The Trail of Tears has left a deep scar on the landscape of North Carolina. Photo by Brett Riggs; ©2008 Endeavors.
Where the Trail has Led
Scholars are piecing together a surprising new picture of American Indians.
by Mark Derewicz
[filed under: social sciences
; article date: january 2008]
In 1783 the Treaty of Paris set the official boundaries of the United States from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River, and from the Great Lakes to Spanish Florida. American Indians were not part of that treaty. As the United States grew westward, Indians were usually forced from the land of their ancestors.
In the stories that follow, researchers shed light on the decline and unlikely resurgence of American Indians, and a Carolina med student inspires volunteers to learn from and help North Carolina’s first people:
Dug from the past
Brett Riggs and Stephen Davis trudged up a hill near Fort Mill, South Carolina, before coming to a level clearing. They started digging, and just below the grass they found clusters of pipe and pottery shards, fragments of wine bottles, and pieces of metal tools — remnants, they thought, of a small group of eighteenth-century Catawba homes. But when they tried to find the edge of that cluster, they found a much larger group of artifacts in the nearby forest. Riggs and Davis looked at each other, checked their maps, and realized that they had likely discovered Nassaw, the central town of eighteenth-century Catawba society.
Before that, Nassaw existed only on a very old, hand-drawn map.
Riggs and Davis, archaeologists at UNC, measured the bore-holes of clay pipe stems found at the site to determine when they were made. Sure enough, the pipes dated back to the 1750s. Then Riggs and Davis found knives, handmade nails, lead shot, brass kettle fragments, and various parts of flintlock muskets. They uncovered darkened circles of soil where wood posts had held up houses. And they found thousands upon thousands of tiny glass beads scattered everywhere — beads that they knew Catawbas had used for jewelry and embroidery.
“It looks like there must have been a brief occupation of this town,” Davis says. “Maybe ten years. We didn’t find the intensity of post holes and other things that you find if people had lived there a while.”
“But there was a lot of debris — pottery, beads, and such,” Riggs says, “which means there must have been a lot of people there for that much trash to accumulate in such a short time.”
These facts fit the storyline. The Catawbas periodically moved this village to bluffs above rivers and streams. The main Catawba town was always named Nassaw no matter where they moved. In 1759 a smallpox epidemic killed half the Catawba population, forcing survivors to abandon the town that Riggs and Davis unearthed and then to resettle sixty miles downriver.
Last summer Riggs, Davis, and UNC students excavated the site; local Catawba children helped sift through hundreds of gallons of dirt to find things that their ancestors had used.
Before Riggs and Davis excavated the site, which is just south of Charlotte, Kanawha Development had planned to build a mixed-use neighborhood on a four-hundred-acre tract that includes the archaeological site. An elementary school was planned for the exact location where Nassaw was unearthed. Not any more. The developers changed their plans so that the village site will be preserved as a park. And adjacent to the new neighborhood, York County Culture and Heritage Museums will build a new museum that will feature installations Riggs and Davis will help create. The artifacts, curated by the Research Laboratories of Archaeology in Chapel Hill, will see the light of day again.
Riggs and Davis have excavated three other old Catawba towns, hoping to piece together Catawba history. The tribe had a vibrant economic presence, modeling their pottery after European styles to create a market for their goods in South Carolina. Catawbas leased land to white settlers for profit, and they lived in cabins that were very similar to homes in the back country of the Carolinas. The Catawbas were skilled hunters, fishers, and farmers; they were self-sufficient.
But the Catawba population, which numbered about five thousand in the early eighteenth century, steadily decreased throughout Colonial times. They were at constant war with rival tribes to the north. In fact, Catawba Nation was made up of various tribes that had thrived in North Carolina before Seneca Indians continually raided the Piedmont, forcing them southward.
During the Revolutionary War, the Catawba tribe joined colonists against the British, fighting under the command of UNC founder William Davie. And for this decision, many Catawba men died, and British soldiers burned down Catawba villages.
Riggs says that only about a couple hundred Catawbas were left in South Carolina in the early 1800s. And this, he says, might be why the federal government didn’t force the Catawbas completely off their land during the forced Indian removals of the 1830s.
“White settlers assumed that the Catawbas would be extinct within a couple decades,” Riggs says.
By the mid-1800s, the Catawbas were living in the cracks of Southern society, contributing economically, politically, and socially. Unlike the major tribes of the South, the Catawbas did not form a government, create a constitution, or otherwise threaten the white establishment.Today some Catawbas live on a reservation that is a small fraction of the land they once called their own.
