Southern Appalachia and Mountain People

As a subregion of the South, the Appalachian South has forged its own unique identities. Mountain inhabitants historically have been ethnically diverse and are increasingly so today. The three bands of southern Appalachia—the Allegheny-Cumberland (parts of West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama), the Blue Ridge (parts of Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia), and the Great Appalachian Valley (parts of Maryland, Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama)—have been the subject of their own extensive mythology disconnected from that of the Old South. Novelist Lee Smith expressed the cultural dissimilarities between the Lowland South and southern Appalachia when she described her mountain home as “far from the white columns and marble generals.” In terms of outsiders’ perceptions, she noted: “Appalachia is to the South what the South is to the rest of the country. That is: lesser than, backward, marginal, Other.”

Beginning with the introduction of outside interests cutting timber, mining coal, and establishing manufacturing industries in the 1880s, local color writers and missionaries have popularized images of southern Appalachia that still shape stereotypes of the region and the ways in which “mountain people” see themselves. From “uplift literature” portraying the region as a social problem, to romantic and fanciful theses about residents’ feuding, supposed Elizabethan dialects, and fallacious status as the most “Anglo-Saxon” of all American populations, outsiders have represented distorted images of Appalachia to serve their own purposes. The fiction of Mary Noialles Murfree (1850–1922) and the local color writings of Emma Bell Miles (1879–1919) and Horace Sowers Kep-hart (1862–1931) were sympathetic to mountain people, but they still helped formalize myths about Appalachian people as static anachronisms. John Charles Campbell’s The Southern Highlander and His Homeland (1921) was one of the first works of systematic scholarship that to some extent documented diversity within the region, but it was nevertheless shaped by a missionary agenda. Journalists, tourists, and educators wrote accounts of their forays among people they deemed “the last frontiersmen” who entertained them with folktales, “ancient” ballads, and the use of “archaic” language. By the turn of the 20th century, the charming frontier people image had been replaced by the more lasting and harmful stereotype of superstitious, incestuous, lazy, whiskey-distilling hillbillies. The efforts by both CBS and NBC television networks to produce hillbilly “reality shows” in the first few years of the 21st century demonstrate how such degrading perspectives still appeal to the public imagination outside the region and still foster a particular self-consciousness among mountain people.

Mountain people are known for their egalitarianism and individualism, their firm connections to place and extended family, and their dedicated church attendance. The Mountain South is home to a proliferation of evangelical denominations with Methodists, heterogeneous Baptists, and Holiness-Pentecostal churches being the most common. Although the region is named for the Appalachee Indians, today the Cherokee and other Native Americans now com-southern appalachia and mountain people prise only 0.3 percent of the Appalachian population. The majority of southern Appalachian people (about 85 percent) are descendants of the two most predominant ethnic groups to displace American Indians late in the colonial period: the Scots-Irish and the Germans. These settlers came down the Great Wagon Road from Philadelphia to what was then called the Backcountry. In some states, Scots-Irish constituted half or more of the European settlers in Appalachia, which remains an area where some of the largest numbers of people self-identify as such on the U.S. Census. It is these immigrants who created bluegrass music with acoustic stringed instruments (British and Irish fiddle traditions, combined with acoustic guitar, mandolin, upright bass, resonator, or Dobro, guitar, and African-derived banjo), who left the region the legacy of the Hatfields and McCoys, who preserved the rich tradition of British ballads and Jack tales (the latter made famous in recent years by the Hicks family), and who maintained weaving traditions (taught in Appalachian “settlement schools” a century ago and today at Berea College in Kentucky and Crossnore School in North Carolina). Southern Appalachian foodways are a blend of American Indian, British, and German traditions, and vernacular architecture styles merge Scots-Irish, English, German, and Scandinavian adaptations to the backwoods frontier.

Mountaineer with his two grandsons, Breathitt County, Ky., 1940 (Marion Post Wolcott, Library of Congress [LC-USF34-055706-D], Washington, D.C.)

Scholars once considered mountain folk the cultural descendants of what historian Frank Lawrence Owsley called “the plain folks of the Old South”—predominantly yeoman farmers with few or no slaves. However, hierarchy and slave ownership were a part of southern Appalachian society, and the “father of Appalachian Studies,” Cratis Williams, observed that internal socioeconomic diversity undermines generalizations about the region. He noted that while southern Appalachia was home to the town dweller, the valley farmer, and the branch water mountaineers (“hollow folk”), stereotyping targeted the latter and was extended to everyone living within the geographic area. The Mountain South had a mixed farming economy with small farms and reliance on hunting and open-range livestock grazing, but as timber and mining companies acquired land and mineral rights, profits left the region, taxes soared, and many farmers could no longer make a living from, or retain, their land (a process that continues today with wealthy outsiders building extravagant summer homes and resort communities). If some antebellum mountaineers could be considered middle-class “plain folk,” their standard of living actually declined in the postbellum economy and with “modernization.” Many farmers took mill work or went to the coal mines, which provided a slim livelihood, dangerous working conditions, and black lung disease. The mechanization of coal mining and the closure of many mines led to high unemployment and entrenched poverty, so that Appalachia remains one of the poorest regions in America. As part of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, Congress created the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) in 1965 to further social and economic development in the region and create or expand highways to decrease isolation. Today, southern Appalachia is still predominantly rural, with few cities and many government forests and parks. It still has some of the highest rates of working poor in the nation. Residents usually take on wage labor while also keeping subsistence gardens, Christmas tree farms, or fruit orchards. Many mountain folk work in tourism-related occupations. Southern Appalachia’s population is growing at a higher rate than that of northern Appalachia, in part because of immigration and in-migration.

Southern Appalachia and its people have been the subject of speculation, romance, prejudice, and scholarship since the late 19th century, but in 1977 a group of teachers, scholars, and regional activists began the Appalachian Studies Association to encourage research and improve communication between Appalachian people, their communities, and governmental and educational institutions. Many association scholars are natives and have taken the ongoing national biases against Appalachian people to task. Redressing the negative representation of mountain people, they also have found that even when positive ethnographic and historical accounts of southern Appalachian life have appeared, these have still rendered all but the “Anglo-Saxon frontiersmen” invisible. In the last two decades, scholars have begun to address the ethnic diversity of the mountain population and document the ways in which new immigrants from Latin America and Southeast Asia continue to add to mountain culture.

While African Americans arrived in the mountains first as slaves, free blacks had also settled in the region by 1790. Historian Richard Drake has noted that, although the majority of antislavery societies in the United States prior to 1830 were in southern Appalachia and Unionist sentiment was strong there during the Civil War, a slave-owning elite did exist in many counties. Generally, the Mountain South had smaller populations of slaves, with many areas having black populations of under 1 percent. The only Appalachian county to have a 50 percent black population at the beginning of the Civil War was Madison County, Ala. At the end of the 19th century, newly freed slaves came in search of work in the coal mines. Today, African Americans comprise about the same proportion of the population of southern Appalachia as they do the total U.S. population (12 percent), but they comprise only 2 percent and 3 percent, respectively, of the populations of central and northern Appalachia. According to the ARC, most African Americans in southern Appalachian counties live in towns rather than rural areas, with the largest concentration being in Jefferson County, Ala., which encompasses the city of Birmingham.

A group of Kentucky performance poets have coined a new ethnonym, “Affrilachian,” to describe African American mountain people. The Beck Cultural Center in Knoxville, Tenn., features displays on African American history in eastern Tennessee. Berea College in Kentucky, the first interracial college in the South, established a Black Cultural Center in 1983. The Highlander Folk School founded by Miles Horton in 1932 in Monteagle, Tenn. (now the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tenn.) was engaged in activism during the southern labor movements of the 1930s, the civil rights movement from the 1940s to the 1960s, and the Appalachian people’s movements of the 1970s and 1980s and was visited by Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. In Colored People: A Memoir (1994), Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates has written of experiencing desegregation where he grew up in the company town of Piedmont, W.Va. African American recording artists playing traditional Appalachian music include Etta Baker, “Sparky” Rucker, and the old-time string band Martin, Bogan, and Armstrong. The first “Black Banjo: Then and Now Gathering” took place at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., in 2005.

Appalachia attracted ethnic Protestants such as French Huguenots, Welsh Baptists, and French-speaking, Italian Waldensians (Waldenses) from the Cottian Alps of northern Italy. In 1893 over 200 Waldensians settled Valdese, N.C. Their unique Protestant religious heritage predates the Reformation and caused their forebears centuries of persecution, but after a century in the Mountain South many have now become Presbyterians and Methodists. Nineteenth-century settlers brought with them distinctive Alpine architectural traditions, and many of their structures are now of historic interest for visitors to Valdese. Traditional ciders, wines, and foods, in addition to particular stories, French hymns, and games such as bocce, also feature in the annual Waldensian Festival held each August.

Although Eastern and Southern European immigrants came to work in the coal mines between 1890 and 1910, southern Appalachia did not attract significant new immigrants until the latter 20th century. Buncombe County, N.C., has now become home to close to 100 resettled Ukrainians. Since 2000, nearly half of the region’s new residents are from minority groups. Thousands of Hmong (tribal people from the mountains of Laos who fought with the U.S. military in the Vietnam War) have been resettled in western North Carolina since the 1980s, adding a new dimension to life in small towns such as Mount Airy (population 8,000 and famed as Andy Griffith’s hometown and the home of “Siamese twins” Eng and Chang Bunker). Hmong were attracted to Mount Airy to work in its hosiery mill, and when the mill closed, many have moved again. As with many Hmong resettlements, the Hmong at Mount Airy rapidly became U.S. citizens but kept to themselves. They are reluctant to acculturate and, although they sometimes attend local churches, they have caused consternation by sacrificing chickens to the spirits within the living rooms of their public housing projects. Marrying young and producing large families, they maintain ties with Hmong in other towns, with many gathering at a large settlement in Hickory, N.C., for their major holiday, Hmong New Year.

Hispanic immigration has been rising rapidly across the South, and the Mountain South is no exception. Construction work, apple and cherry orchards, vineyards, poultry plants, and nurseries have all offered employment opportunities. Throughout the region, the number of classes offering English as a second language has grown tenfold since 2000. Many Hispanic immigrants are living in the United States illegally and, not being classed as refugees like the Hmong, find obtaining citizenship a long process. However, Hispanics are more likely to get involved in the local community and to also establish their own Catholic churches, businesses, and stores.

Leaving their homeland during the civil war of the 1980s and 1990s, Guatemalan Maya have immigrated to Morganton, N.C., and to Appalachian communities in Georgia and Alabama, where they settle together with others from their home villages. After an initial immigration period, spouses and relatives, schoolteachers, and practitioners of traditional arts soon follow. Many younger male Mayans are engaged in farmwork, the nursery or poultry industries, or work for resort communities. With other Latino immigrants, Guatemalan Mayans are renting and buying houses in small towns that had previously experienced depopulation and changing the face of the Mountain South and what it means to be “of” southern Appalachia.

CELESTE RAY
University of the South

Allen W. Batteau, The Invention of Appalachia (1990); Patricia Beaver, Rural Community in the Appalachian South (1986); Patricia Beaver and Helen Lewis, in Cultural Diversity in the U.S. South, ed. Carole Hill and Patricia Beaver (1998); Dwight Billings, Gurney Norman, and Katherine Ledford, eds., Confronting Appalachian Stereotypes: Back Talk from an American Region (1999); Harry M. Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands (1963); Wilma Dunaway, Slavery in the American Mountain South (2003), The First American Frontier: Transition to Capitalism in Southern Appalachia, 1700–1860 (1996); Ron Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880–1930 (1982); Elizabeth Englehardt, The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature (2003); Leon Fink and Alvis E. Dunn, The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South (2003); Wilburn Hayden, Journal of Appalachian Studies Special Issue: Appalachia Counts: The Region in the 2000 Census (2004); Kirk Hazen and Ellen Fluharty, in Linguistic Diversity in the South: Changing Codes, Practices, and Ideology, ed. Margaret Bender (2004); Anthony Harkins, Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon (2004); Elvin Hatch, Appalachian Journal: A Regional Studies Review (Fall 2004); Benita Howell, ed., Culture, Environment, and Conservation in the Appalachian South (2002); C. David Hsiung, Two Worlds in the Tennessee Mountains: Exploring the Origins of Appalachian Stereotypes (1997); John C. Inscoe, Mountain Masters, Slavery, and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina (1989); ed., Appalachians and Race: The Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation (2001); Terry Jordan and Matt Kaups, The American Backwoods Frontier: An Ethnic and Ecological Interpretation (1989); Mary LaLone, in Signifying Serpents and Mardi Gras Runners: Representing Identity in Selected Souths, ed. Celeste Ray and Eric Lassiter (2003); Deborah McCauley, Appalachian Mountain Religion: A History (1995); W. K. McNeil, ed., Appalachian Images in Folk and Popular Culture (1989); Frank L. Owsley, in The South: Old and New Frontiers, ed. H. C. Owsley (1969); Mary Beth Pudup, Dwight B. Billings, and Altina L. Waller, eds., Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century (1995); Henry D. Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870–1920 (1978); Nina Silber, in Appalachians and Race, ed. John C. Inscoe (2001); Robert P. Stuckeret, Journal of Black Studies (March 1993); William H. Turner and Edward J. Cabbell, eds., Blacks in Appalachia (1985); David Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region (1983), Modernizing the Mountaineer: People, Power, and Planning in Appalachia, revised ed. (1994); Jerry Wayne Williamson, Hillbillyland: What the Movies Did to the Mountains and What the Mountains Did to the Movies (1995).

