Waccamaw Sioux

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The Waccamaw Siouan are one of eight by the State North Carolina in the United States of America recognized indigenous peoples of Native Americans . The tribe lives primarily in the southeast of the state in Bladen and Columbus Counties , in the parishes of St. James, Buckhead and Council. The ancestral territory of the Waccamaw Sioux lies on the edge of the Green Swamp about 60 kilometers from Wilmington , 11 kilometers from Lake Waccamaw and 6 kilometers north of Bolton .

Demographics

According to the US Census of 2000, the entire population of Waccamaw Sioux Indians in Columbus and Bladen Counties comprises 2,343 (1,697, and 646, respectively) people and thus 2.7% of the total Indian population of North Carolina. There are 1,245 registered tribal members.

Between 1980 and 2000, the population spread across the two counties increased by 6.7%, while the total population in the state increased by 37% over the same period. The growth in the two counties was mainly caused by the American Indian with 61% and Hispanic population with 295%. The African American population also saw a 7% increase while the white population decreased by 0.6%.

Government and Administration

The tribe is constituted by the Waccamaw Siouan Tribal Council, Inc. consisting of six members elected by the members of the tribe who serve for a period of three years. The position of chief was traditionally inherited, but has now also been converted into an elected office. A council of elders takes part in the monthly meetings and briefs the tribe on matters of concern to the entire tribe. The opinions and suggestions of the members are submitted and participate in the decision-making process.

The tribe employs a steward who looks after the day-to-day running of the tribe and manages the annual budget of approximately one million dollars. He oversees the support programs and creates a monthly report to present this aid to local, state and private donors, the tribal council and the tribe themselves.

recognition

The Waccamaw Sioux were recognized by the State of North Carolina in 1971 and recognized as a not-for-profit association in 1977. In the process of obtaining recognition from the United States, you will be assisted in the administrative process by Lumbee Legal Services, Inc.

language

The first European settlers in the Carolinas were amazed at the diversity of Indian languages ​​in today's southern states . In what is now North Carolina, three language families were common in the region, for example the Hatteras , Roanoke , Chowanoke , Moratok , Pamlico , Secotan , Machapunga, and the Weapemeoc of the coastal plain spoke different but related Algonquin languages . The Cherokee , Tuscarora , Coree and Meherrin , who inhabited areas from the coastal plain to the Appalachians , spoke Iroquois languages while the Catawba , Cheraw , Cape Fear Indians , Eno , Keyauwee , Occaneechee , Tutelo , Saponi , Shakori , Sissipahaw , Sugeree , Wateree , Waxhaw, and the Waccamaw from the Cape Fear River and Piedmont region belonged to the Sioux-speaking peoples.

The historical Sioux language of the Waccamaw Sioux Indians of North Carolina was lost due to the devastating losses within the tribal population in the 18th and 19th centuries.

history

The Lake Waccamaw legend

Since the earliest recorded exploration of the area by William Bartram (who was assisted by the Waccamaws) in 1735 , many legends have been told about the making of the story of the making of Lake Waccamaw . Many are verifiably fairy-tale stories of the first white settlers, while the Waccamaw Sioux tell that thousands of years ago a huge meteor appeared in the southwest in the night sky. It fell to the ground as bright as an infinite number of suns, and when it finally struck it burned itself deep into the earth. The water from the surrounding swamps and rivers flowed into the crater and cooled it, creating the bright blue-green lake. Some believe that this story was invented by James E. Alexander in the mid-20th century .

16th Century

Some historians debate whether the Spanish expedition led by Francisco Girebillo passed through a Waccamaw village in 1521. Girebillo achieved it by following the Waccamaw River and Pee Dee River from the Carolina coast . The Waccamaw are described as semi-nomadic inhabitants of the river valleys, Girobello also wrote that the Sioux people living on the banks lived from hunting and gathering, accompanied by rudimentary agriculture. In addition, he called the rites of the Waccamaw unique to this people, but did not describe them in more detail.

17th century

A little less than 150 years later, the Englishman William Hilton met the Waccamaw Sioux and in 1670 they were mentioned by the German researcher and doctor John Lederer in his Discoveries . At the beginning of the 17th century the Woccon (the Waccamaw) were driven north by troops of the Spaniards and Cusabo with other tribes of the Pee Dee River area . The mixed group of tribes living at the confluence of the Waccamaw and Pee Dee Rivers split up in 1705 to form a group of Woccon, which moved further north to the lower Neuse River and Contentnea Creek.

