IN: The Black Seminoles are black Indians associated with the Seminole people in Florida and Oklahoma. They are the descendants of free blacks and of escaped slaves (called maroons) who allied with Seminole groups in Spanish Florida. Historically, the Black Seminoles lived mostly in distinct bands near the Native American Seminole. Some were held as slaves of particular Seminole leaders; but they had more freedom than did slaves held by whites in the South and by other Native American tribes, including the right to bear arms.

The Black Seminole culture that took shape after 1800 was a dynamic mixture of African, Native American, Spanish, and slave traditions. Adopting certain practices of the Native Americans, maroons wore Seminole clothing and ate the same foodstuffs prepared the same way: they gathered the roots of a native plant called coontie, grinding, soaking, and straining them to make a starchy flour similar to arrowroot, as well as mashing corn with a mortar and pestle to make sofkee, a sort of porridge often used as a beverage, with water added-- ashes from the fire wood used to cook the sofkee were occasionally added to it for extra flavor. They also introduced their Gullah staple of rice to the Seminole, and continued to use it as a basic part of their diets. Rice remained part of the diet of the Black Seminoles who moved to Oklahoma. Initially living apart from the Native Americans, the maroons developed their own unique African-American culture, based in the Gullah culture of the Lowcountry. Black Seminoles inclined toward a syncretic form of Christianity developed during the plantation years. Certain cultural practices, such as "jumping the broom" to celebrate marriage, hailed from the plantations; other customs, such as some names used for black towns, reflected African heritage. As time progressed, the Seminole and Blacks had limited intermarriage, but historians and anthropologists have come to believe that generally the Black Seminoles had independent communities. They allied with the Seminole at times of war. The Seminole society was based on a matrilineal kinship system, in which inheritance and descent went through the maternal line. Children were considered to belong to the mother's clan, so those born to ethnic African mothers would have been considered black by the Seminole. While the children might integrate customs from both parents' cultures, the Seminole believed they belonged to the mother's group more than the father's. African Americans adopted some elements of the European-American patriarchal system. But, under the South's adoption of the principle of partus sequitur ventrem in the 17th century and incorporated into slavery law in slave states, children of slave mothers were considered legally slaves. Under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, even if the mother escaped to a free state, she and her children were legally considered slaves and fugitives. As a result, the Black Seminoles born to slave mothers were always at risk from slave raiders.
QUESTION: What were some of their rituals?
IN: Sam Benjamin Harris (born April 9, 1967) is an American author, philosopher, neuroscientist, blogger, and podcast host. He is a critic of religion and proponent of the liberty to criticize religion. He is concerned with matters that touch on spirituality, morality, neuroscience, free will, and terrorism. He is described as one of the "Four Horsemen of atheism", with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett.

Harris considers Islam to be "especially belligerent and inimical to the norms of civil discourse," relative to other world religions. He asserts that the "dogmatic commitment to using violence to defend one's faith, both from within and without" to varying degrees, is a central Islamic doctrine that is found in few other religions to the same degree, and that "this difference has consequences in the real world." In 2006, after the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy, Harris wrote, "The idea that Islam is a 'peaceful religion hijacked by extremists' is a dangerous fantasy--and it is now a particularly dangerous fantasy for Muslims to indulge. It is not at all clear how we should proceed in our dialogue with the Muslim world, but deluding ourselves with euphemisms is not the answer. It now appears to be a truism in foreign policy circles that real reform in the Muslim world cannot be imposed from the outside. But it is important to recognize why this is so--it is so because the Muslim world is utterly deranged by its religious tribalism. In confronting the religious literalism and ignorance of the Muslim world, we must appreciate how terrifyingly isolated Muslims have become in intellectual terms." He states that his criticism of the religion is aimed not at Muslims as people, but at the doctrine of Islam. Harris wrote a response to controversy over his criticism of Islam, which also aired on a debate hosted by The Huffington Post on whether critics of Islam are unfairly labeled as bigots: Is it really true that the sins for which I hold Islam accountable are "committed at least to an equal extent by many other groups, especially [my] own"? ... The freedom to poke fun at Mormonism is guaranteed [not by the First Amendment but] by the fact that Mormons do not dispatch assassins to silence their critics or summon murderous hordes in response to satire. ... Can any reader of this page imagine the staging of a similar play [to The Book of Mormon] about Islam in the United States, or anywhere else, in the year 2013? ... At this moment in history, there is only one religion that systematically stifles free expression with credible threats of violence. The truth is, we have already lost our First Amendment rights with respect to Islam--and because they brand any observation of this fact a symptom of Islamophobia, Muslim apologists like Greenwald are largely to blame. Harris has criticized common usage of the term "Islamophobia". "My criticism of Islam is a criticism of beliefs and their consequences," he wrote following a controversial clash with Ben Affleck in October 2014 on the show Real Time with Bill Maher, "but my fellow liberals reflexively view it as an expression of intolerance toward people." During an email exchange with Glenn Greenwald, a critic of the New Atheists, Harris argued that "Islamophobia is a term of propaganda designed to protect Islam from the forces of secularism by conflating all criticism of it with racism and xenophobia. And it is doing its job, because people like you have been taken in by it."
QUESTION:
when was sam introduced to islam?