 

Southerners

The 21st-century South is home to many ethnic groups, but since at least the 19th century some in the region have tried, with little success, to establish white southerners as having a particular ethnic heritage, first as cavaliers and more recently as Celts. Beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, sociologists (most importantly John Shelton Reed) and historians (most prominently George Brown Tindall) took a new approach. Influenced by an increasing national interest in ethnicity, aware that the region’s distinctive social system based on a rural one-crop economy and rigid system of white supremacy was rapidly passing, yet convinced that despite such changes a “South” would persist, Reed, Tindall, and other scholars proposed that southerners be looked upon as an ethnic group. Proponents of “southerners as ethnics” realized that the concept of “ethnicity” did not fully fit the southern experience and so sometimes labeled southerners as “quasi-ethnics” or wrote of employing an “ethnic analogy.” The analogy proved inexact because the South had never been a nation, although Reed pointed out it had at least been a failed one. Nevertheless, the concept of southerners as ethnics took hold as a useful way to describe the amorphous yet persistent notions of southern identity and distinctiveness. By 1980 southerners even commanded an entry in an encyclopedia of American ethnic groups.

Tindall and others who employed the concept of ethnicity saw its potential to define “southernness” in a way that would acknowledge that African Americans had played a central role in the creation of the region’s culture and that could provide an identity that embraced both blacks and whites. More recently, other scholars have endorsed the idea of southerners as ethnics as a means to include not only whites and African Americans, but also other groups. The new proponents build from the idea of the South as a persistent folk culture and stress the creole nature of that culture. They celebrate diversity within the region, where the early proponents of southerners as ethnics often sought to identify southerners’ shared distinctiveness.

In both cases, the idea of southerners as ethnics rested in southerners’ sense of their own identity; most thought of and identified themselves as “southerners,” albeit with varying degrees of intensity, and perceived that people outside the region did as well. Beyond the sense of a distinctive identity, Reed, Tindall, and other early proponents of southerners as ethnics built their case on two different but obviously interrelated bases: history and culture. In the first, southern ethnicity was rooted in a distinctive past: slavery, the Confederacy, a rural post–Civil War social order built on a one-crop economy, a one-party political system and disfranchisement, and rigid segregation. The region’s historical experience did not so much live on in memories of specific events (even southerners’ knowledge of the Civil War proved surprisingly shallow) as it did in a generalized sense of grievance. The region, southerners maintained, had long been mistreated and looked down upon by the North. Basing southern ethnicity in history, though, undermined the idea of an identity shared by blacks and whites. Although proponents pointed to a common, if tragic, racial past, the attitudes of white and black southerners toward the region’s racial history and the persistent division along the color line led Tindall and others to argue that the region held not one but two ethnic groups: black and white.

The second basis offered for southern ethnicity—culture or a core of shared beliefs and practices—could more often unite black and white. In addition to their sense of grievance, southerners widely shared three beliefs that distinguished them from other Americans: a strong sense of and pride in place, deeply held conservative religious beliefs, and a ready acceptance of personal violence rooted in a traditional sense of personal honor. Proponents of a southern ethnicity also pointed to a strong attachment to family and various other forms of behavior. Language—not just a pronounced accent but different dialects and a proclivity for certain usages (“y’all” and “mama,” among others)—marked southerners as an ethnic group. So, too, did distinctive tastes in foods, among them grits, okra, fried green tomatoes, and MoonPies. A few observers even included such phenomena as country music and stock car racing, both of which had their roots in the region. The rise of both to national popularity at the beginning of the 21st century, however, raises questions about the persistence of southerners’ distinctive ways, as does the discovery that by that time only about a quarter of southern adults claimed to use “mama” and even fewer regularly ate grits. Perhaps the pervasive power of modern American popular culture will eventually overcome many aspects of southern ethnicity. Proponents of the idea of southerners as persistent ethnics would counter that the South is always changing but never disappearing.

GAINES FOSTER
Louisiana State University

James C. Cobb, Redefining Southern Culture: Mind and Identity in the Modern South (1999); Lewis M. Killian, White Southerners, revised ed. (1985); Celeste Ray, ed., Southern Heritage on Display: Public Ritual and Ethnic Diversity within Southern Regionalism (2003); John Shelton Reed, The Enduring South: Subcultural Persistence in Mass Society (1972), Southerners: The Social Psychology of Sectionalism (1983); George Brown Tindall, Journal of Southern History (February 1974), Natives and Newcomers: Ethnic Southerners and Southern Ethnics (1995).

 

Afro-Cubans

“Afro-Cuban” (afrocubano) is a term that was invented by Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz in the early 20th century. Those whom the term designates often suggest it fails to capture the nuances of Cuban history and seems to qualify citizenship in the nation that Cubans of African descent were instrumental in creating. Historically, the African population was proportionately much larger in Cuba than in the United States. Expanded sugar production in 19th-century Cuba rested on the labor of African slaves. Yet there were many more free people of color in Cuba than in the South under slavery. Afro-Cuban mutual aid societies (los cabildos de naciones) enabled retention of African languages and fostered syncretic Afro-Catholic religions (e.g., Santeria). African-derived music and folklore have strongly influenced Cuban popular culture. Afro-Cuban music has enjoyed sustained popularity in the United States. Dizzy Gillespie’s mid-20th-century collaboration with Cuban musicians Tito Puente, Mario Bauza, and Celia Cruz helped establish a strong audience for salsa. Drums and metaphors from African religious traditions flavor this musical genre, which continues to draw broad interest. One example is the Buena Vista Social Club, a Cuban ensemble reviving a classic era of Cuban popular music and composed partially of the musicians who played in a prerevolution dance club of the same name.

More than half of the soldiers in the Cuban revolt against Spain in 1895 were black or mulatto. It was during this revolution (and the earlier revolt of 1868) that Afro-Cubans first migrated to Florida and Louisiana. Cigar production in Key West and Tampa attracted Cuban settlers. Afro-Cubans accounted for about 15 percent of these 19th-century Cuban migrants. Smaller settlements of cigar workers located in Jacksonville and New Orleans. In addition to cigar workers, these early communities included a large number of Cuban intellectuals and political figures prominent in exile political organizations.

The end of the war against Spain in 1898 coincided with the rise of Jim Crow laws in the United States. Afro-Cubans were adversely affected by these laws. Segregated social clubs formed. Sociedad La Unión Martí-Maceo (the Martí-Maceo Society, founded in Tampa in 1900 in honor of José Martí and Antonio Maceo, important leaders in the Cuban fight for independence) still remains in existence, as does El Círculo Cubano, the white Cuban club founded in 1899. The leading centers of Cuban settlement in the United States during the early 20th century, Ybor City and West Tampa, were enclaves with elaborate social, recreational, and political organizations. Afro-Cubans were integrated into these enclaves, but with growing distance from white compatriots.

Cigar-worker migration to Florida slowed during the Depression of the 1930s and ended completely with the 1961 embargo against Cuban tobacco imports. The very large influx of anti-Castro Cuban exiles, beginning in 1959, targeted Miami far more than Tampa; the Cuban histories of Key West and Jacksonville were by then nearly forgotten. Fewer than 10 percent of the immediate post-1959 immigrants were Afro-Cuban. Second- and third-generation Afro-Cubans in Tampa became more isolated, cut off from contact with Cuba and increasingly involved with African Americans.

The 1980 “Mariel boatlift” (a mass exodus of Cubans prompted by a downturn in the Cuban economy and having the sanction of Cuban president Fidel Castro) included a much larger proportion of Afro-Cubans, many of whom remained in Miami. More recent waves of immigrants and refugees on rafts have continued to include Afro-Cubans. Despite an increase in numbers, however, black Cubans of Miami have remained spatially and socially separate from white Cubans. Jim Crow and southern patterns of residential segregation explain only part of this phenomenon. The issue of racial diversity among Cubans has a long history of ambivalence. José Martí, who sought national unity and an end to Spanish rule in the 1890s, urged Cubans to ignore racial differences and forget past injustices. However, this sanction discourages discourse about racial problems and has made Afro-Cubans relatively invisible.

Average incomes of Cuban immigrants exceed those of all other Latino ethnic groups in the United States. Black Cubans, however, have been shown to earn significantly less than their white counterparts. In Miami, especially, segregation between black and white Cubans is greater than for the population as a whole. Nevertheless, among recent immigrants and their children, there remains a strong identification with Cuba, and cultural elements such as food and music continue to favor the homeland. In Tampa, descendants of immigrants are more varied in identification and cultural preferences. Fewer speak Spanish or regularly eat Cuban food. Many still attend the St. Peter Claver Catholic Church, and a smaller number continue to belong to the Martí-Maceo Society. The majority of descendants, however, more strongly identify as African American.

SUSAN D. GREENBAUM
University of South Florida

Alejandro de la Fuente, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (2001); Susan Greenbaum, More than Black: Afro-Cubans in Tampa (2002); Guillermo Grenier and Alex Stepick, eds., Miami Now! Immigration, Ethnicity, and Social Change (1992); Pedro Perez Sarduy and Jean Stubbs, eds., Afro-Cuba: An Anthology of Cuban Writing on Race, Politics, and Culture (1993).

 

Alabama-Coushattas

The Alabama-Coushatta Tribe includes over 1,000 members, about 500 of whom live on a reservation of approximately 4,600 acres in east Texas. As a Southeastern Woodlands group, the Alabama-Coushatta trace their ancestry back to the Mississippian moundbuilders and belong to the Muskogean linguistic family, which also includes the Creek, Choctaw, Seminole, and Chickasaw. They encountered Hernando de Soto during his 1539–41 expedition, when he visited Alabama and Coushatta towns in northeastern Mississippi, northern Alabama, and southern Tennessee. By the late 1600s, the two groups had moved to the area of present-day Montgomery, Ala. There they participated in the Upper Creek Confederacy. By the mid-1700s autonomous yet interconnected Alabama and Coushatta towns began migrating independently from Alabama. Some groups settled in parts of Louisiana and Florida before crossing into Texas in the 1780s. The contemporary Alabama-Quassarte town in Oklahoma represents groups who were removed from Alabama in the 1830s. The Texas tribe maintains some contact with the Oklahoma group and closer ties with the Coushatta tribe of Louisiana.

The Alabama and Coushatta peoples negotiated relationships with the colonizing French, Spanish, and English and, later, with Americans, Texans, and Mexicans who vied for political and economic alliances with both tribes. Non-Indians such as Stephen F. Austin and Sam Houston cited the tribes’ reputations as “civilized,” friendly, and peaceful to prevent their removal from east Texas in the 19th century. In 1840 the Republic of Texas first tried, unsuccessfully, to find reservation land for the Alabama and Coushatta. The state of Texas designated reservation land for the Alabama in 1853, and the Coushatta joined them there.

