In 1910, they organized as the Council of Wide Awake Indians.[2] They founded a public school in 1933.[2]
They are not affiliated with the Waccamaw Indian People, a state-recognized tribe from South Carolina. The Waccamaw Siouan Indians also hold no affiliation with the Waccamaw Sioux Indian Tribe of Farmers Union, an unrecognized tribe based in Clarkton, North Carolina.[5]
The Waccamaw Siouan Indian Tribe operates a HUD Native American Housing Assistance Project, which helps its members with housing rehabilitation, housing down payments, and emergency funding.[1] They also operate a child day care center.[1]
Demographics
According to the 2010 Census, the total Waccamaw Siouan population in Columbus and Bladen counties was 1,896 (1,025 and 331, respectively). This represents 2.7% of the total combined Native American population of North Carolina. Current tribal enrollment consists of 2,594 members.[7]
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 among the Native American and Hispanic populations—61% and 295%, respectively, the latter also representing immigration. There was a 7% increase in the black population, and a 0.6% decrease in the white population.[8]
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, formerly inherited or handed down in personal appointment, is now also an elected position. The tribe has an Elders Review Committee, which 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, with 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.[9]
State recognition
The Waccamaw Siouan Indians were recognized by the state of North Carolina in 1971, and holds membership on the North Carolina Commission of Indian Affairs as per NCGS 143B-407.
Their congressional representative introduced a failed bill for federal recognition in 1948. Lumbee Legal Services, Inc., represents the Waccamaw Siouan Tribe in its administrative process for seeking federal recognition.[10][11][12]
Location
The tribe is centered on the edge of Green Swamp,[6] seven miles from Lake Waccamaw. Its headquarters is in Bolton, North Carolina.[1]
History
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 suns as it hurtled earthward, the meteor finally struck, burning 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. Some historians contend that this story is the mid-20th century invention of James E. Alexander.[13]
16th century
Archeologist Martin T. Smith suggests that the 1521 Spanish expedition led by Francisco Girebillo likely encountered a Waccamaw village when they traveled inland from the Carolina coast along the Waccamaw and Pee Dee rivers. Describing the inhabitants of the river valley as semi-nomadic, Girebillo noted that they relied on hunting and gathering, and limited agriculture. He wrote that the people practiced mortuary customs "peculiar" to them, but failed to describe their distinctive practices in any detail.[14]
Francisco Gordillo and Pedro de Quexos captured and enslaved several Native Americans in 1521, and shipped them to Hispaniola, which the Spanish were colonizing. One of the men became known as Francisco de Chicora. Francisco identified more than twenty indigenous peoples who lived in the territory of present-day South Carolina, among which he mentioned the "Chicora" and the "Duhare," whose tribal territories comprised the northernmost regions. Anthropologist John R. Swanton believed that these nations included the Waccamaw and the Cape Fear Indians. Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón returned to the area in 1526.
17th century
About 150 years later, the Englishman William Hilton recorded his encounter with ancestors of the Waccamaw Siouan people, calling them the Woccon. In 1670, the German surveyor and physicianJohn Lederer mentioned them in his Discoveries. By the beginning of the 17th century, the Woccon (Waccamaw), along with a number of Pee Dee River tribes, had been pushed north by a combination of Spanish and allied Cusabo Indian forces. 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 people. They were repeating information from others; neither visited the area of wetlands where some of the Waccamaw were beginning to seek refuge from colonial incursions.
18th century
John Lawson had placed the Woccon a few miles to the south of the Tuscarora in his New Voyage to Carolina (1700). Settling around the confluence of the Waccamaw and Pee Dee rivers, this amalgam of tribes had fragmented by 1705; a group of Woccon who moved farther north to the Lower Neuse River and Contentnea Creek.[15] The first written mention of the Woccon (or Waccamaw) by English colonials was recorded in 1712. The South Carolina Colony tried to persuade the Waccamaw, along with the Cape Fear Indians, to join James Moore, son of the former British colonial governor of South Carolina, in his expedition against the Tuscarora in the Tuscarora War.
By the second decade of the 18th 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.
After the Waccamaw-South Carolina War, the Waccamaw sought refuge in the wetland region situated on the edge of Green Swamp, near Lake Waccamaw. They settled four miles north of present-day Bolton, North Carolina, along what is still known as the "Old Indian Trail."[16] State land deeds and other colonial records substantiate the oral traditions of the Waccamaw Siouan Indians and their claim to the Green Swamp region.