Stephen Davis is the associate director of UNC’s Research Laboratories of Archaeology, and Brett Riggs is a research archaeologist in the Research Laboratories of Archaeology, both in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Trail of Tears
Chickasaws, Seminoles, Creeks, Choctaws, and Cherokees were all large sovereign nations in the South before the United States was formed. But after the Revolutionary War, state politicians wanted land that Indians occupied. The United States, a very new and vulnerable nation, had little money or will for a protracted war against Indians. So politicians tried something else.
George Washington and Secretary of War Henry Knox wanted U.S. citizens to respect Indian sovereignty. States such as Georgia, where many Cherokees lived, disagreed. What transpired between 1790 and 1840 is a sad and sordid story that Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green tell in their new book, Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears.
Perdue and Green say that Knox decided on a policy of “civilizing” the Indians because he thought it could appease tribal leaders and, eventually, Southern states.
“For Knox,” Green says, “civilization meant that Indians would give up hunting and warring and become peaceful farmers willing to sell surplus land to white neighbors.”
Knox wanted them to learn English, become Christians, adopt republican governments, and live on individual homesteads. The U.S. government agreed to provide livestock in the hope that Indians would slowly sell their vast hunting grounds and use the proceeds to improve the land left to them.
Many American Indians, Perdue says, were not opposed to certain European customs. Some Indians embraced Christianity. They wore Western clothing and learned English. They built toll roads and ferries, and opened inns for travelers. They engaged in commercial farming and bought livestock and farming equipment. Essentially, Indians took what they found useful from Anglo-American culture and passed over whatever they did not. They never agreed to give up their national sovereignty, or most of the land that the tribe held in common.
The “civilization” policy stalled in the late 1820s, so President Andrew Jackson took a more direct approach: move the Indians west of the Mississippi River. In today’s vernacular, Green says, this removal policy would be called ethnic cleansing.
Cherokees opposed this policy in several ways. They sent delegations to Washington D.C. and presented memorials to Congress. They made their case in the columns of The Cherokee Phoenix, a bilingual newspaper.
At the time, Perdue says, “most Americans found it remarkable or unbelievable that an Indian tribe published a newspaper. It generated a great deal of public interest and sympathy for the Cherokee cause.”
The Georgia legislature countered by making Indians subject to state law. The Cherokee Nation took one case — against a Cherokee accused of breaking state law — all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the Court ruled that the Nation had no standing. But a second case in which a white missionary to the Cherokees was convicted for violating Georgia law brought momentary victory. Chief Justice John Marshall wrote, “The Cherokee Nation is a distinct community, occupying its own territory, with boundaries accurately described, in which the laws of Georgia can have no force.”
But Georgia authorities refused to implement the decision, and President Jackson did not enforce it.
“Jackson did not consider tribes sovereign,” Green says. “He considered Indians subjects.”
Georgia citizens continued to encroach on Cherokee land, building new houses and seizing Cherokee homes. At one point, Cherokee Chief John Ross returned from Washington to find a Georgia family sitting at his dinner table. The family had won Ross’s land in a state-sponsored lottery.
“He rented a room that night,” Perdue says, “and the next morning he found his wife and children in a two-room cabin across the state line in Tennessee.”
No Cherokee wanted to leave the East, but a few prominent Cherokees decided to cut their losses. They met with a federal delegation at the Cherokee capital in what is now north Georgia to sign a treaty without their tribal council’s approval: $5 million for millions of acres of Cherokee land. When the tribal council and Ross found out, they deemed the treaty fraudulent and the Cherokee signers traitors. Ross, though, could not convince the federal government to overturn the agreement.
By the time the deadline came for all Cherokees to leave their homes on May 23, 1838, only two thousand had done so. At least thirteen thousand remained. U.S. Army soldiers began taking Indians from their homes and putting them in newly built forts. Corn was left unharvested and sometimes dinner was left on the table. Parents returning home from work found empty houses; soldiers had taken their children and the grandparents.
Many Cherokees spent months at these forts before they marched to Indian Territory — modern day Oklahoma — along several paths that came to be known collectively as the Trail of Tears.
On the eve of his departure, Cherokee William Shorey Coodey said, “At this very moment, a low sound of distant thunder fell on my ear. In almost an exact western direction, a dark spiral cloud was rising above the horizon and sent forth a murmur I almost fancied as a voice of divine indignation for the wrongs of my poor and unhappy countrymen, driven by brutal power from all they loved and cherished in the land of their fathers, to gratify the cravings of avarice.”
Thousands died of cholera, measles, whooping cough, dysentery, and respiratory infections. Wealthier Cherokees were not immune. Chief Ross’s wife died outside Little Rock, Arkansas. The Cherokee Nation survived, but its sovereignty had been put to the test, along with the sovereignty of the four other nations of the South.