After the Civil War the Alabama and Coushatta experienced poverty and disease, without federal or state government aid. In 1881 Presbyterian missionaries came to the reservation and pressured the tribe to give up many native practices, but they also provided the education and medical care that the state and federal governments neglected. In the 1880s the railroad brought the lumber industry to east Texas and engaged Alabama and Coushatta individuals in a wage-labor economy. While alleviating poverty, the wage-labor system exacted a cultural toll. However, anthropologist M. R. Harrington documented the significant retention of cultural practices into the 20th century despite assimilative pressures.

During the 1910s and 1920s both the state and federal governments began to give aid to the tribes. In 1928, to increase the size of the reservation, the federal government purchased more land and deeded it collectively to the Alabama-Coushatta. The name has remained hyphenated ever since. After the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, the Alabama-Coushatta organized as a tribe and created a constitution that prescribed, among other things, strict membership and residence rules.

In 1955 the federal government terminated its trusteeship relationship with the Alabama-Coushatta, thereby transferring the responsibility to the state of Texas. However, in response to a dispute over hunting rights and an adverse ruling by the state attorney general, the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe sought and regained federal recognition in 1987.

In the 1960s the tribe began a tourist enterprise with funding from the state of Texas. Today, the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe promotes economic development on its own initiative. In 2001 the Alabama-Coushatta began limited gaming with the opening of an entertainment center. However, the state opposed and closed the operation in spite of the drastic increase in jobs and economic improvements that it brought not only to the reservation but to the entire area. The tribe continues to pursue negotiations on gaming with the state.

In the 21st century the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe conducts instruction in native language, pine-needle and river-cane basket making, and traditional dance. Individuals work and attend school in the surrounding area and participate in local Presbyterian, Baptist, and Assembly of God churches. In addition, people maintain the observance of matrilineal clans and traditional medicinal techniques and foodways. Individuals have also revived intertribal networks across the United States through participation in political and business activities, powwows, and athletic events.

STEPHANIE MAY DE MONTIGNY
University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh

Daniel Jacobson, Ethnohistory (Spring 1960); Geoffrey D. Kimball, Koasati Grammar (1991); Howard Martin, Myths and Folktales of the Alabama-Coushatta Indians of Texas (1977); Stephanie A. May, “Performances of Identity: Alabama-Coushatta Tourism, Powwows, and Everyday Life” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 2001), “Alabama and Koasati,” in Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 14: Southeast, ed. Raymond Fogelson (2004); Harriet Smither, Southwestern Historical Quarterly (October 1932); John R. Swanton, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 137 (1946).

 

Appalachian African Americans

African Americans have a long history in Appalachia. Arriving first in the 18th and 19th centuries as slaves, their numbers remained relatively small until the opening of the coal fields in the late 19th century. The need for miners encouraged a dramatic in-migration of free African Americans from the Deep South.

In West Virginia, the heart of central Appalachian coal country, the number of African American miners increased from just under 5,000 in 1900 to over 11,000 a decade later. By 1930 West Virginia had 22,000 African American miners. In Kentucky, African American miners numbered 2,200 in 1900 and 7,300 in 1930. These miners either followed family members to the central Appalachian region or were directly recruited by coal companies. While dispersed throughout the region, significant numbers of African Americans found their way to Kanawha and McDowell Counties in West Virginia and Harlan County in Kentucky. In the region’s coal towns, African Americans stood on a comparatively equal footing with European Americans, as coal companies strove to maximize profits by keeping racial antagonism low and placing the most skilled workers in the appropriate jobs, regardless of race. As Appalachians, African Americans presently experience the myriad effects of poverty, including the dilapidated housing, low educational attainment, and limited access to health and social services that typify this marginalized subregion. As a minority among mountain people, African Americans additionally suffer the historical consequences of racism.

Joe Thompson at the Black Banjo Gathering, Appalachian State University, Boone, N.C., 2005 (John Maeder, photographer, Appalachian Wanderings)

Any discussion of African Americans in Appalachia relates to a demographic understanding of Appalachia itself. The region, as delineated by the Appalachian Regional Commission in the 1960s, includes counties in 12 states stretching from Mississippi to New York. In the southern, central, and northern subregions, African Americans comprise 13, 2.2, and 3.6 percent of the population, respectively. Of the 1.7 million African Americans living in Appalachia, approximately 76 percent are in the southern subregion, 22 percent are in the northern subregion, and 2.8 percent are in the central subregion. The 10 Appalachian counties with the highest percentages of African Americans are in Mississippi and Alabama. Additionally, those counties with the highest numbers are urban or adjacent to urban areas.

Implicit in any discussion of blacks in Appalachia is their distinctiveness in relation to other African Americans in the South based on their mountain experience and heritage. Practicing religious and musical traditions of their Deep South kinfolk, rural Appalachian African Americans also had ties to industrializing America. These African Americans, however, have largely been ignored in the media and in scholarship. In their “discovery” of Appalachian culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, outsiders stereotyped Appalachian residents as isolated, backward, violent, and, not least of all, Anglo-Saxon. Over the past 20 years the people of Appalachia, including African Americans, have become increasingly critical of their pejorative representation in mainstream America.

Accompanying the rise of “place-based” studies and identity politics in the 1990s, African Americans began actively claiming an Appalachian identity. William H. Turner and Edward J. Cabbell’s Blacks in Appalachia (1985) considered specific African American communities in the mountains and black coal miners. In the early 1990s a Kentucky-based performance group, the Affrilachian Poets, began to give voice to the frustrations of African Americans in Appalachia who feel excluded from historical and contemporary understandings of what it means to be of Kentucky and/or Appalachia. In Pennington Gap, Va., the county’s first school for blacks, Lee County Colored Elementary School, has become the Appalachian African American Cultural Center. The center collects oral histories, photographs, copies of slave documents, and material culture pertaining to the African Americans’ historical experience in the region.

MICHAEL CRUTCHER
University of Kentucky

Dwight B. Billings, Gurney Norman, and Katherine Ledford, eds., Back Talk from Appalachia: Confronting Stereotypes (1999); William H. Turner and Edward J. Cabbell, eds., Blacks in Appalachia (1985); Frank X. Walker, Affrilachia (2000).

 

Barbadians

In an influential article, historian Jack Greene called Barbados a “cultural hearth” for the southeastern slave states. The Barbadian influence has probably been exaggerated, but English colonists from that island undoubtedly had an important role in causing early South Carolina to resemble the West Indies in several ways. South Carolina’s slavery-dominated plantation economy was later exported through South Carolinians, both black and white, to other southeastern states.

Another historian, Peter Wood, called South Carolina a “colony of a colony.” By 1670, when the first permanent English settlement was made near Charleston, Barbados was already a mature and exceedingly wealthy sugar-producing colony. Land was scarce on the 166-square-mile island, as large sugar “factories” squeezed out opportunities for small farmers and their families. Barbadians played a key role in establishing the newer English colony. Sir John Colleton, who had gone out to Barbados after the defeat of King Charles I’s forces in the Puritan Revolution, apparently took the lead in obtaining the Carolina charter for eight English noblemen. The most important of the eight Proprietors in the settling of South Carolina, Anthony Ashley Cooper, first earl of Shaftesbury, had also owned a Barbados plantation and had other Caribbean interests. Although a Barbadian attempt to settle Carolina in the 1660s failed, some Barbadians joined the successful 1669–70 settling expedition from England.

In South Carolina’s early years as a colony, much of the shipping from England came by way of Barbados. In the beginning, significant numbers of Barbadian free blacks, indentured servants, and slaves moved to the new colony, but the numbers have been inflated by counting people who only passed through Barbados on their way from England to South Carolina. After the 1690s, rice became the staple crop of South Carolina. Slave populations of more than 80 percent and dreadful mortality developed in Lowcountry parishes that shared the names of parishes in Barbados. The slave code, the harshest on the continent, was also modeled on that of Barbados, but the parallels should not be overstated. South Carolina also came to have a very wealthy white elite, but it never became a monocultural economy like Barbados and its plantation owners were never absentee to the same degree.

Three Barbadians became South Carolina governors in its Proprietary era, and emigrants from that island formed part of the powerful Goose Creek faction that troubled the colony’s owners by refusing to stop selling Native Americans into slavery and by trading with pirates. While serving as the third governor in 1672–74, Sir John Yeamans—who earlier had arranged the murder of a man so that he could marry the man’s wife—infuriated the earl of Shaftesbury by selling to Barbados for a profit provisions that were urgently needed in Carolina. The third Barbadian governor, Robert Gibbes, obtained the office of governor by bribery in 1710. London merchants demonstrated that they could also be rapacious colonists in South Carolina’s early years. Given that astonishingly little is now known of the origins of the colony’s early leaders, too much may have been made of the role of the aggressive Barbadians in the formation of South Carolina.

CHARLES H. LESSER
South Carolina Department of Archives and History

Peter F. Campbell, Some Early Barbadian History (1993); Jack P. Greene, South Carolina Historical Magazine (October 1987); Charles H. Lesser, South Carolina Begins: The Records of a Proprietary Colony, 1663–1721 (1995).

 

Black Seminoles

From the late 17th century through the mid-19th century, slaves who escaped to Florida from the South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry found homes and allies among the Seminole. The name “Seminole,” in fact, meant “runaway” and had been adopted after the group detached themselves from the Creek Confederacy. The Seminole called the runaway slaves estelusti and considered them free. Black Seminoles lived in separate villages near at least a dozen Seminole towns, the earliest being in the current Alachua, Leon, Levy, and Hernando Counties. While the Seminole held African-born slaves and had enslaved Yamasee Indians who were prisoners of war, they protected these escapees from slave catchers. When estelusti had resided with the Seminole for long periods they became known as maroons, as did the free blacks who had also chosen to settle with the Seminole. Eventually they became Black Seminoles with a blended cultural heritage and a unique history tied to both slavery and Removal.

Black Seminoles (or Seminole Maroons) spoke Gullah and the Muskogee or Mikasuki languages of the Seminole, and they sometimes served as interpreters between the Seminole and English speakers. Some scholars suggest they developed an Afro-Seminole Creole (a blend of Gullah, Spanish, English, and Muskogee). They adopted the brightly colored clothing and the moccasins of the Seminole, often lived in thatched palmetto plank houses of the Seminole architectural tradition, and danced at Green Corn ceremonies; but they also continued their own cultural traditions, such as “jumping the broom” at marriage celebrations and giving their children African-derived names (for example, names based on the day of the week on which the child was born, such as “Cudjo” for Monday and “Cuffy” for Friday) or “slave names” (such as Abraham and Caesar). Originally from Africa’s Rice Coast, Black Seminoles or their ancestors had grown rice on plantations in South Carolina and Georgia and grew rice crops in Florida in addition to raising corn (about one-third of which they paid annually to their Seminole defenders).

During the Revolutionary War the Black Seminoles allied with the Seminole and the British against the colonists, and when Florida was once again under Spanish control (1784–1821) the Spanish employed Black Seminoles to trade with Indians. When Spanish rule ended, some Black Seminoles moved to Andros Island in the Bahamas (where their descendants live today). Others, resisting the U.S. government’s repeated attempts to reenslave them, fought against Andrew Jackson during the First Seminole War (1817–18) and under their own captains with Osceola’s warriors in the Second Seminole War (1835–42).

Juan Caballo, a Black Seminole leader in the Second Seminole War, was known as a “Black Seminole chief” and a freeman of African, Spanish, and Native American ancestry. The majority of Seminoles and at least 500 Black Seminoles were removed to Oklahoma, where they became known as Freedmen. Caballo founded the Black Seminole town of Wewoka there. By 1849 Creek slave traders in Indian Territory had managed to limit the rights of free blacks and Caballo led his people to Mexico, which had abolished slavery in 1829. There, Black Seminoles were known as cowboys and lauded for their military successes against the Comanche and Apache. In 1870 Black Seminoles in Mexico were invited to settle in Texas and serve as scouts for the U.S. Cavalry. Several won the Medal of Honor (the highest military decoration awarded by the United States) and many served as Buffalo Soldiers. Today, Brackettville, Tex., is home to the Seminole Indian Scout Cemetery Association.

