Waccamaw Siouan

Waccamaw Siouan Indians are one of eight state-recognized Native American tribal nations in North Carolina. Located predominantly in the southeastern North Carolina counties of Bladen and Columbus, in the communities of St. James, Buckhead, and Council, the Waccamaw Siouan tribal homeland is situated on the edge of Green Swamp about 37 miles from Wilmington, North Carolina, seven miles from Lake Waccamaw, and four miles north of Bolton, North Carolina. [See Sylvia Pate and Leslie S. Stewart, "Economic Development Assessment for the Waccamaw Siouan Tribe" (Pembroke, NC: University of North Carolina, 2003), p.5; and Thomas E. Ross, "American Indians in North Carolina: Geographic Interpretations" (Southern Pines, N.C.: Karo Hollow Press, 1999), pp. 137-140.]

Demographics

According to the 2000 Census, the total Waccamaw Siouan Native American population in Columbus and Bladen counties was 2,343 (1,697 and 646, respectively). This represents 2.7% of the total combined Native American population of North Carolina. Current tribal enrollment consists of 1,245 members. [U.S. Bureau of the Census, "2000 Census of Population, Social and Economic Characteristics: North Carolina" (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2003); and Pate and Ste "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.]

Between 1980 and 2000, the two-county area experienced a small overall population increase of 6.7% compared with a 37% rate of growth for North Carolina. The growth in the two counties was mostly in the Native American and Hispanic populations-- 61% and 295%, respectively. There was also a 7% increase in the black population, and a 0.6% decrease in the white population. [Pate and Stewart, "Economic Development Assessment", p.9.]

Government

The tribe is governed by the Waccamaw Siouan Tribal Council, Inc., consisting of six members who are elected by the tribal membership with staggered terms of one to three years. The Tribal Chief's position was formerly handed down, but recently became an elected position. The tribe also has an Elders Review Committee and conducts monthly tribal meetings to inform and educate members about issues of importance to the tribe as a whole. The opinions and suggestions of tribal members are solicited during these meetings and are incorporated into the decision-making process.

The tribal council employs a tribal administrator to handle the day-to-day operations of the tribe of an annual budget of approximately $1 million. The administrator supervises the management of tribal grant programs and provides a monthly reporting of the status of grant activities to local, state, and federal agencies, private donors, the tribal council, and tribal members. [ Pate and Stewart, "Economic Development Assessment", p.8.]

tate and Federal Recognition

The Waccamaw Siouan Indians were recognized by the state of North Carolina in 1971, and were incorporated as a 501(c)3 organization in 1977. Lumbee Legal Services, Inc. represents the Waccamaw Siouan Tribe in its administrative process for seeking Federal recognition. [See Clarke Beach, "Congress Asked to Recognize Waccamaw Indians in State," "Daily Times-News" Burlington, N.C., (18 April 1950).
*"Congress Hears of Lost N.C. Tribe," "Asheville Citizen", Asheville, N.C. (27 April 1950); Ross, "American Indians in North Carolina", pp. 137-148.]

Language

The earliest Europeans in the Carolinas were astounded by the linguistic diversity of what is now the Southeastern United States. Within the region now known as North Carolina, three language families were represented, as distinct from one another as Indo-European languages are from Finno-Ugric languages. The Hatteras, Chowan, Moratok, Pamlico, Secotan, Machapunga, and the Weapemeoc of the coastal plain, for example, spoke a variety of Algonquian languages.

The Cherokee, Tuscarora, Coree, and Meherrin who inhabited homelands from the coastal plain to the Appalachian Mountains, spoke a variety of Iroquoian languages. The Catawba, Cheraw, Cape Fear, Eno, Keyauwee, Occaneechi, Tutelo, Saponi, Shakori, Sissipahaw, Sugeree, Wateree, Waxhaw, and Waccamaw of the Cape Fear River and Piedmont regions were related Siouan-speaking peoples.