18th century

The first mention of the Woccon / Waccamaw by the English settlers was recorded in 1712. At the time, the South Carolina colony was trying to persuade the Waccamaw to join forces with the Cape Fear Indians, the son of former British governor James Moore , to join the campaign against the Tuscarora in the Tuscarora War . Some of the earliest English travelers to penetrate the interior of the Carolinas, John Lederer in 1670 and John Lawson some 30 years later, described the Waccamaw in their travelogues as the Sioux of the Eastern peoples. However, none of them visited the wetlands to which some of the Waccamaw had withdrawn in search of protection from the invading settlers. In fact, the Sioux tribe, which John Lawson referred to as "Woccon" and which he classified in his report New Voyage to Carolina from 1700, the area a few kilometers south of the Tuscarora, heard for the authorities of the British colony at this time to exist. The Woccon, who moved south in a group, were henceforth listed as Waccamaw in the colony's documents. The spelling in the different periods of the colonial government varied or changed and could only be roughly adapted to the spoken language of the respective tribes. For example, the Woccon disappeared from historical reports around the time the Waccamaw reappeared.

The Waccamaw stayed in the Waccamaw and Pee Dee Rivers region until 1718, when they were forced to relocate to the Weenee or Black River area. In 1720 they joined fleeing families of the Tuscarora, Cheraw, Keyauwee and Hatteras, who moved to the banks of Drowning Creek, today's Lumbee or Lumber River . Some Waccamaw families stayed there until 1733 when they withdrew again, this time to Lake Waccamaw and the Green Swamp.

In the second decade of the 18th century, many Waccamaw, also known as "Waccommassus", lived about 150 kilometers northeast of Charleston , South Carolina. In 1749 war broke out between the Waccamaw and the colonists of South Carolina, 29 years later, in May 1778, the colony made promises to protect the Indians, the promises were not kept, and the Indians withdrew to the Waccamaw-South Carolina- War back to the wetlands at Green Swamp, near Lake Waccamaw. There they settled six kilometers north of what is now Bolton, in an area known as the Old Indian Trail .

19th century

State land distributions and other colonial records support Waccamaw Sioux claims to the Green Swamp region. After three centuries of experience in dealing with European settlers, the Waccamaw Sioux were very adapted and lived from agriculture in the European style, for which they also claimed farmland for individual farms .

Like other North Carolina Native American tribes, the Waccamaw Sioux were banned from universal suffrage in 1835 when the state passed an amendment to its original 1776 constitution. Classified as Free Colored , the Waccamaw Sioux lost all political and civil rights and were subsequently unable to vote, carry weapons or serve in the military. Popular animosity against the Waccamaw Sioux and other tribes increased as a result of the ratification of the discriminatory constitutional amendment.

The importance of education

During the 19th century, the children of the tribe did not have access to public education. Even during the Reconstruction , Waccamaw Sioux parents refused to send their children to school because they were assigned to schools based on ethnic group membership . In a society that knew only two " races ", white children went to white-only schools and everyone else had to go to black schools. Both the Lumbee and Coharie tribes were able to set up their own schools and later even establish their own school system. The Waccamaw tried that too in 1885, but Doe Head School in the Buckhead Native American community was open only sporadically. It was finally closed when the school authorities sent an African-American teacher to the school in 1921 and the Waccamaw Sioux refused to accept him as a teacher.

20th century

The first county-supported school for Indians that was also available to the Waccamaw Sioux was the Wide Awake School. The school was established in the Buckhead Township of Bladen County and the students were taught by Welton Lowry, a Lumbee. Waccamaw Sioux who wanted to attend high school could attend Coharie East Carolina High School in Clinton , Lumbee High School in Fairmont, Robeson County (Fairmont High School), or the Catawba Indian School in South Carolina .