In 2000 the Seminole Nation in Oklahoma changed its membership criteria, and most Seminole Freedmen are no longer eligible for enrollment. However, the different descendant populations in Nacimiento in the Mexican state of Coahuila, in Texas, and in Oklahoma retain a sense of identity through oral tradition and through ongoing social and marital links between their communities. Called Mascogos in Mexico, Black Seminoles have blended Mexican, Indian, and African traditions. Those on both sides of the border claim Indian fry bread, enchiladas, hot tamales, sufkee (a cinnamon-flavored hominy dish), and tetta poon (a sweet potato desert) as Black Seminole food-ways. Historically, the populations living in the United States have been more endogamous, while groups in Coahuila have intermarried with Mexicans. For festival occasions, traditional costumes can include calico skirts and bodices for women and feathered turbans and brightly colored hunting shirts for men. One of the largest Seminole Maroon gatherings takes place each September in Brackettville, where English and Spanish speakers mix to the sounds of African spirituals and Tex-Mex music in commemoration of a hybrid cultural inheritance and shared history.

Fourteen-year-old Matthew Griffin of Groveland, Fla., dresses in traditional Black Seminole Indian clothing when giving public presentations on his ancestors (Sherry Boas, photographer, originally appeared in the Orlando Sentinel, August 2005)

CELESTE RAY
University of the South

LILLIAN AZEVEDO-GROUT
University of Southampton

Rebecca Bateman, Ethnohistory (Spring 2002); Jeff Guinn, Our Land before We Die: The Proud Story of the Seminole Negro (2002); Ian F. Hancock, The Texas Seminoles and Their Language (1980); Rosalyn Howard, Black Seminoles in the Bahamas (2002); Kevin Mulroy, Freedom on the Border: The Seminole Maroons in Florida, the Indian Territory, Coahuila, and Texas (1993); Kenneth Wiggins Porter, The Black Seminoles: History of a Freedom Seeking People (1996); Richard Price, ed., Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, 3rd ed. (1997); Scott Thybony, Smithsonian (August 1991); Bruce Twyman, The Black Seminole Legacy and North American Politics, 1693–1845 (1999).

 

Brass Ankles/Redbones

Prior to the late 1960s, when they fell into disuse, the terms “Brass Ankles” and “Redbones” were the pejorative nicknames of presumably “mixed-race” communities in South Carolina’s Lowcountry and Louisiana’s western hills and plains. The origin of the terms is not known. Generally, the people to whom the terms were applied resented the designations, usually defining themselves as “Indian,” “white,” or sometimes both.

In South Carolina, individual Brass Ankles and a few families passed as “mulatto” or “colored.” But these represented only a minority of the larger Brass Ankle population. During the mid-20th century, anthropologists and sociologists characterized or defined all of the Brass Ankle communities as “tri-racial isolates” (enclaves of multiethnic and interracial culture and descent) and also predicted the demise of such communities. Only South Carolina had populations labeled as Brass Ankles. Today, their primary communities are located near Pineville and Moncks Corner in Berkeley County, around Holly Hill in Orangeburg County, in Ridgeville and Summerville in Dorchester County, and in Jacksonboro, Walterboro, and Smoaks in Colleton County. Starting in the late 19th century, most of these communities developed separate social institutions, especially churches. The state also supported several “Indian” schools in various Brass Ankle locales. Although African ancestry is certainly a component of several Brass Ankle communities, Native American ancestry is well documented for some of the families in Berkeley County, and those living just north of Holly Hill in Orangeburg refer to themselves as “Santees” and maintain an Indian ethnic identity. Those living between Ridgeville and Walter-boro claim descent from a refugee band of Natchez, exiled from Louisiana by the French colonists, who asked for and received Settlement Indian status from South Carolina in 1747. Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, several communities organized themselves into Indian associations. Largely through the efforts of these associations to educate the public, the term “Brass Ankle” was virtually abandoned and is seldom heard in contemporary times.

Brass Ankle family at home near Summerville, S.C., January 1939 (Mary Post Wolcott, Library of Congress [LC-USF34-050605-D], Washington, D.C.)

“Redbone” is a more generic term, widely utilized historically across much of the South. Its precise meaning and application varies in time and place, but it always denotes an implication of “racial” mixture. The term has documented usage, particularly in African American speech, in Virginia, Tennessee, and South Carolina, and in Louisiana it came to designate mixed and geographically and socially isolated communities found in nearly every western parish—from Sabine Parish in the north, through Rapides Parish (near Alexandria), and down to Calcasieu Parish in the southwest.

There are perhaps more than 20,000 Louisiana Redbones. Most descend from South Carolinians who were defined as mulattos or “other free persons.” While South Carolinians use the term “Redbone,” its use there generally indicates “mixed-race” persons within the African American community. The westward migration of Brass Ankles and Redbones commenced shortly after the United States acquired Louisiana in 1803. In the new territory, they married into Creole, French, and Indian families, resulting in a unique cultural heritage—at once Anglo, African, Spanish, French, and Indian of several regional tribes. Despite their numbers and dispersal, Louisiana Redbones are largely unstudied. Documentary evidence indicates that at least some Red-bone families are primarily of Native American heritage.

The Brass Ankles and Redbones are prominent examples of the many “little races” that dotted much of the South. Some of these mixed communities have dispersed or disintegrated, their members passing categorically into white and black urban and suburban worlds. Discriminatory forces often fostered a sense of separateness, tighter community ties, and distinct identity. Where effective accommodative leadership emerged, Brass Ankles and Redbones successfully resisted categorization as “Negro” and established their own stores, churches, and schools. Their persistence reveals the variegated ethnic tapestry of the South.

C. S. EVERETT
Vanderbilt University

Virginia DeMarce, National Genealogical Society Quarterly (March 1992); Wes Taukchiray, Alice Bee Kasikoff, and Gene Crediford, in Indians of the Southeastern United States in the Late Twentieth Century, ed. J. Anthony Paredes (1992).

 

Caddos

Archaeological investigations reveal that Caddo groups were settled throughout valleys of Oklahoma, Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas by 800 A.D. A distinctive culture emerged as Caddos developed a successful horticultural economy, a highly effective political structure, a viable interregional trade network, and well-planned civic-ceremonial centers that were also the scene of elaborate mortuary rituals.

Civic-ceremonial centers employed earthen mounds as platforms for temples and for the burial of social and political elites. Objects unearthed from Caddo sites are rich in symbolism—pottery vessels with distinctive shapes and unique decorative designs, carved stone pipes, sheet copper masks, marine shell gorgets, cups, and dippers. The spiritual leader of all Caddos was the Xinesi, the keeper of an everburning fire whose prayers beseeched Caddi Ayo, “Leader Above,” to forgive Caddo misdeeds and provide for their needs.

Caddo families built large, sturdy homes constructed of vertical timbers, lashed by saplings and cane, daubed with clay, and covered with thatch. An outdoor workspace and elevated corn crib commonly stood near a dwelling. Gardens planted with beans, pumpkins, and sunflowers, fields of corn, and wooded areas separated households.

The earliest written descriptions of Caddo people appear in the chronicles of Spanish and French explorations (after the death of Hernando de Soto, Luis de Moscoso led his expedition and entered Caddo territory in 1542; the French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, arrived in Texas in the late 1600s). They describe Caddo farmsteads grouped in dispersed communities with names usually prefixed by “na,” meaning “place of” (e.g., Nadaco).

Young Caddos learning traditional Turkey Dance songs at the drum (Rhonda Fair, photographer)

The chief civil authority for each Caddo community was the caddi, an inherited position. A prestigious caddi might have preeminence over others. Communities were grouped geographically into three separate branches of the Caddo nation. The Natchitoches lived in the area of the present Louisiana city named for them; the Hasinai, meaning “Our People,” lived in east Texas; and the Kadohadacho centered on the great bend in the Red River. “Caddo” derives from the French abbreviation of Kadohadacho, and before the middle of the 19th century only the Kadohadocho were called Caddo.

The Caddo were historically and politically significant during the 18th and 19th centuries, when their homeland became disputed borderland between the Louisiana Territory and the province of Texas. Spanish missionaries, military leaders and government officials, French traders and governors, Mexican presidents, and American Indian agents recognized the powerful influence and political astuteness of prestigious Caddo caddis and vied for the favor of Tinhiouen (caddi ca. 1760 to 1789) and Dehahuit (ca. 1800 to 1833). The Caddos declared neutrality, maintained authority over neighboring tribes in the region, and boasted that no white man’s blood was spilled on their soil.

Strong and gifted leadership could not offset population loss from epidemics or control land grabs by immigrants who advanced the western frontier of the United States. Diminished by disease and plagued by Osage raids, the Caddo moved from the Red River in the 1790s and resettled between the Sabine River and Caddo Lake. The Natchitoches, greatly reduced in number and surrounded by Anglo-Americans, eventually merged with the Caddo and Hasinai. Epidemics subsequently devastated the Hasinai. Survivors in eight formerly populous communities came together in two, Anadarko [Nadaco] and Hainai.

The Caddo were coerced into ceding their Louisiana homelands to the United States in 1835. Treaty terms bound them to move outside the borders of the United States and “never more return to live, settle, or establish themselves as a nation, tribe, or community of people.” Most moved to Texas with in a year. Prevented from establishing permanent villages by Texas militia and frontier people, they were essentially homeless until a Brazos River reserve was opened for them in 1855. Four years later, anti-Indian agitators ignited hostilities that forced them to abandon the Brazos Reserve for Indian Territory (now Oklahoma).

In 2004 approximately 4,800 Kadohadacho, Hasinai, and Natchitoches descendants were enrolled members of the federally recognized Caddo Nation in Oklahoma. Their seat of government is in Caddo County, Okla. An elected chairperson and council replaced the traditional role of the caddi in 1938, but new generations continue to learn ancient Caddo culture embedded in stories, songs, dances, and ceremony.

CECILE ELKINS CARTER
Mead, Oklahoma

Cecile Elkins Carter, Caddo Indians: Where We Come From (2001); Wallace Chafe, “A Note on the Caddo Language,” in Caddo Indians: Where We Come From (2001); Vynola Beaver Neukumet and Howard L. Meredith, Hasinai: A Traditional History of the Caddo Confederacy (1988); Timothy K. Perttula, “The Caddo Nation”: Archaeological and Ethnohistoric Perspectives (1992); Clarence Webb and Hiram Gregory, The Caddo Indians of Louisiana (1978).

 

Cajuns

Louisiana became a French colony in 1682. The largest concentration of French settlement was in the southernmost part of Louisiana, where French language and culture endure into the 21st century.

South Louisiana is culturally, historically, and linguistically connected to the French-speaking world, but it is hardly homogenous. The great variety of subregional dialects of French derive from three main currents: the colonial French that developed among the descendants of the French who first began to settle Louisiana in 1699, the Creole that developed among the descendants of the African slaves brought to work on the French colonial plantations, and the Cajun French that evolved among the descendants of Acadians who began to arrive in Louisiana in 1765 after they were exiled by the British from their homeland in what is now Nova Scotia. Yet there is little pure linguistic or cultural stock today. The basic sources influenced each other in areas where the groups came into frequent contact. Many move effortlessly and even unconsciously between dialects according to the context. All three basic sources were also modernized by steady trickles of immigration—especially in the 19th century by the so-called petits Créoles, economic immigrants from France, and by refugees from the Haitian revolution—as well as by contemporary academic influences.

Cajun family eating crawfish (Greg Guirard, photographer, courtesy of the Center for Louisiana Studies)

French was the language of everyday life and government in Louisiana into the 19th century. But the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and statehood in 1812 placed serious pressure on French Louisiana to conform to the language and culture of the United States. By the time of the Civil War, there were Acadian generals, governors, bankers, and business leaders. For less upwardly mobile Acadians, the war was simply not their affair. These did not join the effort willingly, and once drafted into the service of the South, they strained to get out of it. Yeoman farmers had no one else to run their farms in their absence, so many simply deserted and walked home from nearby battlefields.

With the end of the Civil War, French Creoles understood that their future was necessarily going to be American; they immediately began to send their children to English-language schools. By the turn of the 20th century, their transition to English was virtually complete. Ordinary Cajuns did not similarly change until much later, beginning with the arrival of Anglo-American farmers from the Midwest in the 1880s and reinforced by the arrival of Anglo-American oil workers and developers from Texas, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania in the early 1900s. This process was intensified by the nationalistic fervor that preceded and accompanied World War I, the relief efforts that accompanied the great flood of 1927, and the agricultural and economic depressions of the 1920s and 1930s—all of which brought national-level relief efforts exclusively in English.