19th century
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 individual farmsteads.[17]
In 1835, following Nat Turner's slave rebellion, North Carolina passed laws restricting the rights and movements of free blacks, who had previously been allowed to vote. Because Native Americans were classified equally as "Free people of color" and many were of mixed-race, the Waccamaw Siouan Indians and others were stripped of their political and civil rights. They could no longer vote, bear arms, or serve in the state militia.
Local whites intensified harassment of the Waccamaw Siouan Indians after North Carolina ratified this discriminatory state constitution. Whites tended to classify them simply as black, rather than recognizing their cultural identification as Indian.[18]
Education
Through much of the 19th century, Waccamaw Siouan children received no public school education. None existed in the South before the American Civil War. During Reconstruction, Republican-dominated legislatures established public schools, but legislators had to agree to racially segregated facilities to get them passed. Having been free people before the war, the Waccamaw Siouan did not want to enroll their children in school with the children of freedmen. The public schools had only two classifications: white and all other (black and mulatto, the term for mixed-race or "people of color," usually referring to people of African and European ancestry, the most common mixture).
The first county-supported Indian school open to Waccamaw Siouans was called the "Wide Awake School." The school was built in 1933 in the Buckhead community in Bladen County.[20] Classes were taught by Welton Lowry (Lumbee). Waccamaw Siouan students who wanted to attend high school among self-identified Indians went to the Coharie Intra-tribal Council's community's East Carolina High School in Clinton, North Carolina; the Lumbee Fairmont High School in Fairmont, Robeson County; or the Catawba Indian School in South Carolina.[21]
The Waccamaw Siouan Indians received state recognition in 1971 and organized as a nonprofit group, which forms its elected government. They are working on documentation to gain federal recognition.[13]
Activities
The tribe holds an annual cultural festival and powwow.[1] This takes place on the third Friday and Saturday of October at the Waccamaw Siouan Tribal Grounds in the Buckhead Community of Bolton, North Carolina.[22] Open to the public, the powwow includes a dance competition, drumming competition, horse show, and gospel sing.[23] A crafts fair features items made by members of the Waccamaw tribe, and demonstrations of the associated craft skills.[23]
1 2 3 Martin, John. "Waccamaw". North Carolina History Project. Retrieved 25 April 2024.
↑ U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2000 Census of Population, Social and Economic Characteristics: North Carolina (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2003
1 2 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.
↑ 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.
↑ Pate and Stewart, Economic Development Assessment, p.9.
↑ Pate and Stewart, Economic Development Assessment, p.8.
↑ 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
1 2 Ross, American Indians in North Carolina, p.137.
↑ 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).
↑ 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).
↑ 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).
↑ 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", Dialectical Anthropology, 1993, vol. 18, no2, pp. 207-244
↑ 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 similar tribal remnants 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.
↑ Ross, American Indians in North Carolina, p. 144.
↑ Columbus County Board of Education Minutes. Book 1, p.5., 1885; Ross, American Indians in North Carolina, pp.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.
Robeson County is a county in the southern part of the U.S. state of North Carolina and is its largest county by land area. Its county seat and largest community is Lumberton. The county was formed in 1787 from part of Bladen County and named in honor of Thomas Robeson, a colonel who had led Patriot forces in the area during the Revolutionary War. As of the 2020 census, the county's population was 116,530. It is a majority-minority county; its residents are approximately 38 percent Native American, 22 percent white, 22 percent black, and 10 percent Hispanic. It is included in the Fayetteville-Lumberton-Pinehurst, NC Combined Statistical Area. The state-recognized Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina is headquartered in Pembroke.
Columbus County is a county located in the U.S. state of North Carolina, on its southeastern border. Its county seat is Whiteville. As of the 2020 census, the population is 50,623. The 2020 census showed a loss of 12.9% of the population from that of 2010. This included an inmate prison population of approximately 2,500.
Lake Waccamaw is a town in Columbus County, North Carolina, United States. The 2010 census population was 1,480. Originally home to Native Americans, Europeans later colonized Lake Waccamaw in the 18th century. The Europeans built naval stores and the discovery of turpentine oil led to the Wilmington-Manchester railroad track being created. A shingle company was later converted to a lumber company. In 1910, a group of townspeople created the Waccamaw Club.
Pembroke is a town in Robeson County, North Carolina, United States. It is about 90 miles inland and northwest from the Atlantic Coast. The population was 2,823 at the 2020 census. The town is the seat of the state-recognized Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, as well as the home of the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.