Theda Perdue is a professor of history, and Michael D. Green is a professor of American studies, both in the College of Arts and Sciences.
The end of history
With the United States pushing westward during the early 1800s, Choctaw Indians of southern Mississippi had a choice between the lesser of two evils: they could stay on the land of their ancestors, own small individual farms, and dissolve their tribal government, or they could move to Oklahoma — a Choctaw word meaning land of the red people — and keep their tribal government intact. Most headed to Indian country. And for those who didn’t, their land was usually taken from them anyway, says Clara Sue Kidwell, director of Carolina’s new American Indian Center.
Kidwell, who is part Choctaw and Chippewa, says that her ancestors from Mississippi were not forced into prison camps as the Cherokees were, but they were forced to move to Oklahoma in large communities with whatever possessions they could carry with them. And they had to leave behind their livestock. Still, she says, they acclimated fairly well to eastern Oklahoma.
“Most importantly, the Choctaws had their written constitution; they had their sovereignty,” she says.
For a little while, that is. In her new book, The Choctaws in Oklahoma, Kidwell shows how this sovereignty was whittled away.
Throughout the 1800s, whites trickled west until the intercontinental railroad led to mass westward migration. Coal was discovered, and towns formed near the mines. Whites pressured Congress to loosen Indian control in eastern Oklahoma, Kidwell says, and Congress responded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by breaking up the Five Nations into small allotments that were granted to individual Indians and whites. All leftover land was bought up, usually by whites.
Kidwell says that tribal leaders accepted this allotment policy at the turn of the twentieth century because the nations might have been left with nothing had they not negotiated with Congress. Also, culture and society were changing for everyone. Many Indians became more interested in per capita payments for their land than in the integrity of the land for its own sake.
“I won’t say that all Choctaw people changed,” Kidwell says. “But the leadership changed. Sometimes there were very bitter disputes about allotment. Nevertheless, the Choctaw tribe was converting into a semi-industrialized, money-driven economy, where self-interests began overriding communal interests.”
Kidwell’s grandmother was allotted three hundred acres in south-central Oklahoma, where she wound up marrying a white cattle rancher from Texas in 1910. Years later Kidwell’s father told stories about how her grandfather married her grandmother for the land. True or not, that allotment was prime grazing land. And Kidwell’s grandfather, who earned and lost lots of money in the cattle business, eventually sold bits and pieces of the allotment. The family moved to a small town called Ringling, a long way from communal life.
Intermarriage certainly changed the way land was used and sold, Kidwell says, but the really disastrous thing about allotment came in 1908, when the federal government used blood quantum to determine which Indians were competent to manage their land — the more Indian blood you had, the less competent you were deemed. Kidwell says that guardians — often white lawyers, bankers, and upstanding members of society — were put in charge of land that had been allotted to full-blood Indian children.
“But these guardians often didn’t have the children’s best interest at heart,” she says. Many children never saw their entrusted allotments. “It was a national scandal.”
Clara Sue Kidwell is the director of the American Indian Center at UNC.
Choctaw pride
Wendell Long was one seven-year-old Choctaw who did receive a piece of land after the United States broke up Oklahoma’s Five Nations into allotments. He went on to study medicine at Harvard and to marry a Norwegian woman. When he died, his wife sold off the allotment, but the family still owns several other plots. One day some of that land will be passed down to Long’s granddaughter, Valerie Lambert, an anthropologist at Carolina.
Lambert was an avid reader growing up in Oklahoma City in the 1970s, and she wondered why her tribe did not resemble the powerful Indian nation of the 1800s.
“It was confusing,” she says. “A lot of people acted as if there was no tribe.”
As she got older, she saw the tribe get stronger, both economically and politically. It was common knowledge that Hollis Roberts, Choctaw Chief from 1978 to 1997, led the Choctaw resurgence. But Lambert found that this resurgence would not have been possible if not for a young Choctaw named Charles Brown, who led a movement in 1970 to save her tribe from complete collapse. Lambert recounts this effort in Choctaw Nation: A Story of American Indian Resurgence.
For much of the twentieth century, many people, including some Indians, began to think tribes were a thing of the past. They wanted Indian nations officially terminated — that is, to be no longer federally recognized. Tribes could no longer negotiate with the federal government, nor would they receive federal money for educational programs, social services, law enforcement, health services, or resource protection.
During the 1950s Choctaw Chief Harry Belvin wanted to dissolve the tribe, sell off tribal assets, and give the proceeds to individual Indians. So he and others worked with the federal government to schedule termination, which after several postponements was set for August 25, 1970.