The ancestral Siouan language of the Waccamaw Siouan Indians of North Carolina has since been lost due to the devastating population losses of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

History

The Legend of Lake Waccamaw

Since its earliest recorded exploration by the naturalist, William Bartram (who was assisted in his efforts by Waccamaw Indians) in 1735, many stories have been told about the legendary origin of Lake Waccamaw. Many have proved to be the fanciful inventions of early white settlers. According to the Waccamaw Siouan Indians, thousands of years ago, an immense meteor appeared in the night sky toward the southwest. Flaming to a brilliance of innumerable suns as it hurtled earthward, the meteor finally struck, burning itself deep within the earth. The waters of the surrounding swamps and rivers flowed into the crater and cooled it, creating the gem blue, verdant green lake. However, some people contend that this story is the mid-twentieth century invention of James E. Alexander. [Ross, "American Indians in North Carolina", p.137.]

ixteenth Century

Some historians contend that the 1521 Spanish expedition led by Francisco Girebillo came across a Waccamaw village. Girebillo arrived there by traveling inland from the Carolina coast and along the Waccamaw and Pee Dee River. Describing the Waccamaw as semi-nomadic river basin inhabitants, Girebillo also wrote that Siouan river peoples relied on hunting and gathering, and to some extent, a limited agriculture. Moreover, he claimed that the Waccamaw practiced mortuary customs peculiar to them but failed to describe their distinctive practices in any detail. [Martin T. Smith, "Archaeology of Aboriginal Culture Change in the Interior Southeast: Depopulation During the Early Historic Period" (Gainesville, FLA: University of Florida Press, 1987).]

eventeenth Century

A little less than 150 years later, the Englishman, William Hilton encountered the Siouan Waccamaw, and in 1670, the German surveyor and physician, John Lederer, mentioned them in his "Discoveries". By the beginning of the seventeenth century however, the Woccon, or Waccamaw, along with a number of Pee Dee River tribes, had been pushed north by a combination of Spanish and Cusabo forces. Settling around the confluence of the Waccamaw and Pee Dee River, this amalgam of tribes had already fragmented by 1705 to form a group of Woccon who moved farther north to the Lower Neuse River and Contentnea Creek. [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).]

Eighteenth Century

The first written mention of the Woccon, or Waccamaw by English colonials was recorded in 1712. At this time, South Carolina Colony attempted to persuade the Waccamaw, along with the Cape Fear Indians, to join the son of the former British colonial governor of South Carolina, James Moore, in his expedition against the Tuscarora in the Tuscarora War. Some of the earliest English travelers to the interior of the Carolinas, John Lederer in 1670, and John Lawson some thirty years later, referred to the Waccamaw in their travel narratives as an Eastern Siouan peoples. Even so, neither visited the wetlands to which some of the Waccamaw were beginning to seek refuge from colonial incursions. In fact, the "Woccon" Indians, the Siouan tribe that John Lawson had placed a few miles to the south of the Tuscarora in his "New Voyage to Carolina", written in 1700, ceased to exist for British colonial administrators by that particular name. Moving southward as a group, the Woccon were now listed in colonial records as the Waccamaw. Since differing colonial powers could only approximate the sound of the names of numerous Southeastern indigenous polities, tribal names were often arbitrarily changed or altered in their spelling. "Waccamaw," for example, appeared in the historical record at about the same time that "Woccon" disappeared.

The Waccamaw continued to inhabit the region along the Waccamaw and Pee Dee River until 1718, where they then were forced to relocate to the Weenee, or Black River area. In 1720, they joined with fleeing families of Tuscarora,Cheraw, Keyauwee, and Hatteras Indians along Drowning Creek, now known as the Lumbee, or Lumber River. Families of Waccamaw Indians continued to live along Drowning Creek until 1733, when some families again sought refuge elsewhere-- this time, along Lake Waccamaw and Green Swamp.

By the second decade of the eighteenth century, many Waccamaw, also known as the Waccommassus, were located one hundred miles northeast of Charleston, South Carolina. In 1749, a war broke out between the Waccamaw and South Carolina Colony. Twenty-nine years later, in May 1778, provisions were made by the Council of South Carolina to render the Waccamaw protection, but not unsurprisingly, South Carolina Colony's promises was found wanting. After the Waccamaw-South Carolina War, the Waccamaw sought refuge in the wetland region situated on the edge of Green Swamp, near Lake Waccamaw, and settled four miles north of present-day Bolton, North Carolina, along what is still known as the "Old Indian Trail." [For insightful analyses of the Native Southeast's formative post-Contact period, see 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); 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); 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), pp. 44-71; Charles Hudson, "The Southeastern Indians" (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1976); Chapman Milling, "Red Carolinians" (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1969); and Douglas L. Rights, "American Indians in North Carolina" (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1947).]