The Catawba, also known as Issa, Essa or Iswä but most commonly Iswa, are a federally recognized tribe of Native Americans, known as the Catawba Indian Nation. Their current lands are in South Carolina, on the Catawba River, near the city of Rock Hill. Their territory once extended into North Carolina, as well, and they still have legal claim to some parcels of land in that state. They were once considered one of the most powerful Southeastern tribes in the Carolina Piedmont, as well as one of the most powerful tribes in the South as a whole, with other, smaller tribes merging into the Catawba as their post-contact numbers dwindled due to the effects of colonization on the region.
The Lumbee are a Native American people primarily centered in Robeson, Hoke, Cumberland, and Scotland counties in North Carolina.
The Waccamaw people were an Indigenous people of the Southeastern Woodlands, who lived in villages along the Waccamaw and Pee Dee rivers in North and South Carolina in the 18th century.
State-recognized tribes in the United States are organizations that identify as Native American tribes or heritage groups that do not meet the criteria for federally recognized Indian tribes but have been recognized by a process established under assorted state government laws for varying purposes or by governor's executive orders. State recognition does not dictate whether or not they are recognized as Native American tribes by continually existing tribal nations.
The Haliwa-Saponi Indian Tribe, also the Haliwa-Saponi Tribe, is a state-recognized tribe and nonprofit organization in North Carolina. They are not federally recognized as a Native American tribe.
The Saponi are a Native American tribe historically based in the Piedmont of North Carolina and Virginia. They spoke a Siouan language, related to the languages of the Tutelo, Biloxi, and Ofo.
The Pedee people, also Pee Dee and Peedee, were a historic Native American tribe of the Southeastern United States. Historically, their population has been concentrated in the Piedmont of present-day South Carolina. It is believed that in the 17th and 18th centuries, English colonists named the Pee Dee River and the Pee Dee region of South Carolina for the tribe. Today four state-recognized tribes, one state-recognized group, and several unrecognized groups claim descent from the historic Pedee people. Presently none of these organizations are recognized by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, with the Catawba Indian Nation being the only federally recognized tribe within South Carolina.
The Coree were a very small Native American tribe, who once occupied a coastal area south of the Neuse River in southeastern North Carolina in the area now covered by Carteret and Craven counties. Early 20th-century scholars were unsure of what language they spoke, but the coastal areas were mostly populated by Iroquois and Algonquian peoples.
The Cheraw people, also known as the Saraw or Saura, were a Siouan-speaking tribe of Indigenous people of the Southeastern Woodlands, in the Piedmont area of North Carolina near the Sauratown Mountains, east of Pilot Mountain and north of the Yadkin River. They lived in villages near the Catawba River.
The Croatan were a small Native American ethnic group living in the coastal areas of what is now North Carolina. They might have been a branch of the larger Roanoke people or allied with them.
The Congaree were a historic Indigenous people of the Southeastern Woodlands who once lived within what is now central South Carolina, along the Congaree River.
Demographics of North Carolina covers the varieties of ethnic groups who reside in North Carolina and relevant trends.
Woccon was one of two Catawban languages of what is now the Eastern United States. Together with the Western Siouan languages, they formed the Siouan language family. It is attested only in a vocabulary of 143 words, printed in a 1709 compilation by English colonist John Lawson of Carolina. The Woccon people that Lawson encountered have been considered by scholars to have been a late subdivision of the Waccamaw.
The Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina is a state-recognized tribe in North Carolina. The tribe represents Lumbee people. They do not hold federal recognition as a Native American tribe.
Priscilla Freeman Jacobs is a former Native American chief of the Waccamaw-Siouan tribe from 1986 to early 2005. Throughout her life she advocated for her tribe, helping to improve educational opportunity and economic development as well as promoting a resurgence of appropriation for Indian culture and heritage.
The Waccamaw Indian People, formerly the Chicora-Waccamaw Indian People, is a state-recognized tribe and 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in Conway, South Carolina. The organization was awarded the status of a state-recognized tribe by the South Carolina Commission of Minority Affairs on February 17, 2005 and holds the distinction of being the first state-recognized tribe within South Carolina. The Waccamaw Indian People are not federally recognized as a Native American tribe and are one of two organizations that allege to be descended from the historic Waccamaw, the other being the Waccamaw Siouan Indians, who have been a state-recognized tribe in North Carolina since 1971. The Tribal Council of the Waccamaw Siouan Indians has issued a public proclamation stating that the two tribes share no relationship or association, and that the North Carolina Waccamaw do not recognize the Waccamaw Indian People as an Indian tribe or tribal entity.
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