creole (European ancestry) and Louisiana Creole (meaning someone of mixed racial ancestry).
Contemporary usage has broadened the meaning of Louisiana Creoles to describe a broad cultural group of people of all races who share a French or Spanish background. Louisianans who identify themselves as "Creole" are most commonly from historically Francophone communities, with some ancestors who came to Louisiana either directly from France or via the French colonies in the Caribbean. They generally are Roman Catholic and influenced by the traditional French culture of the early part of the state. The term is also often used to mean simply "pertaining to New Orleans". Louisiana's Creole People (Creoles of Color) are of mixed (mainly) French, Spanish, African American, and Native American heritage[4]
(Those Louisianans descended from the Acadians of French Canada usually identify as Cajuns, rather than Creoles.)
The English word creole derives from the French créole, which in turn came from Portuguese crioulo. This word, a derivative of the verb criar ("to raise"), was coined in the 15th century, in the trading and military outposts established by Portugal in West Africa and Cape Verde. It originally referred to descendants of the Portuguese settlers who were born and "raised" locally. The word then spread to other languages, probably adopted from Portuguese slave traders who supplied most of the slaves to South America through the 16th century.
While the Portuguese may have originally reserved the term crioulo for people of strictly European descent, the crioulo population came to be dominated by numerous people of mixed Portuguese and African ancestry. This mixing happened relatively quickly in most Portuguese colonies of the time. The growth of a mixed population was due to both the scarcity of Portuguese-born women in the settlements, and to the Portuguese Crown policy of encouraging mixed marriages in the colonies to create more stable populations.
The crioulos of mixed Portuguese and African descent eventually gave rise to several major ethnic groups in Africa, especially in Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé e Príncipe, Ziguinchor (Casamance), Angola, Mozambique. Only a few of these groups have retained the name crioulo or variations of it:
Sierra Leone, founded by the British to serve as a colony for freed slaves, has a Creole ethnic group whose ancestors migrated from Canada, where many were Americans who had fought with the British and settled there after the American Revolutionary War; the British West Indies, and various parts of West Africa. Their offspring (born in the Freetown colony) came to be known as Creoles or its cognate Krio. Some of these Creoles or Krios were of mixed ancestry.
Similarly, the United States established a colony for freed slaves in what became Liberia. Descendants of African-American immigrants, or Americo-Liberians, were often called Creoles. Many of the African-American immigrants and their descendants were of mixed ancestry.
Creoles from these two nations emigrated to other African countries, such as Equatorial Guinea, where they were known as Krios; or Nigeria, where they were known as Saros. Some scholars report that a new wave of Krio immigrant descendants of freed slaves of Sierra Leone and Liberia are known as Fernandinos (see Fernando Po). The original Fernandinos of the region who existed on the islands of Bioko and Sao Tome and Principe, both discovered by explorer Fernão do Pó, stemmed from indigenous, Spanish and/or Portuguese ancestry.
An additional sub-group of African descent from the Caribbean and South America on Bioko Island were descendants of freed Cuban and Brazilian slaves brought to the islands during the 1600s and 1800s. People of this specific ancestry were part of the emancipado population which included other distinct groups assimilated into the local colonial society.
In Brazil, the word crioulo initially denoted persons of Portuguese parentage born in Brazil (as distinct from colonists that migrated from Portugal), like in Portuguese-speaking Africa. It eventually came to denote a person of predominantly African ancestry. In colonial Brazil, it was common refer to a Brazilian-born slave as a crioulo, whereas slaves from Africa were known as "Africans". Thus crioulo came to refer to slaves born and raised in Brazil. Later, crioulos was used to refer to all people of African ancestry.
African slaves were imported into the country from the 17th century until the first half of the 19th century. Due to their multiple ethnic roots and to the wide geographic expanse of the country, the slaves and their descendants did not constitute a cohesive ethnic group. On the other hand, as in the Portuguese colonies in Africa, people of mixed Portuguese and African ancestry soon came to constitute a large segment of the population. There were no sharp class divisions based on degrees of African heritage.
In regions that were formerly colonies of Spain, the Spanish word criollo (literally, "native," "local") historically referred to class in the colonial caste system, comprising people born in the colonies with unmixed Spanish descent. People with at most 1/8th of Amerindian ancestry, were also considered Criollos; but this rule did not apply to black African ancestry. The crown often passed over Criollos for the top military, administrative, and religious offices in the colonies in favor of the Spanish-born Peninsulares (literally "born in the Iberian Peninsula").
The word Criollo is a cognate of English "Creole", and often translated by it; even though many other Creole peoples never were historically connected to Spain or to the colonial system, and/or were never defined in terms of racial purity.
The racially-based caste system was in force throughout the Spanish colonies in the Americas, since the 16th century. By the 19th century, this discrimination and the example of the American Revolution and the ideals of the Enlightenment eventually led the Spanish American Criollo elite to rebel against the Spanish rule. With the support of the lower classes, they engaged Spain in the Spanish American wars of independence (1810–1826), which ended with the break-up of former Spanish Empire in America into a number of independent republics.
In parts of the Caribbean region, the term Creole is sometimes used to describe anyone, regardless of race or ethnicity, who was born and raised in the region. In Guadeloupe and Martinique, 'creole' is used to refer to white people of mixed race and black/mulatto mixed of white, african and east indian. In French West Indies, people mixed of only African and Black East Indian are called "Bata-Indians" - which isn't a pejorative term.[5] In Haiti, it excludes white people.[5] It is sometimes used to refer to persons of European, African, or mixed Afro-European descent such as mixed race people of Dominica, Jamaica, Barbados and Suriname, or in contradistinction to other ethnicities such as East Indians in Trinidad & Tobago and Guyana, or Mestizos & Creoles (African & European Decent) in Belize. It also refers to the syncretism of the various cultures (African ones as well as European ones for example French, British, Spanish and Portuguese among others) which influenced the area. This is also referred to as the creolization of society "due to its ability to suggest some of the complex sociocultural issues also involved in the process" (Manuel, p. 14). Creole, 'Kreyol' or 'Kweyol' also refers to the creole languages in the Caribbean, including Antillean Creole and Jamaican Creole among others.
In parts of the Southern Caribbean the term "Creolean" is used to refer to a French-speaking person of white ethnicity, especially if they are from the smaller islands belonging to Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.
Today, centuries after slavery and colonization, the Franco-Caribbean people sometimes use this term as a term of empowerment and pride in their native culture. The movement of the pride, a literary movement led by the likes of Patrick Chamoiseau, is called Créolité which can be translated to “Creoleness”.
The usage of 'creole' in the islands of the southwest of the Indian Ocean varies according to the island. In Réunion and the Seychelles, the term 'creole' includes people born there of all ethnic groups.[5] In Mauritius, on the other hand, the term excludes white people.[5] In all three, 'creole' also refers to languages derived from French.