Waccamaw
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The Waccamaw Indians of South Carolina, distinct from the Waccamaw Siouan Indians of North Carolina, are a state recognized tribe of Native Americans in South Carolina.
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[edit] Geography
The branch of the Waccamaw descendant community known as the Waccamaw of South Carolina have continuously inhabited their homeland in present-day northeastern South Carolina. The ancient Waccamaw were river dwellers who lived along the Waccamaw River from present-day North Carolina’s Lake Waccamaw to Winyah Bay near Georgetown, South Carolina.
[edit] History
While the Waccamaw were never populous, they incurred devastating population loss and dispersal with the incursion of colonial settlers and their diseases during the eighteenth century.
According to the ethnographer, John R. Swanton, the Waccamaw may have been one of the first mainland groups of Natives visited by the Spanish. Within the second decade of the sixteenth century, Francisco Gordillo and Pedro de Quexos captured and enslaved several Indians, and shipped them off to Spain. One of the men whom the Spanish enslaved was the Indian now known as "Francisco de Chicora." Francisco identified more than twenty tribal peoples who lived in present-day South Carolina, among which he mentioned the "Chicora" and the "Duhare" — tribal territories that comprised the northern most regions on Francisco's list. Swanton believed that these nations were the Waccamaw and the Cape Fear Indians respectively.
[edit] Eighteenth century
European contact nearly wiped out the Waccamaw. Having little defense against European diseases, the Waccamaw, like many southeastern Native peoples died by the thousands. By the early eighteenth century, the Waccamaw received ammunition from the Cheraw, a related Siouan people of the Southeastern Piedmont, who tried to enlist them to support the Yamasee and other tribes against the English in 1715. The Waccamaw again engaged in a brief war against South Carolina colony in 1720 in order to stem the tide of English incursions into the Carolina Piedmont and in particular, assaults on the Waccamaw and their lands. Colonial accounts state that the English killed, or took captive numerous Waccamaw men, women and children.
This story repeated itself over and over again. Caught in the middle of the accelerating deerskin and slave trades, the Waccamaw themselves were forced into slavery. While George II of Great Britain ordered all plantation owners to free their Indian slaves in 1752, the loss without compensation from the crown of those whom they considered to be rightfully purchased property was not to be considered. Slave owners simply insisted that they did not own any Indian slaves.
In 1755, John Evans noted in his journal that the Cherokee and Natchez Indians killed some Waccamaw and Pee Dee Indians "in the white people’s settlements." Their location at this time is uncertain, but some believe that the Waccamaw were then living near present-day Moncks Corner, South Carolina. By this time, it seems that some remnant Waccamaw families also merged with the Catawba and Cheraw soon thereafter.
[edit] Nineteenth Century
By the mid eighteenth century, the Dimery settlement, near Dog Bluff, South Carolina, was formed. There, a core community of allied Waccamaw families, the Dimerys, Cooks, Hatchers, Turners, was formed, and was widely known as an Indian community. In 1809, John Dimery married Elizabeth Hardwick in Marion County, South Carolina. By 1813, John and Elizabeth Hardwick Dimery had moved to Horry County where they purchased 300 acres of land on the east side of the Little Pee Dee River. John Dimery and his sons added to their land holdings in subsequent years-- lands that continue to form the heart of the Waccamaw's Dimery Settlement.
By 1850, the Dimery Settlement had grown to at least four families: that of John Dimery, Willis Thompkins, Cockran Thompkins, and Sara Cook, for a total of some 27 individuals. Oral tradition states that around this time John Dimery gave the land for the raising of Pisgah Church. The Waccamaw grew cotton, corn, and later tobacco, much the same as their neighbors, and participated in community activities such as hog killings, barn raisings, and wood sawings where community members combined their efforts to help individual members of the settlement.
All in all, the Waccamaw confronted the difficulties of the nineteenth century as they had during the preceding century. While warfare, disease, and enslavement decimated their population in the eighteenth century, census classifications that listed the Waccamaw as "free persons of color," threatened their Indian identity in the nineteenth. Thus, John Dimery first appeared on the Horry County Census in 1820 as a "free person of color." An examination of records from various areas of the South in the first half of the 1800s shows that nearly every group now identified as Indian was enumerated as "colored" in the local and federal census.
The Nottoway and Ginkaskin of Virginia, and the Cherokee of Georgia were all counted as "free colored" in the 1830s. The Meherrin, Chowan, and Saponi descendants of North Carolina were all listed as "mulattos" or, simply, "colored," after moving or being forcibly removed from their traditional lands and adopting European lifestyles. In some cases this was a deliberate effort on the part of whites to forestall any effort on the part of Indians to reclaim their traditional homelands; in other cases it was simply a matter of Native peoples no longer seeming like "real" Indians in the eyes of their neighbors after acculturating so well to white society and losing so much of their traditional culture. In fact, it was unusual to find Native peoples listed as "Indians" after the 1780s in any part of the South.
The Hatchers were an excellent example of how uncertain a position the Waccamaw of the Dimery Settlement, and other Native peoples in the South occupied in official records. Thus, even into the twentieth century, William I. Hatcher, who lived in Galivants Ferry Township was enumerated as white in the 1920 federal census. His brothers Noah, Julius, Robert and Vander, living in Dog Bluff Township, were recorded as "mulatto," and their uncles, Peter and William, who lived in Robeson County, NC, were enumerated as Indians.
[edit] Today
Today, the Waccamaw Indians of South Carolina consist of about 400 members. The Waccamaw petitioned the state for recognition as an American Indian tribe, and received formal recognition from the South Carolina Commission for Minority Affairs on February 17, 2005. The tribe is headquartered and bounded by the Waccamaw River and the Little Pee Dee River in Aynor, Horry County, South Carolina.
The majority of tribal members live along the Waccamaw River in Georgetown and Horry counties, especially near the area now known as Dog Bluff. In May 2004, The Waccamaw Indian People of South Carolina received twenty acres of land in the tribe's ancestral homeland in the Dog Bluff community near Aynor in Horry County.
The Waccamaw Indians of South Carolina are one of the founding members of the South Carolina Indian Affairs Commission, The National Organization for the Unification of Native Americans (NOUNA), and the National Coalition for Indian Sovereignty.
[edit] Sources
- Milling, Chapman J. Red Carolinians. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1969.
- Swanton, John R. The Indian Tribes of North America. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Instition Press, 1984, pp. 100-101