Beginning in 1916, mandatory English-language education was imposed in the southern part of the state in a well-meaning effort to haul the French-speaking Cajuns into the American mainstream. As a result, Cajun children were punished for speaking the language of their parents in school, often by teachers with the same surnames as the students. After World War II, GIS returning from service in France spurred a Cajun cultural revival that was fanned by local political leaders who used the 1955 bicentennial of the Acadian exile from Nova Scotia as a rallying point for the revitalization of ethnic pride. In 1968 the state of Louisiana officially fostered the movement with the creation of the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana, which attempted to establish French as a second language in elementary schools.

Today’s Cajuns are friendly, yet suspicious of strangers; easygoing, yet guarded with their opinions and emotions; deeply religious, yet amusingly anticlerical; proud, yet quick to laugh at their own foibles; and unfailingly loyal, yet possessed of a frontier independence. Cajuns are immediately recognizable as a people, but they defy simplistic definitions.

While the French language struggles to maintain its role in the cultural survival of south Louisiana, the sounds of rock, country, and jazz music are incorporated by young Cajun musicians today as naturally as were the blues and French contredanses of old. New cultural blends continue to emerge in connection with recent Hispanic and Southeast Asian arrivals, including crawfish-filled tamales and egg rolls.

BARRY JEAN ANCELET
University of Louisiana at Lafayette

Barry Jean Ancelet, Cajun and Creole Music Makers, revised ed. (1999), Cajun and Creole Folktales (1994); Barry Jean Ancelet, Jay Edwards, and Glen Pitre, Cajun Country (1991); Shane K. Bernard, The Cajuns: Americanization of a People (2003); Carl A. Brasseaux, Acadian to Cajun: Transformation of a People (1992), The Founding of New Acadia (1987); Glenn R. Conrad, ed., The Cajuns: Essays on Their History and Culture, revised ed. (1983); James H. Dormon, The People Called Cajuns: An Ethnohistory (1983); Marcia Gaudet and James C. McDonald, Mardi Gras, Gumbo, and Zydeco (2003); C. Paige Gutierrez, Cajun Foodways (1992).

 

Cambodians

Cambodian immigrants in the South are almost exclusively Khmer, the primary ethnic group of their Southeast Asian homeland. The Khmer empire and culture, tracing its origins back more than 2,000 years, experienced an era of greatness during the Angkor period (800 to 1400 A.D.), from which much of contemporary Khmer culture—dance, music, mythology, and Buddhism—derives. Subsequently dominated by a series of foreign powers, Cambodia gained independence in 1954 only to become embroiled in the Vietnam War. The nationalist Khmer Rouge (communist Khmer) seized power in Cambodia in 1975 after the U.S. military withdrew. During the Khmer Rouge’s four-year reign of terror, more than 2 million citizens were executed or starved to death.

Cambodian classical dancers performing Tepmamorom, a dance about harmony, Greensboro, N.C. (Cedric N. Chatterley, photographer)

In the early 1980s, 150,000 Cambodian refugees were resettled in the United States. Data from the 2000 census records a Cambodian population reaching 300,000 and indicates the growth of Cambodian communities in several southern states, including North Carolina (2,681), Georgia (2,905), Texas (6,852), Virginia (4,423), and Florida (2,447). Many Cambodian refugees have been drawn to the South for economic and climatic reasons. Although raised as farmers and fishers, many Cambodians have come to work in furniture factories and textile mills across the South.

For 20 years these new southerners have focused on building new lives, forming Buddhist temples, and reestablishing their annual calendar of ceremonies. Asian markets now nestle within small southern strip malls and stock not only the dried fish, spices, jasmine rice, and cooking utensils used in Cambodian kitchens, but also the incense, candles, and golden statues central to Buddhist religious practice. In communities across the region, language, foodways, storytelling, dance, music, and wedding traditions have also been carefully preserved and passed on to the next Cambodian American generation. Many communities have nurtured traditional Khmer dance groups; Cambodian high school students in traditional silk costumes and gold jewelry perform these classical and folk dances for their friends and teachers during annual International Day celebrations on campus, citywide multicultural festivals, and other public events.

Southern Cambodian communities have reestablished an annual calendar of Buddhist ceremonies that includes major events such as the May celebration of Visakha Puja Day, the day of the birth, enlightenment, and death of the Buddha; the summer celebration of Buddhist Lent and its series of sermons about the life of the Buddha; and the fall Kathin ceremony, in which the congregation presents new robes and personal supplies to the monks. Chol Chhnam, the Cambodian New Year’s celebration, increasingly draws hundreds, even thousands, of participants to temples across the region to recommit themselves to their Buddhist beliefs, offer significant support to the Buddhist temples (wats) they have founded, and to bolster their relationships with other Cambodian families. A national holiday held in the dry season prior to the annual rice plantings in Cambodia, the celebration also includes social games and playful water fights meant to invoke the rains and guarantee good harvests.

While their communities prosper, the current struggle for both first- and second-generation Cambodian Americans living across the South is to craft a new identity that honors both their memories of their ancestral land and their experiences in their new home.

BARBARA LAU
Duke University

May M. Ebihara, Carol A. Mortland, and Judy Ledgerwood, eds., Cambodian Culture since 1975: Homeland and Exile (1994); David W. Haines, ed., Refugees as Immigrants: Cambodians, Laotians, and Vietnamese in America (1989); Barbara Lau, “The Temple Provides the Way: Cambodian Identity and Festival in Greensboro, North Carolina” (M.A. thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2000).

 

Canary Islanders (Isleños)

Canary Islanders—long known as “Isleños,” or “Islanders”—came from a cluster of 13 Spanish islands off the African coast and entered the colony of Louisiana (then under Spanish rule) between the years 1778 and 1783. They arrived as recruits for the Louisiana Infantry Regiment and to bolster the Spanish presence in the colony. However, Governor Bernardo de Gálvez instead employed the married recruits and their often large families as settlers. Consequently, nearly 2,000 Isleños established themselves in lower Louisiana in St. Bernard Parish virtually adjacent to New Orleans, at Barataria across the Mississippi River from the city, upriver at Galveztown at the junction of the Amite River and Bayou Manchac, and on Bayou Lafourche. Mostly poor and illiterate farmers, they struggled long and hard against adversities such as floods, hurricanes, disease, and poorly allocated settlement sites. By the close of the colonial period, only their St. Bernard and Lafourche settlements survived.

After the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, the Isleños, who became the first Hispanic community incorporated into the United States, mostly disappeared. Through the 19th century, they lived in small and isolated enclaves composed principally of Spaniards who preserved their culture and speech, but they were surrounded by larger populations of Acadians, Anglo-Americans, African Americans, and other ethnicities, who rarely acknowledged their culture. Few Isleños improved their economic status and acquired lands and slaves in the antebellum era, and the Civil War destroyed the holdings of most of those who had. In the “Bourbon Age” that followed Reconstruction in Louisiana—when vested interests such as railroad, mining, lumber, cotton, and sugar companies and corrupt planters and politicians in the notorious New Orleans ring dominated political life—a few more Isleños gradually assimilated into Louisiana’s cultural mainstream, acquired an education, and left behind their traditional occupations as farmers, fishers, and hunters.

In the 20th century, modernization brought further change and broke down the isolated enclaves that had retained distinct traditions and the Canarian dialect. Improved means of transportation and communication—railroads, automobiles, paved roads, newspapers, radio, movies, and television—facilitated Isleño assimilation. Twentieth-century wars, especially World War II, spurred mobility and heightened awareness of life beyond the Islanders’ secluded communities. Use of Spanish declined as schools insisted that Isleño children speak only English, and dissatisfied youth often abandoned their “bumpkin” niches to meld into Louisiana’s cultural milieu. Moreover, the Isleños had never practiced endogamy, and with growing assimilation greater numbers married outside their community. Today, few Canary Islanders claim Isleño descent on both sides of their families. The Spanish monoglots typical of the 19th century have disappeared, and their 20th-century bilingual and bicultural descendants who grew up in households where the Isleño language and culture predominated are now elderly and few in number.

Nevertheless, since the 1970s in St. Bernard Parish, where ethnic identity has retained its most enthusiastic followers, members of Los Isleños Heritage and Cultural Society have sought to preserve their cultural past and reacquaint their children with the Spanish language. Leaders in the community established the Isleño Museum and Village, with artifacts and vernacular architecture that recall St. Bernard’s history (another museum has recently opened in Donaldsonville on Bayou Lafourche). In 1996 the Canary Islanders Heritage Society of Louisiana was founded in Baton Rouge. Each spring a festival in St. Bernard focuses attention on Canary Islander heritage, with traditional costumes, typical Isleño foods (based on rice and seafood locally obtained and with a distinctive Louisiana flavor), and the Spanish décima tradition of folk poetry, which relates stories about Isleño life. A few hardy Isleños retain vestiges of the folk medicine, prayers, and related customs brought from the Canary Islands and practiced before the quality of medicine improved and spread to their isolated communities. While Isleños (who are predominantly Catholic) observe Christmas, Easter, and Lent, All Souls’ Day, when tombstones are whitewashed and graves tended, is particularly well celebrated. Finally, in recognition of their singular experience, Louisiana’s Isleños have recently been recognized by the U.S. government as a distinct Hispanic group.

GILBERT C. DIN
Fort Lewis College

Gilbert C. Din, The Canary Islanders of Louisiana (1988); Los Isleños Heritage and Cultural Society, Los Isleños: A Louisiana Local Legacy (2000); Raymond R. Mac-Curdy, The Spanish Dialect of St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana (1950); Dorothy L. (Molero) Benge and Laura M. (Gonzales) Sullivan, Los Isleños Cookbook: Recipes from Spanish Louisiana (2000); Cecile Jones Robin, Remedies and Lost Secrets of St. Bernard’s Isleños (2000).

 

Catawbas

Members of the Catawba Nation of American Indians numbered 2,423 in the 2000 U.S. Census. While Catawbas live in communities across the country, 500 continue to make their homes on the Catawba Indian Reservation, a 630-acre tract located eight miles east of the city of Rock Hill, S.C., along the banks of the Catawba River. The Catawba reservation sits within the tribe’s ancestral land. It serves not only as the center of tribal political and business affairs, but also as the focal point for preservation of Catawba culture.

When the ancestors of today’s Catawba Indians signed the Treaty of Augusta in 1763, they could not have foreseen the succession of frustrating legal battles that would influence virtually all of their affairs and much of their history. For 230 years, the Catawba filed land claims against the state of South Carolina; eventually, the claims were resolved in the courts and through federal legislation.

Although linguistically related to Siouan peoples, the Catawba of the pre-European contact period shared many of the cultural characteristics of the ancestors of today’s Cherokee tribe. Scholars attribute their blended culture to the tribe’s geographic location in a transitional zone between “hill tribes” (like the Cherokee) and “southern chiefdoms” (like the Waxhaw). Early Catawba cultural characteristics included sociopolitical organization into small tribal groups located in villages situated near rivers; hunting patterns based on seasonal cycles; cultivation of corn, beans, squash, and gourds; pottery making; and spiritual practices associated with the building of burial mounds. The Catawba forged relationships with some neighboring tribes but fought against the Cherokee, who allied with British colonial governments. (The Catawba allied themselves with the Patriots in the American Revolution.)

The Catawba story is one of survival. After contact with Europeans, which began as early as the 1560s and intensified in the early 1700s, members of the tribe sought to maintain their way of life while recognizing that encroaching Europeans had to be accommodated. In the mid-1700s, notable Catawba leader King Hagler skillfully forged alliances with prominent South Carolina citizens and politicians from whom he secured various, albeit insufficient, forms of support. A tragic result of contact with non-Indians was a devastating smallpox epidemic among the Catawba in 1759, which reduced the tribe’s population by 60 percent to a total of 400 members living in a single village. In 1763 the Catawba and South Carolina signed the aforementioned Treaty of Augusta, setting aside the tribe’s 15-square-mile reservation.

In 1840 the state of South Carolina and the Catawba Nation signed yet another treaty, this time at Nation’s Ford, in which the tribe relinquished lands in exchange for promised financial support and a new reservation. The state never made good on these promises and, significantly, the agreement was signed in violation of the Non-intercourse Act of 1790, a law requiring the consent of the U.S. Congress in land transactions involving American Indians.

