Mulatto descendants of Mihil Gowen

One of the sons of Mihil Gowen (variants Goen, Going, Goins, etc) is Christopher who was born to a woman whose name is unknown about 1660 in James City of the early English colony in Virginia.

Christopher Going, believed to be a son of Mihil Goen and an Indigenous (likely Powhatan) Woman, is believed by some to have been one of the first "Black Indians" (also known as Maroons*) in North America.

While some believe Christopher's mother was a "white" i.e. Euro-Christian woman her name was apparently never recorded in any colonial era document so far discovered, nor has any description of her ever been found, so it is just a legend (unproven and undocumented). Although as part of a colonial system which normalised the documenting of details of people considered by them to be subjects of the English Crown, that her name was not recorded is a little unusual to say the least. 

This lack of documentation and description could easily be understood and explained if she was an Indigenous woman still using her own language and known only by the name her people called her, which was probably unintelligible to colonial bureaucrats had they even had any reason to record her name, which apparently they did not.

Part of the legend appears to spring from the fact some of her and Mihil Gowen's descendants are described as "Mulatto" in colonial records but an assumption is made that the legal definition of the word when the records were made is identical to what it has come to mean in modern times in common usage, which is of a person who is of mostly European mixed with African ancestry. It does not at all mean the same thing, here is the original definition by colonial legislators:

"And for clearing all manner of doubts which hereafter may happen to arise upon the construction of this act, or any other act, who shall be accounted a mulatto, Be it enacted and declared, and it is hereby enacted and declared, That the child of an Indian and the child, grand child, or great grand child, of a negro shall be deemed, accounted, held and taken to be a mulatto." -- General Assembly of Virginia "4th Anne Ch. IV (October 1705)"

And so it appears the Virginia colonial government made no distinction between descendants who had either or both Indigenous and African ancestry mixed with European, and in my opinion, nor should anyone today make such a distinction especially when it leads to the "paper genocide" or erasure of our Indigenous ancestors in favour of continuance of a biracial system of apartheid which was at its regrettable height during the Jim Crow era, and which ended in 1967 with Loving v Virginia and the dawn of the US Civil Rights era.

-- L A Childress, 3 Feb 2018

* Maroon is defined as "of a very dark brownish crimson color" in dictionaries, and while "Black Indian" is often used in North America today to describe people who descend from alliances between Africans and Indigenous peoples, "Maroon" has been used in other of the English colonies e.g. Jamaica. The origin of the word appears to be French Marron which means "chestnut" for the colour. See Wikipedia Jamaican Maroons.