The Waccamaw Siouan Indians are one of eight state-recognized tribes in North Carolina. Also known as the Waccamaw Siouan Indian Tribe, they are not federally recognized. They are headquartered in Bolton, North Carolina, in Columbus County, and also have members in Bladen County in southeastern North Carolina. In 1910, they organized as the Council of Wide Awake Indians. They founded a public school in 1933.
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.
Waccamaw Siouan Indians live in St. James, Buckhead, and Council, with the Waccamaw Siouan tribal homeland 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.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. Their descent from the historic Waccamaw is contested by some scholars. 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.Ross, American Indians in North Carolina, p.137. Historical Waccamaw Archeologist Martin T. Smith suggests that the 1521 Spanish expedition led by Francisco Girebillo likely encountered a Waccamaw village. Describing the inhabitants of the river valley as semi-nomadic, Girebillo noted that they relied on hunting and gathering, and limited agriculture.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).
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.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). The South Carolina Colony tried to persuade the Waccamaw, along with the Cape Fear Indians to join their side in the Tuscarora War. By the second decade of the 18th century, many Waccamaw were located one hundred miles northeast of Charleston, South Carolina. In 1720, a war broke out between the Waccamaw and South Carolina Colony. After the War, authorities had difficulty finding the Waccamaw. Accounts vary, placing them near the Catawba, captured by the Seneca, near Lake Waccamaw, or living under the Peedee.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); Douglas L. Rights, American Indians in North Carolina (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1947).
Modern history In 1993, scholar Lisa Aldred noted scholars did not agree on if the Waccamaw-Siouan descended from the historic Waccamaw. She stated surnames among the modern Waccamaw-Siouans were present under the category "all other free persons" in the 1800 United States census.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 Genealogist Paul Heinegg states the Waccamaw Siouans are an invented North Carolina tribe. He states they were created in the wake of Person County granting a separate school to a 1887 group referred to as "", who were later listed as "Cubans", "Mongolians", then "the Indian race".
Education Through much of the 19th century, children ancestral to the Waccamaw Siouan Tribe received no public school education. The public schools had only two classifications: white and Black. They were restricted from white schools, due to not being white, and refused to enroll their children in Black schools. Having been free people before the war, they did not want to enroll their children in school with the children of freedmen.
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 Buckhead Indian community followed suit by founding the Doe Head School in 1885. 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.Ross, American Indians in North Carolina, p. 144.
20th century The first predecessor to the Waccamaw Siouan Tribe was the Council of the Wide Awake Indians, which was able to open a publicly funded school. The school was built in 1933 in the Buckhead community in Bladen County. 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.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.
Combining multiple trends used by groups in the Southeast with ambiguous origins, the Waccamaw Siouan Tribe created their name by pairing the name of a local lake and the language family likely spoken by indigenous groups in the region. They converted their old school building into their tribal headquarters. 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.
After participating in a 1970 cultural workshop held by the Haliwa-Saponi, the Waccamaw Siouans began holding powwows. These powwows were imported from Plains Indian cultural traditions, rather than those indigenous to the region or to any regional tribe. They were somewhat invented, created within a Pan-Indian context. Among the Waccamaw-Siouans, the powwow became highly embedded, and was reinterpreted as a local symbol of identity, replacing the Indian school as the main institution of the tribe.
Government Nonprofit organization In 1977, the Waccamaw Siouan Indian Tribe incorporated as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, based in Bolton, North Carolina.
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.Pate and Stewart, Economic Development Assessment, p.8.
Recognition process The Waccamaw-Siouan were designated and officially recognized by the state of North Carolina on July 20, 1971, through the passage of a law by the North Carolina General Assembly. North Carolina General Statutes § 71A-4. Waccamaw Siouan Tribe of North Carolina lays out their rights, privileges, immunities, obligations and duties:
"The Indians now living in Bladen and Columbus and adjoining counties of North Carolina, originally found by the first white settlers in the region of the Cape Fear River, Lake Waccamaw, and the Waccamaw Indians, a Siouan Tribe which inhabited the areas surrounding the Waccamaw, Pee Dee, and Lumber Rivers in North and South Carolina, shall, from and after July 20, 1971, be designated and officially recognized as the Waccamaw Siouan Tribe of North Carolina and shall continue to enjoy all their rights, privileges and immunities as citizens of the State as now or hereafter provided by law, and shall continue to be subject to all the obligations and duties of citizens under the law."
The "Waccamaw-Siouan from Columbus and Bladen Counties" hold membership on the North Carolina Commission of Indian Affairs as per NCGS 143B-407.
Federal recognition The Waccamaw Siouan Indian Tribe is not federally recognized.
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.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
Services
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. They also operate a child day care center.
Activities