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It has long been noted that North American Indians have refused to disappear from American life. The modern Waccamaw Siouan Indians are no exception; they adopted political strategies in a conscious attempt to gain recognition and rights as American Indians. Anthropologist Nancy Lurie (1971:418) calls such political activity an emerging “articulatory movement ” among American Indians. The word articulate means to “join with or to give expression to a cultural identity as a minority” and is the opposite of assimilate or “to be absorbed into the system, to disappear as a cultural minority” (Lerch 1988:76). The ancestors of the Waccamaw Siouan of North Carolina survived more than three hundred years of contact with Euro-American society and still kept a hold on their Indian identity in spite of strong pressures to assimilate. While outsiders focused primarily on “blood” and “racial” descriptions such as “mixed bloods,” “tri-racial isolates ,” or “racial islands,” they clung to their Indian heritage and identity and attempted to articulate with the dominant society. In this chapter, which begins in 1921 as the Pageant of the Lower Cape Fear was being staged in Wilmington, we will use Lurie’s concept of articulatory relationships to understand the actions of Waccamaw Siouan Indian leaders. Resisting assimilation, the leaders asserted the Indian identity of their community and negotiated “informal contractual agreements with white-dominated government agencies controlling the distribution of public resources and services”(Lerch 1988:77).From the Waccamaw Siouan perspective,the basis of these articulatory relationships was to be recognition as an Indian community .In this chapter,we explore how separate schools were contested,the goals of Indian education, how different tribal names were adopted, and how relationships between Indian leaders and non-Indians centered on the issue of Indian identity. We learn a great deal about how the Waccamaw Siouan community was organized politically and socially by tracking their¤ght for separate Indian schools and a tribal name, ¤rst as Croatan and later  Tribal Names as Survival Strategies Croatan and Cherokee as Cherokee. The de¤nition of Indian (Croatan, Cherokee, Siouan) had to¤t the current political views of the white community who held the reins of power over the Indians. The local racial de¤nitions of “colored people” must be seen as part of the white society’s expression of social control over minorities. Since the state of North Carolina, through its educational policy and county governing bodies set the standards for racial classi¤cation, this review of racial politics is very relevant to Indian identity. What was the Waccamaw Siouan community like in 1921? To begin with, it was not called Waccamaw Siouan. Within the community, people referred to themselves as the “Wide Awake Indians” when speaking of their council. Outside the community when articulating with non-Indians, they used “Croatan” and, later, “Cherokee.” In this chapter, “Croatan” is used to refer to the modern Waccamaw Siouan ancestral community when discussing their actions from 1921 until 1928. At that point, the community changed its name to the “Cherokee Indians of Columbus County.” Thereafter in the chapter, “Cherokee” is used to conform to that period in their history. The modern tribal name of Waccamaw Siouan was not used until 1948. In the early twentieth century,the Croatan Indian community (ancestral of the modern Waccamaw Siouan) centered in two small settlements bordering Columbus and Bladen Counties, about thirty-¤ve miles outside of Wilmington and across the Cape Fear River. People lived on small farms, supplementing subsistence agriculture with ¤shing, hunting, and logging. Most inherited their land from family members who had secured a land base through private deeds in the eighteenth century (Lerch 1988:78). For example, Abraham Freeman, an early settler whose descendants lived in the 1920 Indian communities, established a land base along two small branches running north out of the Green Swamp, just above Lake Waccamaw, by 1787. Freeman and others appeared in the 1800 federal census as “all other free persons” rather than as white or slave. Over the years, marriage within the community preserved a core of people who lived together as Indians. From this group,they chose leaders who would speak for them in their dealings with the white society. Those leaders or “men of age” formally organized as the “Wide Awake Indian Council” in 1910 (Lerch 1988:80). “Men of age” came from dominant family groups and served at the will of their relatives (Lerch 1988:79). Oral tradition describes these men as being willing to spend long hours...

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