In the fall of 1969 Lambert says Charles Brown found out about the termination legislation and set out to overturn it. He called everyone he knew and formed a youth movement that went door to door in Oklahoma City to inform Choctaws about Belvin’s plan. Brown lobbied Congress and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and gained hundreds of supporters who made it clear to the rest of the tribe and the federal government that they did not support tribal termination. Brown cranked out a newsletter and sent it to Choctaws around the country. He gave speeches: he said that defeating termination legislation would mark the rebirth of the Choctaw tribe, that Choctaws were destined for great things.
Belvin saw public sentiment tilt Brown’s way, Lambert says, and so Belvin began opposing the termination act, too. One day before termination was to take place, the legislation was repealed.
Brown’s vision was realized throughout the next thirty years as Choctaw chiefs, including Roberts, used economic development plans to rejuvenate Choctaw Nation. Casinos, grocery stores, manufacturing plants, truck-service plazas, department stores, and independent businesses all took root in southeastern Oklahoma, bringing in revenue and creating jobs for Choctaws. Tribal assets totaled $14.5 million in 1981 and $144 million in 2002. As a result, roads have been paved, loans granted, and firms created, including the Choctaw Manufacturing and Development Corporation, which has contracts with the U.S. military.
“We were a formidable political and economic presence before the United States was a country,” Lambert says. “It’s almost as if our capabilities and talents had been beaten down for so long that only recently have we been able to reemerge and resume what we believe to be our rightful place on this continent.”
Casinos bring in the most money for federally recognized tribes and allow tribes to accomplish what some other communities can’t — such as building a hospital, as Choctaw Chief Greg Pyle did in 2000.
When Lambert did field work in Oklahoma, a long-time Choctaw doctor from Oklahoma City told her: “In all my years of medicine, I have never seen a more efficient, more professional, and more outstanding health-care delivery system than the one that Chief Pyle and Gary Batton have built.”
Valerie Lambert is assistant professor of anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Earning a welcome
In 2004 two UNC doctors, Ziya Gizlice and Sara Huston, found that Indian adults in North Carolina have significantly higher rates of chronic conditions and risk factors — such as diabetes, asthma, high blood pressure, and obesity — than whites. Indians have less access to health care and a lower quality of life.
And in North Carolina — which has the largest Indian population of any state east of the Mississippi but only one federally recognized tribe — Indian tribes are centered in the most rural counties, where there’s less access to health services.
That same year, medical student Anthony Fleg started Native Health Initiative (NHI), an organization he codirects with his wife Shannon. NHI sends student volunteers to Indian communities to learn about tribes and partner with Indians on health and education issues. The Flegs had six volunteers their first year. Now they have more than thirty from across the country.
But creating NHI wasn’t easy.
“Tribes have grown leery of people just coming in for a short time, gathering information for a dissertation, and then leaving,” Anthony says. But he didn’t want to collect data; he wanted to learn and build a partnership.
Before Anthony founded NHI, he tried for three years to find an internship with a tribe anywhere in the country. Then in 2002, Navajo Nation in Arizona took him in and he helped doctors study iron deficiency in infants. He also met Shannon, a Navajo. A year later, he saw a listserv posting from a med student in Norway who wanted to volunteer with an Indian tribe.
“That was the moment I knew I had to do something about the fact that there aren’t any volunteer programs for students,” Anthony says.
He set up a meeting with North Carolina’s Commission on Indian Affairs, which led Anthony to meet Lumbee tribal leaders, who agreed to let volunteers — including that Norwegian student — work with doctors in Pembroke. NHI immediately partnered with tribal leaders to create cooking classes to combat obesity. NHI volunteers shadowed doctors to learn about Lumbee health needs. And Anthony teamed up with pastors, including Bruce Swett, to start diabetes screenings at local churches.
“UNC students brought their talents and gifts to the community,” Swett says, “and we knew that if they came here also to learn, then our community would love them back. And that’s what happened.”
NHI volunteers helped put together a lacrosse team to increase physical activity for Indian youth. In 2006 volunteers helped screen homebound Indians for diabetes and other chronic conditions. And last summer, twenty-six NHI volunteers helped with eight different health and education projects for five tribes: the Occaneechis, Tuscaroras, Waccamaw-Siouans, Lumbees, and the Eastern Band of Cherokees.
Anthony and Shannon Fleg are codirectors of NHI. Anthony is a fourth-year medical student in the School of Medicine; he earned his master’s degree from the School of Public Health in December 2007. Shannon is a social research associate for the Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention.
Learn more:
- UNC’s american indian center.
- research labs of archaeology at UNC.
- history at UNC.
- american studies at UNC.
- anthropology at UNC.
- school of public health at UNC.
- browse our archive for more stories in social sciences.
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