During the mid-1800s, a time when the federal government forcibly moved eastern tribes westward to Oklahoma Indian Territory, the Catawbas adamantly remained in South Carolina. As early as the 1880s the tribe sought legal redress for the loss of their land in 1840. The late 1800s also saw the arrival of Mormon missionaries in Catawba country, leading to the conversion of many tribal members (most modern-day Catawbas remain Mormon).

On 14 June 1993 Gilbert Blue, the elected chief of the Catawba Nation, and South Carolina governor Carroll Campbell signed an agreement that led to the passage of the federal Catawba Land Claims Settlement Act (signed by President Bill Clinton on 27 October 1993). The terms of the act included restoration of the Catawba Nation’s federal recognition (terminated in 1959) as well as payment of $50 million to the tribe. The act stipulated that the funds be used for land acquisition, economic and social development, education, and per capita payments to tribal members. The settlement has led to cultural preservation initiatives focused on Catawba language, storytelling, and pottery making. Catawbas sponsor reservation-based educational programs for Indians and non-Indians as well as a website that details cultural preservation initiatives. Continued sponsorship of the annual Yap Ye Iswa (Day of the Catawba) festival, as well as some members’ participation in pan-Indian powwows, are additional means Catawbas take to assure their survival as American Indian people and the preservation of their culture for future generations.

JIM CHARLES
University of South Carolina at Spartanburg

Douglas Summers Brown, The Catawba Indians: The People of the River (1966); Charles M. Hudson, The Catawba Indians (1970); James H. Merrell, The Catawbas (1989), Indians’ New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (1989).

 

Cherokees, Eastern Band

As a consequence of their ancestors’ 19th-century Removal by the U.S. government, the majority of contemporary Cherokees are part of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. However, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians—a federally recognized tribe of about 12,500 members—occupies a reservation of some 57,000 acres in traditional homelands in the mountains of western North Carolina. Its origins date to treaties of 1817 and 1819 that permitted certain members of the Cherokee Nation to separate and reside on private reservations outside the tribal domain. About 50 individuals and their families did so and claimed to be U.S. citizens, though their precise legal status was uncertain. They maintained a traditional Cherokee cultural outlook and continued their association with relatives and friends on the nearby tribal reservation. The 1835 Treaty of New Echota obligated the Cherokee Nation to cede its lands and migrate to present-day Oklahoma, but William Holland Thomas, an Anglo merchant and adopted Cherokee, staunchly defended the right of those holding private reservations to remain, and he helped them acquire additional lands. Neither the United States nor the state of North Carolina attempted to evict these Indians. A few members of the Cherokee Nation hid out in the mountains or otherwise avoided Removal, and they soon joined the Cherokee who legally remained in North Carolina. By 1839 about 1,100 Cherokees lived in the state, with perhaps 300 more in Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama.

Between 1839 and the outbreak of the Civil War, North Carolina Cherokees lived quietly on marginal mountain lands and endured periodic attempts to enroll them for Removal to the West. Had their lands been more attractive to whites, they probably would have been forced to leave. Their way of life blended Cherokee culture with that of their poor white neighbors. They lived as nuclear families in log cabins and raised corn on tiny individual farms, mixed Christianity with Cherokee beliefs and practices, sought consensus in periodic councils, and fiercely competed in the Indian game of stickball. Few of these Cherokees spoke English, and most relied on Thomas to protect their interests. With the coming of the war, Thomas incorporated Cherokee and European American mountaineers into his own Confederate military force, the Thomas Legion. A much smaller number of Cherokee served on the Union side.

Cherokee woman making pottery in North Carolina (Hugh Morton, photographer)

At the war’s end, the Indians were impoverished, starving, disease-ridden, and divided into factions. Thomas was suffering the onset of mental illness and could no longer provide effective leadership nor protect Cherokee lands. To remedy the situation, the United States in 1868 recognized the Indians as the Eastern Band of Cherokee and placed the tribe under the supervision of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. By 1880 the federal government had established a tribal reservation consisting of a number of scattered units in southwestern North Carolina and was also providing educational opportunities for Cherokee children. In 1889 the Eastern Band incorporated under North Carolina law, and with later amendments this charter provided a political and economic framework under which the Indians continue to operate.

From the 1890s through the 1920s, the Eastern Band’s economy centered on commercial exploitation of tribal forests by outside corporations. By 1930, however, the new Great Smoky Mountains National Park, adjoining the Qualla Boundary (the official name of the reservation), promised to make tourism the economic mainstay. Park visitors, it was believed, would also want to see “real” Indians. The Great Depression and World War II delayed development, but since 1945 a growing Indian-based tourist infrastructure, especially in the town of Cherokee, has accommodated millions of reservation visitors. In 1982 the Eastern Band opened a high-stakes bingo hall that attracted visitors from all over the eastern United States, and in 1995, under the terms of the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, it set up a small casino. Two years later a much larger casino opened under outside management; by 2003 it featured a 15-story hotel, had about 900 employees, and brought the Eastern Band $139 million a year—enough to support major tribal improvements and annual payments of about $6,000 to every enrolled member. Gaming income and a tribal sales tax also support the preservation and enhancement of tribal culture, partly through the Cherokee Preservation Foundation. This economic growth and the increasing per capita payments have exacerbated old disputes over who deserves to be included on the tribal roll.

Since 1975 federal Indian policy has encouraged self-determination for all tribes, and by the early 21st century the Eastern Band was originating and supervising most of its own programs while the Bureau of Indian Affairs operated in an advisory capacity.

JOHN FINGER
University of Tennessee

John R. Finger, Cherokee Americans: The Eastern Band of Cherokees in the Twentieth Century (1991), The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, 1819–1900 (1984); Sharlotte Neely, Snowbird Cherokees: People of Persistence (1991).

 

Cherokees, Prior to Removal

According to both native and nonnative accounts, Cherokee history has been characterized by the interplay of centripetal forces (such as pressure from encroaching Indian and European American groups) and centrifugal ones (such as the diaspora-spawning Removal of 1838–39). Among the most important themes characterizing Cherokee life before 1838 were the importance of individual and town-level autonomy, complementarity based on gender and generation, and social organization based on exogamous matrilineal clans. But in the generations prior to the forced Removal to Indian Territory, the Cherokee political structure gradually became more centralized and hierarchical, gender complementarity shifted to give some priority to the power and resources controlled by men, and matrilineal descent was challenged by European American models of kinship and property transmission. A society that had been internally balanced and reinforced by its traditional subdivisions grew divided by new ones based on descent, religion, traditionalism, and attitudes toward Removal.

Elohi, a Cherokee migration account, tells of Cherokees migrating to their historic location from a flood-plagued land and fighting off sequential waves of invading enemies, of whom Europeans are merely the latest manifestation. By 1835 a series of land cessions would leave the Cherokees centered in northwestern Georgia and with only a fraction of their lands, which had once extended from northern Alabama and South Carolina to the Ohio River and from the Tennessee River on the west to the Catawba River on the east.

Archaeological evidence suggests that Appalachian Summit communities showing cultural continuity with the historic Cherokee may date back to 1000 A.D. One source estimates the precontact Cherokee population at 28,000 to 30,000. Speaking an Iroquoian language (thought to have split from related languages at least 3,500 years ago), the Cherokee were linguistically isolated in a region where Muskogean languages predominated. European accounts of the historic Cherokee begin through 16th-century encounters with Spanish explorers in the southern Appalachians. Towns of this period and region, which were perhaps associated with Cherokees, featured communal structures built on mounds and had populations subsisting on a combination of maize horticulture and hunting.

In the late 17th century, Cherokees began establishing trade relations with the British, and the deerskin trade came to dominate Cherokee economic life. The objective of men’s hunting shifted from subsistence to individual wealth accumulation (or the payment of debts). New dependencies developed on commodities such as metal tools, firearms, cloth, and alcohol. Some scholars argue that their mountain location made the Cherokee better able to withstand some of the devastating consequences of early European contact, particularly the epidemics and slave trade that decimated other southeastern tribes. They remained relatively strong and well organized compared to neighboring groups. Some also argue that early 18th-century Cherokee communities were ethnically and linguistically diverse, reflecting the coalescence of various local remnant populations. In 1800 the Cherokee had an estimated population of 16,000.

Ethnohistory and archaeology provide a more complete picture of Cherokee cultural life during the 18th century. Cherokees lived in five regional groupings of autonomous towns clustered along river valleys in northern Georgia, South Carolina, southwestern North Carolina, and western Tennessee. These town clusters, consisting of 10 to 12 villages with populations of 100 to 600 people each, corresponded to dialects in the Cherokee language and represented different ecological adaptations. Towns were organized around a council house, a more open summer townhouse, and a plaza or square ground. Individual households contained extended matrilineal kin and consisted of a summer house and a winter or hot house for medicinal and other uses.

The social, economic, and ceremonial life of towns was organized by a system of seven exogamous, matrilineal clans, whose names are represented as follows by contemporary Eastern Band Cherokees: Aniwahya (Wolf); Anikawi (Deer); Anitsiskwa (Bird); Aniwodi (Paint); Anisahoni (Blue); Anigatagewi (Wild Potato); and Anigilohi (Long Hair). Clans regulated marriage, provided hospitality to traveling clan members, exacted retribution for the killing of their members, and had specific ceremonial obligations. Women held considerable power as clan leaders. Towns were also divided into two complementary men’s organizations: the white or peace organization, dominated by the older men, and the red or war organization, controlled by the younger men. The red organization led military, trading, and hunting expeditions; the white organization dominated town politics unless the town was under attack.

Women controlled the local horticultural economy, based on corn, beans, squash, and other crops. They also gathered vegetable foods, especially wild greens, and medicinal herbs. Though women were responsible for cultivation, men assisted with clearing the fields and with the harvest. Men hunted game, most commonly deer.

Spiritual and medicinal activity focused on taboo observation and the respectful treatment of spiritual beings. Medicine men treated patients with a combination of formulaic prayer designed to summon curative spirits and remove malevolent ones, give herbal treatments, and provide other actions such as immersion in water or scratching. The focus of the ceremonial year was the Green Corn ceremony. Some accounts suggest that spiritual leadership was hereditary at one time through the existence of a priestly clan, since destroyed or expelled. In historic times, however, spiritual and medicinal power seems to have been linked to individuals.

The Cherokee fought unsuccessfully against the colonists during the American Revolution, and the new American government engaged in widespread retaliatory raids on Cherokee towns. As they were emerging from the disastrous consequences of that war, the Cherokee encountered a new challenge at the turn of the 19th century—the “civilization” program. A combination of federal entities, missionaries, and some members of their own communities sought to introduce new cultural elements, such as European American agricultural modes of production (including the use of African slave labor), Christianity, formal education, and centralized government. These new practices and institutions were not adopted equally or at all by every member of Cherokee society and produced some lasting divisions, sometimes pitting those of mixed European American and Cherokee ancestry (“mixed bloods”) against those of Cherokee descent only (“full bloods”). This new, nonmatrilineal way of thinking about kinship and descent further undermined traditional culture. Some argue, though, that the Cherokee were highly adaptable in their response to these pressures, and that they therefore enjoyed a kind of renaissance in this period. One of their most triumphant achievements—the invention of an indigenous writing system for the Cherokee language (the Cherokee syllabary) by the monolingual traditionalist Sequoyah—occurred in the 1820s.

MARGARET BENDER
Wake Forest University

Fred O. Gearing, Priests and Warriors: Social Structures for Cherokee Politics in the 18th Century (1962); William G. McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic (1986); Howard Meredith and Virginia Sobral, eds., Cherokee Vision of Elohi (1997); James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees (1982); Theda Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700–1835 (1998); Christopher B. Rodning, in Between Contacts and Colonies: Archaeological Perspectives on the Protohistoric Southeast, ed. Cameron B. Wesson and Mark A. Reese (2002); Gerald F. Schroedl, in Indians of the Greater Southeast, ed. Bonnie G. McEwan (2000), in Archaeology of the Appalachian Highlands, ed. Lynne P. Sullivan and Susan C. Prezzano (2001); Circe Sturm, Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma (2002); Russell Thornton, The Cherokees: A Population History (1900).