Nineteenth Century

State land deeds and other colonial records substantiate the oral traditions of the Waccamaw Siouan Indians and their claim to the Green Swamp region. Given their three-century-long historical experience of European contact, the Waccamaw Siouan Indians had become highly acculturated. They depended on European-style agriculture and established claims to land through individuated farmsteads. [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." "M.A. Thesis" (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina, 1992).]

Like other North Carolina Native peoples, the Waccamaw Siouan Indians were disenfranchised in 1835, when the state passed amendments to its original constitution of 1776. Classified as "Free people of color," the Waccamaw Siouan Indians were uniformly stripped of their political and civil rights and could not vote, bear arms, or serve in the state militia. Harassment of the Waccamaw Siouan Indians by local whites only intensified after the ratification of North Carolina's overtly discriminatory state constitution. [For elucidations of the complexities of race vis-a-viz Native peoples of the Southeast and South, see Peggy Pascoe, "Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of 'Race' in Twentieth-Century America," "Journal of American History 83 (June 1996): 44-69; Eva M. Garoutte, "Real Indian: Identity and the Survival of Native America" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Virginia Dominguez, "White By Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana" (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986). For literature on related peoples and historical experiences, see Karen Blu, "The Lumbee Problem: The Making of an American Indian People" (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980); and Gerald M. Sider, "Lumbee Indian Histories: Race, Ethnicity, and Indian Identity in the Southern United States" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); James H. Merrell, "Cultural Continuity among the Piscataway Indians of Colonial Maryland," "William and Mary Quarterly" 36: 548-70; and Merrell's "The Racial Education of the Catawba Indians," "Journal of Southern History" vol. 50, no. 3. (Aug., 1984), pp. 363-384.]

The Importance of Education

Throughout the nineteenth century, Waccamaw Siouan children received no public school education. Even during Reconstruction, Waccamaw Siouan parents refused to enroll their children in school since attendance was based on race. In a society recognizing only two races, white children went to white-only schools, and all others were supposed to attend black schools. The Lumbee and Coharie tribes managed to build their own schools and later still, develop their own school systems. The Waccamaw Siouans followed suit with the Doe Head School in 1885. The school, situated in the Buckhead Indian community, was open only sporadically, and finally closed in 1921, when the state sent a black teacher to the school and the community asked the teacher to leave. [Ross, "American Indians in North Carolina", p.144.]

Twentieth Century

The first county-supported Indian school open to Waccamaw Siouans was called the "Wide Awake School." The school was built in the Buckhead community in Bladen County, and classes were taught by a Lumbee teacher, Welton Lowry. Waccamaw Siouan students who wished to attend high school went to the Coharie Indian community's East Carolina High School in Clinton, North Carolina; the Lumbee tribe's, Fairmont High School in Fairmont, Robeson County; or the Catawba Indian School in South Carolina. [Columbus County Board of Education Minutes. Book 1, p.5., 1885; Ross, "American Indians in North Carolina", p.144-145; Lerch, "State-Recognized Indians of North Carolina," pp. 44-71; "Waccamaw Legacy: Contemporary Indians Fight for Survival" (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004); and "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" (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), pp. 76-91.]

The Waccamaw Siouan Indians received state recognition in 1971 and are working on documents to gain federal recognition. [Ross, "American Indians in North Carolina", p.137.]

Relationship to other North Carolina Indian Tribes

Like most North Carolina Indian groups, the Waccamaw Siouan Indians have a long tradition of affiliation with other tribal nations. Kinship practices first observed in the colonial era continue through intermarriage with other tribes. The link to the Lumbee and Coharie is most evident in the occurrence of particular surnames found in the three groups: Jacobs is found among the Waccamaw Siouan, Lumbee, and Coharie Indians, while Campbell, Freeman, Jacobs, Graham, Hammonds, Blanks, Hunt, Locklear, Moore and Strickland are common among both the Lumbee and Waccamaw Siouan Indians. [Julian T. Pierce, Cynthia Hunt-Locklear, Jack Campisi, Wesley White, "The Lumbee Petition", 3 vols. (Pembroke, NC: Lumbee River Legal Services, 1987), pp.1-79.]

Notes