Relationship to other North Carolina tribes

Like most other North Carolina Indian tribes, the Waccamaw Sioux have a long tradition of amalgamation with other peoples. The kinship systems observed during the colonial era are preserved through inter-tribal marriage. The relationship to the Lumbee and Coharie is particularly striking thanks to the surnames used in the three tribes: Jacobs is found in all three tribes, while Campbell, Freeman, Graham, Hammonds, Blanks, Hunt, Locklear, Moore and Strickland especially among the Lumbee and common to the Waccamaw Sioux.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Sylvia Pate and Leslie S. Stewart: Economic Development Assessment for the Waccamaw Siouan Tribe , Pembroke, NC: University of North Carolina, 2003, p. 5
  2. ↑ Thomas E. Ross: American Indians in North Carolina: Geographic Interpretations , Southern Pines, NC: Karo Hollow Press, 1999, pp. 137-140.
  3. ^ US Bureau of the Census, 2000 Census of Population, Social and Economic Characteristics: North Carolina (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office , 2003); and Pate and Stewart, Economic Development Assessment , p. 9; Patricia Lerch, "Coverage Differences in the Census of a Rural Minority Community in North Carolina: the Little Branch area of ​​the Waccamaw Sioux Tribe," Final Report-1990 Decennial Census report: Ethnographic Evaluation of the 1990 Decennial Census Report (Washington, DC: Center for Survey Methods Research, Bureau of the Census, 1992); and Ross, American Indians in North Carolina , p. 140.
  4. ^ Pate and Stewart, Economic Development Assessment , p. 9.
  5. ^ Pate and Stewart, Economic Development Assessment , p.8.
  6. ^ See Clarke Beach, "Congress Asked to Recognize Waccamaw Indians in State," Daily Times-News Burlington, NC, (April 18, 1950)
  7. ^ "Congress Hears of Lost NC Tribe," Asheville Citizen , Asheville, NC (April 27, 1950)
  8. ^ Ross, American Indians in North Carolina , pp. 137-148.
  9. ^ Ross: American Indians in North Carolina , p. 137.
  10. ^ Martin T. Smith, Archeology of Aboriginal Culture Change in the Interior Southeast: Depopulation During the Early Historic Period (Gainesville, FLA: University of Florida Press, 1987).
  11. ↑ For some of the earliest accounts of the Waccamaw, refer to John Lederer, The Discoveries of John Lederer (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, Inc. 1966); and John Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina , ed. Hugh Talmadge Lefler (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967).
  12. ^ Alan Gallay: The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002)
  13. ↑ James H. Merrell : The Indians' New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993)
  14. ↑ Patricia Lerch: "State-Recognized Indians of North Carolina, Including a History of the Waccamaw Sioux," in J. Anthony Paredes, ed., Indians of the Southeastern United States in the Late 20th Century (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992), pages 44-71.
  15. ^ Charles Hudson, The Southeastern Indians (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1976)
  16. ^ Chapman Milling, Red Carolinians (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1969)
  17. ^ Douglas L. Rights: American Indians in North Carolina (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1947).
  18. ↑ Jo E. Aldred, "No More Cigar Store Indians: Ethnographic and Historical Representations By and Of the Waccamaw-Siouan Peoples and their Socioeconomic, Legal, and Political Consequences." MA Thesis (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina, 1992).
  19. ^ Peggy Pascoe, Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of 'Race' in Twentieth-Century America , in: The Journal of American History , Volume 83, June 1996, pp. 44-69; Eva M. Garoutte: Real Indian: Identity and the Survival of Native America , University of California Press, 2003; Virginia Dominguez: White By Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana , Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey 1986; Karen Blu: The Lumbee Problem: The Making of an American Indian People , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 1980; Gerald M. Sider: Lumbee Indian Histories: Race, Ethnicity, and Indian Identity in the Southern United States , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 1993; James H. Merrell: Cultural Continuity among the Piscataway Indians of Colonial Maryland , in: The William and Mary Quarterly 36, pp. 548-70; Merrell's The Racial Education of the Catawba Indians , in: Journal of Southern History , Vol. 50, No. 3, Aug. 1984, pp. 363-384
  20. ^ Ross: American Indians in North Carolina , p. 144.
  21. ^ Columbus County Board of Education Minutes. Book 1, p.5., 1885; Ross: American Indians in North Carolina , pp. 144-145
  22. ↑ Lerch: "State-Recognized Indians of North Carolina," pp. 44-71; Waccamaw Legacy: Contemporary Indians Fight for Survival , University of Alabama Press, 2004
  23. ^ "Articulatory Relationships: The Waccamaw Struggle Against Assimilation," in James Peacock and James Sabella, eds .: Sea and Land: Cultural and Biological Adaptations in the Southern Coastal Plain , University of Georgia Press, 1988, pp. 76-91.
  24. ↑ Julian T. Pierce, Cynthia Hunt-Locklear, Jack Campisi, Wesley White: The Lumbee Petition , Volume 3, Lumbee River Legal Services, 1987. Pages 1-79

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