 

Chickasaws

The Chickasaw in late pre-Columbian times numbered an estimated 4,000 and claimed a territory astride western Kentucky, Tennessee, northern Alabama, and Mississippi. Most Chickasaw lifeways resembled those of their neighbors—Choctaw, Creek, Cherokee, and Natchez. The Chickasaw are related to the Choctaw; the tribes’ Muskogean language, except for mild dialectal differences, is the same. Early European observers described these Indians as “tall, well-built people, with reddish skin, raven black hair, and large, dark eyes.” They had a strong warrior tradition, and their incessant wars with neighboring tribes led them to replace losses in combat by adoption of captives and absorption of tribal remnants. Chickasaw men were hunters and warriors first and farmers only on occasion. Chickasaw women and Indian slaves cleared land, cared for crops, and gathered firewood.

During the 18th century, the Spanish, French, and British vied for Chickasaw support in their drive for control of the Lower Mississippi Valley. British traders from Charleston eventually succeeded in building an alliance with the Chickasaw. Between 1720 and 1752, French armies from New Orleans invaded Chickasaw territory to force the tribe to abandon its allegiance to the British, but each invasion ended in French defeat. Chickasaws served with British armies in the Lower Mississippi Valley during the Seven Years’ War (1756–63). Chickasaws also supported the British during the American Revolution, fighting in Tory armies in the west against American insurgents.

Soon after 1800 the Chickasaw came under the influence of missionaries and white neighbors settling on the margins of their territory. Indian youth attended mission schools, became literate, and eventually ascended to positions of tribal leadership. Several became slaveholders and developed productive plantations on tribal lands.

Through successive treaties with federal officials, Chickasaw leaders ceded tribal territory in western Tennessee and Kentucky, so that by 1830 all that remained of their once vast domain was a residual area in northern Mississippi and a fragment in northern Alabama. By the Treaty of Pontotoc in 1832, and an amendatory treaty in 1834, the Chickasaws agreed to sell their eastern lands and remove to Indian Territory. In 1837 Chickasaw and Choctaw leaders signed the Treaty of Doaksville, whereby the Chickasaw accepted a home in the Choctaw Nation. In 1855 a treaty with the Choctaw permitted the Chickasaw to establish a separate union in south-central Indian Territory. They adopted a constitution that provided for an elective council, a chief executive (governor) of the Chickasaw Nation, a judiciary, and a public school system. In the antebellum period the Chickasaws sustained themselves by farming, raising livestock, and frontier trade.

During 1861 the Chickasaw Nation joined the Confederate States of America, and Chickasaw companies fought in several campaigns against Union troops in the Indian Territory. The Chickasaw were required to follow the provisions of Reconstruction, which included freeing their slaves and altering their constitution to provide equal civil and social status for freedpeople.

Pressed by the federal Dawes Commission during the late 19th century to adopt allotment in severalty (meaning the parceling of land separately and to individuals rather than communally), Chickasaw and Choctaw leaders finally submitted by signing the Atoka Agreement in 1897. The following year the Curtis Act set forth the process for dissolving the Chickasaw Nation, and in 1907 the Chickasaw were absorbed into the new state of Oklahoma.

ARRELL MORGAN GIBSON
University of Oklahoma

James R. Atkinson, Splendid Land, Splendid People: The Chickasaw Indians to Removal (2003); Robbie Ethridge and Charles Hudson, eds., The Transformation of the Southeastern Indians, 1540–1760 (2001); Arrell Morgan Gibson, The Chickasaws (1971); John I. Griffen, ed., The Chickasaw People (1974); Daniel F. Littlefield, The Chickasaw Freedmen: A People without a Country (1980); Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, The Columbia Guide to American Indians of the Southeast (2001).

 

Chickasaws in the 20th Century

The motto most associated with the Chickasaw is “Unconquered and Unconquerable,” a legacy imparted to them as the only tribe in the Southeast never to have lost a battle. Their national seal depicts a warrior holding onto the long bow that made them such fierce adversaries. One of the last holdouts among southeastern tribes, the Chickasaw reluctantly signed the Treaty of Doaksville in 1837, which secured them new land in Indian Territory (Oklahoma). By the close of the 19th century, the federal Dawes Commission had decided to assimilate American Indians by dispersing their lands through mandated allotments, allowing all residual acreage to be acquired by increasingly abundant European Americans. Despite this legacy of Removal and assimilation, the Chickasaw remain a vibrant, sovereign nation.

Through many years of legal negotiations and economic endeavors, the Chickasaw Nation has resiliently organized as a political unit. Governor Bill Anoatubby has held the highest Chickasaw Nation political office since the early 1990s, providing a consistency and stability rare for most Indian populations. Occupying almost 8,000 square miles in all or part of 12 counties in south-central Oklahoma, they continue to purchase available lands nearby. Current tribal enrollment stands at about 39,000, with more than half the members living on tribal territory. Blood quantum requirements for enrollment are much like their tribal neighbors who require that an enrolled ancestor on the Dawes Commission rolls be documented.

The Chickasaw belong to the Muskogean linguistic family. Their oral and written language is similar to that of the Choctaw Nation, although some dialect differences emerge in Chickasaw speech. During the 17th and 18th centuries, the Chickasaw language served as the principal language of commercial and tribal communication for all the tribes along the lower Mississippi River. The word “Chickasaw” is the anglicized version of the tribe’s name for itself, Chikasha, which roughly translates to “he who walked ahead.” Today, elders assist in the teaching and learning of the language. A Chickasaw “talking” dictionary is available on CD-Rom to encourage younger speakers. According to a recent estimate, only about 300 speakers remain, not all of whom are fluent.

Unfortunately, historians and anthropologists have recorded relatively little about the Chickasaw compared to other Oklahoma and southeastern tribes. A traditionally matrilineal, agricultural society, much of Chickasaw culture was lost or went underground as they were forced into federally sponsored “Indian programs” and mission boarding schools.

A tribute to their heritage is the revitalization of stomp dances, all-night ceremonial dances that the Chickasaw believe their ancestors performed at the beginning of time. What locals call the Kullihoma Reservation, a small community east of Ada, Okla. (the governmental seat of the Chickasaw Nation), is the preferred site for stomp dances and is also home to reconstructions of traditional Chickasaw homes. Visitors can tour a rectangular summer house, circular winter house, and stilted corn cribs. Gatherings and special events continue to take place at Kullihoma.

Today, considered a highly “progressive” tribe, the Chickasaw have developed state-of-the-art services to meet most needs of a growing nation. In the area of health care, the Chickasaw began what would be a major movement among Indian nations, by successfully “compacting” or taking control of their own health services in 1994. Comprehensive health care is now available through four facilities located throughout Chickasaw country.

Tribal administrators also have developed a wide variety of youth and family services, programs for the elderly and disabled, cultural programs, innovative mapping services for planning, development, and maintenance, and a highly advanced technical department that constructs multimedia websites about the Chickasaw Nation’s history and heritage.

LISA J. LEFLER
Western Carolina University

SAMANTHA HURST
University of California, San Diego

Duane Champagne, Social Order and Political Change: Constitutional Governments among the Cherokee, the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, and the Creek (1992); H. B. Cushman, History of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Natchez Indians, ed. Angie Debo (1999); Anne K. Hoyt, Bibliography of the Chickasaw (1987); Arrell M. Gibson, The Chickasaw (1971); John R. Swanton, The Indians of the Southeastern United States (1988); Muriel H. Wright, A Guide to the Indian Tribes of Oklahoma (1986).

 

Chinese

Chinese first came to the South to work in cotton and sugarcane fields and in construction of Texas railroads. Young men from the artisan and peasant classes also traveled as sojourners to Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. These first arrivals were especially from the Sze Yap (or Four Counties) district of the Guangdong Province in southern China. In 1867 the first Chinese workers, called the derogatory name “coolies,” arrived in Natchitoches, La., at the encouragement of local cotton and sugar planters. These first Louisiana arrivals were Spanish speakers, as they came not from the western United States or directly from China but from Havana and Matanzas, Cuba, where they had been fulfilling contract agricultural labor. Much like other Chinese who came to the United States in the 1800s, the Chinese in the South sent most of their money home to their families and originally planned to retire to their homeland. Their prosperity encouraged the immigration of family members and friends.

During Reconstruction, planters and business owners began recruiting Asians as a new source of labor to replace freed slaves. Most found employment in agricultural work, although some took railroad construction jobs. They soon realized their new role in the plantation system would not foster the wealth with which they had hoped to return to China, and many left farm-work in the late 19th century to work in laundries and restaurants in urban areas. In the rural Mississippi Delta, many Chinese opened small grocery and agricultural supply stores. There they found their economic niche by supplying African Americans, who were often turned away or refused credit by white grocers, with new cash purchasing power. Chinese men replaced slave labor at the sugar plantations in Jefferson Parish, La., where they often intermarried with African Americans or American Indians. Fewer than 1,000 Chinese had come to the South before the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

Once the Exclusion Act was repealed by the 1943 Magnuson Act, the Chinese communities in Mississippi attracted new arrivals and communities also began forming in Houston and San Antonio. By 1900 El Paso had a small Chinatown. In Texas, cultural distinctions separated the “Old” and “New” Chinese immigrants and continue to do so. The Cantonese-speaking, 19th-century immigrants were mostly from southern China, while 20th-century arrivals were from various other locations in China and predominantly spoke Mandarin. The older immigrants came mostly from peasant backgrounds, were upwardly mobile, and often succeeded in business. The newer immigrants were of China’s elite and focused on the professions. Descendants of the older immigrants long maintained a focus on clan or family association (defined by surname). Today, Chinese New Year may still be celebrated, and a Confucian emphasis on family obligations remains strong. Many Chinese in the South are now Baptists.

Considered “colored,” Chinese children attended African American schools. The Chinese established a few private schools in Texas and Mississippi with the assistance of Baptist missions, whose members sought to convert Chinese immigrants and provide a vehicle for acculturation. Not until the 1950s and 1960s, when approximately 10,000 Chinese called the South home, did Chinese children begin attending white public schools.

Many southerners came to see the Chinese as having a social identity “between black and white” in a biracial hierarchy. Chinese grocery stores were almost always established in mixed African American and Chinese neighborhoods. Neighborhood residents, both black and Chinese, were the regular clientele for these “mom and pop” establishments, although whites also patronized them on occasion.

The lack of a Chinatown such as those in more urban areas has not prevented the Delta Chinese from forming a distinct community. Although there has been some competition between family-owned businesses, extended families form support networks. Store labor is shared, with both young and old taking their turns stocking shelves and bagging groceries. Meals are in a traditional family style, usually with Chinese dishes, but those sitting at the table rotate in shifts while the store is open.

Regular mahjong nights (a gambling game for four players) often characterize evenings with families and neighbors, and tournaments even take place at Chinese Baptist church halls. Birthday and wedding celebrations have a distinctly Chinese style, with traditional decorations (such as wall hangings of calligraphic characters), speeches given in Cantonese, and Chinese food. Holidays such as Chinese New Year and the New Moon Festival are recognized, typically with smaller, extended family gatherings. Cantonese, the dialect of the Guangdong Province and most of the Delta Chinese, is passed on to children in varying degrees in the home.

The number of Chinese families in the Mississippi Delta continuing to live a “grocery store” lifestyle is shrinking, as many of the younger generation are moving away for other opportunities and going into the professions. Delta retirees are frequently replaced not by their children, but rather by Chinese families looking to immigrate into the area. New immigrants are increasingly coming from large urban areas within the United States to escape the higher cost of living in cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. This is true across the South, as small towns from Arkansas to southern Appalachia are now home to Chinese restaurants and fast-food takeouts. Additionally, Chinese herbal shops and Chinese medical practitioners are becoming easier to locate even in the rural South. Chi gong (Qigong) and Tai chi groups—practicing breathing and moving exercises related to the martial arts but focused on health and the mind/body/soul relationship—are now more common in urban areas and on southern university campuses. China’s historical relations with the South are also beginning to receive more attention from scholars. For example, the first Chinese women to be educated in the United States were May-ling Soong and her sisters, who studied at Wesleyan College in Macon, Ga. May-ling was later to become Madame Chiang Kai-shek, one of China’s most significant political and military leaders in the first half of the 20th century.

Chinese grocery, Vicksburg, Miss., 1975 (William R. Ferris Collection, Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

MELINDA CHOW
University of Memphis

Lucy Cohen, Chinese in the Post–Civil War South: A People without a History (1984); James W. Loewen, The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White (1988); Robert Seto Quan, Lotus among the Magnolias: The Mississippi Chinese (1982); Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (1998).

