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.
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. 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
physician John 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. 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". 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. 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.
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). Late in the 19th century, the
Croatan Indians of Robeson County (now called
Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina) gained
state-recognition as tribes and support for a separate school. The
Croatan Indians of Samson County, now called the
Coharie Intra-tribal Council, Inc. built their own schools and later still, developed their own school system. The
Waccamaw-Siouan Tribe followed suit by founding the Doe Head School in 1885. Situated in the Buckhead Indian community, the school was open only sporadically. It closed in 1921, after the state had sent a
black teacher to the school, and the community asked the teacher to leave.
20th century 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. 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. 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. == Activities ==