 

Chitimachas

The Chitimacha tribe of Louisiana maintains a reservation adjacent to the town of Charenton in St. Mary Parish in south Louisiana. According to their oral history, the Chitimacha “have always been here.” They are the only tribe in Louisiana to occupy a portion of their aboriginal homeland. Today, the Chitimacha tribe operates its own school (constructed in 1978 to replace the small and outdated schoolhouse then in use), provides social and emergency services to tribal members in the Charenton vicinity, and operates the Cypress Bayou Casino. Current tribal membership is just under 1,075 individuals.

Current Chitimacha culture is an amalgam of Chitimacha and Cajun influences. Generally, the Chitimacha are Christians, predominantly Catholics and Baptists. Historically, the Chitimacha once participated in stomp dances at dance grounds along lake-shores of south Louisiana to mark social and religious occasions, but these dances are no longer held. The Chitimacha language is all but lost, with the last fluent speaker, Benjamin Paul, having died in 1934. Fortunately, ethnographers such as Morris Swadesh and John Swanton recorded enough of the language in writing and on wax cylinders for there to be a renewal. Since 1996 the Chitimacha language has been taught to the youth at the Chitimacha Tribal School and at Yamahana, the early-learning center on the reservation.

Documentary evidence and information from tribal interviewees has increased knowledge of the Chitimacha tribe prior to European contact. The Chitimacha’s hereditary class system did not allow for upward movement and required commoners to employ different forms of address for the elite. Swanton’s early 20th-century research revealed that totemic clans based on matrilineal descent also existed, but the Chitimacha recalled only the wolf, bear, dog, and lion clan by that time.

The Chitimacha subsisted on maize, potatoes, and wild game, especially deer, alligator, and aquatic species. As hunters they employed bone, stone, or garfish scale–pointed arrows, or they used blow guns and wooden darts and nets for fishing. Prolific ceramic producers until about two centuries ago, the Chitimacha continue to make baskets that imitate ceramic design. The Chitimacha are especially proud of their double-woven baskets. According to tribal tradition, a deity taught the Chitimacha basketry techniques that included 51 different design elements, which are now combined to create hundreds of different basket designs in various shapes and sizes.

At the time of European contact, the Chitimacha were one of the most powerful tribes between Florida and Texas. Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d’Iberville, an early French explorer, encountered the Chitimacha and one of their subtribes, the Washa, along the Mississippi River in 1699. In 1706, as a response to slave raids and French aggression, a group of Chitimacha killed Jean Francois St. Cosme and several members of his party, who were missionaries to the Natchez. Another French explorer, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, bribed other tribes to make war on the Chitimacha until 1718, when a Chitimacha chief met Bienville in the fledgling city of New Orleans. Many Chitimacha were enslaved during the 12 years of conflict. Villages located along Bayou Lafouche, then called the River of the Chitimacha, and those farther to the east were pushed to the south and to the west. Many Chitimacha retreated across the Atchafalaya Basin to villages of their nation located along Grand Lake and the Bayou Teche, where the tribe remains today.

When peace came the French, and later the Spanish and American governments, officially recognized the integrity of the Chitimacha tribe and its land ownership rights. After the Jefferson administration purchased the Louisiana Territory, the Chitimacha lands received protection through the Indian Nonintercourse Act. In 1826 the Chitimacha claimed 20 arpents front and 40 deep on either side of the Bayou Teche, totaling approximately 5,440 acres. However, the U.S. government injudiciously processed land claims from the preceding French and Spanish governments to distribute “unclaimed” lands to new settlers.

Forced to sue the federal government to confirm title to their lands in 1846, the Chitimacha retained only 1,093 acres, about one-fifth of what they possessed 20 years earlier. This land base withered further through sales by Eugenia Soulier Rouge, “chieftess,” and because of judgments against the tribe for state taxes. Sara McIlhenny, a friend of the tribe and collector of their baskets, intervened to protect 261.54 acres of tribal lands, which were put in trust for the tribe in 1919. In recent years, the tribe purchased 693 acres in the vicinity of tribal trust lands and now owns a total of 955 acres, approximately 443 of which are trust lands.

In 1916 the Chitimacha tribe was federally recognized by the U.S. government. Having had a traditional government with a chief, the General Council of the Chitimacha People voted to adopt a constitutional form of government on 7 November 1970. The constitution gives membership criteria, provides for residence on trust lands, and, most importantly, regulates governance of tribal affairs through a five-member tribal council. The chief executive of the Chitimacha tribe is the tribal chairperson.

JASON EMERY
Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana

Dayna Bowker Lee, The Chitimacha Land Base from the Colonial Period to the Present (1991); Herbert Hoover, The Chitimacha People (1975); John R. Swanton, Indian Tribes of the Lower Mississippi Valley and Adjacent Coast of the Gulf of Mexico (1911); Gertrude C. Taylor, Attakapas Gazette (1981).

 

Choctaws

Approximately 8,900 enrolled members of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians live in eight recognized communities across east-central Mississippi and in smaller communities in southern Tennessee and southern Mississippi. Oral traditions provide two explanations for the Choctaw presence in the South. According to the migration legend, the Choctaw once lived west of the Mississippi River until scarce game and divine guidance led them to their present home in Mississippi. In the emergence legend, the Choctaw were created along with the other major tribes of the Southeast—the Chickasaw, Creek, Cherokee, and Seminole—from an earthen mound. The Choctaw, the last to be created, were chosen to stay at this point of creation. In both stories, the sacred Nanih Waiya mound figures centrally as the exact location of the Choctaw homeland.

Choctaw children in traditional dress (Photograph courtesy of Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians)

Written records first identify the Choctaw by name at the end of the 17th century, although Chief Tuscaloosa, who thwarted Hernando de Soto in 1540, is frequently identified as Choctaw. By the 18th century the Choctaw were mired in colonial wars, allying first with the French against the British and Chickasaw, and then later with the new Americans against the Spanish and the Creek. Allegiance to the United States, however, did not protect the Choctaw from the harsh colonial policies of the new nation. Pressured into a series of treaties during the early 19th century, the Choctaw ceded over 28 million acres of land to the U.S. government. The Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in 1830 marked the beginning of the Indian Removal from the Southeast, with the Choctaw being the first to go.

According to the treaty, the Choctaw could remain in Mississippi and assimilate or remove to Oklahoma and retain federal recognition as Choctaw. Those who left formed the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, which today numbers over 20,000. Those who stayed in Mississippi were forced to eke out a living as squatters and then sharecroppers on land they once owned. They remained isolated in a biracial South, where they could not be white and to be black was to be disempowered by segregation. One benefit of this isolation, however, was the continued development of a unique ethnic identity, allowing the community to maintain their language and social customs.

Throughout most of the 20th century, the majority of Choctaw worked as farmers. Stickball and dancing were the dominant forms of entertainment, particularly during long weekends when communities would gather. This tradition developed into the annual Choctaw Fair, a combination of reunion, festival, stickball tournament, country and indigenous music concert, and cultural display. The fair is a useful symbol of Choctaw daily life, with its combination of traditional and mainstream culture. Basketball is as common today as swamp-cane basket weaving. With little existing information about traditional Choctaw religion, the majority of the Choctaw today are Christian, although most also maintain some degree of belief in the old stories and practices of the elders.

In 1934 the U.S. Congress passed the Indian Reorganization Act, which allowed tribes once again to govern themselves independently. By 1945 the Choctaw had ratified a constitution and elected Joe Chitto as their first tribal chairperson. In 1979 Phillip Martin became tribal chief and began a series of economic ventures on the reservation that now include an 80-acre industrial park, a construction company, two casinos, and a resort area, helping make the tribe one of the largest employers in the state. Only a decade ago, over 90 percent of the population was fluent in the Choctaw language. The statistics are beginning to invert, with over 90 percent of Choctaw children under the age of five not able to speak the language. To combat this language loss, the tribe is engaged in a series of programs to teach, maintain, and reinvigorate the language and customs of the tribe.

While tribal members maintain a specific tribal identity, they are also making efforts to connect to American Indians across the country. The Choctaw are active members of a number of national Indian organizations, such as the Native American Sports Association and the United South and Eastern Tribes. Further, tribal groups such as the Chahta Alla Youth Council meet with American Indian youth groups across the country. More recently, the tribe has begun hosting intertribal powwows that bring American Indians of all tribes together.

TOM MOULD
Elon University

Patricia Galloway, Choctaw Genesis (1995); Tom Mould, Choctaw Prophecy: A Legacy of the Future (2003); John. H. Peterson Jr., The Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians: Their Recent History and Current Social Relations (1971); John R. Swanton, Source Material for the Social and Ceremonial Life of the Choctaw Indians (1931).

 

Coharies

The Coharie Indian tribe is primarily located in Sampson and Harnett Counties in southeast North Carolina. The tribe consists of approximately 2,600 members, living in the New Bethel Indian community north of Clinton, the Holly Grove Indian community in south Clinton, the Shiloh Indian community in rural Sampson County, and the Dunn Indian community in rural Harnett County. By tradition, the Coharie Indian tribe descends from the Neusiok Indians, who were forced from their homelands in northeastern North Carolina in the 18th century.

The Coharie tribe had a small presence in Sampson County by the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In 1859, for example, tribal members established subscription schools for Indian children at a time when the state provided no public support for the education of Indians. This began a tradition in the Coharie community by which schools and churches became the two most important institutions of membership inside the tribe. In 1910 the tribe was successful in lobbying the Sampson County government for a school especially for tribal members. The county established Shiloh Indian School, which operated until 1940. In 1911 tribal members petitioned the state for an additional school in Sampson County, upon which New Bethel Indian School was established in the New Bethel community. Other schools for the exclusive use of tribal members were later opened in North Carolina, including one in the Holly Grove community (ca. 1923) and one in Dunn (1942). Established in 1943, the East Carolina Indian Training School in Sampson County enrolled only Indian children in grades 1–12 until 1966.

With the creation of the Shiloh Pentecostal Holiness Church in 1907, members of the Coharie tribe began establishing exclusively Indian churches within the tribal territory, a practice continued until 1965. These institutions served political purposes as well as religious purposes. Tribal leaders would use the churches as a forum to discuss and address tribal issues.

In the early 20th century, Coharie tribal members created a formal system of government with the establishment of the Sampson County Indian Clan. From the 1910 record documenting the election of the tribe’s first chief, the purpose of the clan was to govern tribal affairs. The state of North Carolina officially recognized the tribe in 1911; however, because of complaints from the non-Indian local community, the law was rescinded in 1913. It was not until four years later, in 1917, that the state again recognized the Coharie Indian tribe.

The tribe’s headquarters are in Clinton, N.C. The Coharie Intra-Tribal Council, Inc., an organization consisting of elected representatives from each of the Coharie tribal communities, administers its programs and governs tribal affairs. Goals of the organization include promoting health, education, and the social and economic well-being of the Coharie tribal membership. The Coharie Intra-Tribal Council operates two daycare centers, a fish farm, a tribal federal housing program under the Native American Housing and Self Determination Act, job training assistance programs, and several programs dedicated to the needs of tribal elders.

The Coharie sponsor a number of cultural programs, including the annual Coharie Powwow held every September on the original grounds of the East Carolina Indian Training School. This event is the successor of the original Indian Day started in 1969 by tribal leaders to celebrate Coharie history. Today, the annual powwow remains one of the region’s most popular celebrations, attended by both tribal members and the local non-Indian community.

Currently the tribe is working toward obtaining federal recognition. Their efforts began in the early 1980s by submitting a letter of intent to petition for federal recognition to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The tribe continues research to complete a documented petition.

CLYDE ELLIS
Elon College

John Lawson, A New Voyage To Carolina, ed. Hugh T. Lefler (1984); James Mooney, Siouan Tribes of the East (1894); Theda Perdue, Native Carolinians: The Indians of North Carolina (1985); Theda Perdue and Michael Green, The Columbia Guide to American Indians of the Southeast (2001); Thomas E. Ross, American Indians in North Carolina: Geographic Interpretations (1999); Ruth Wetmore, First on the Land: The North Carolina Indians (1975); Clyde Ellis, Our State (November 2000).

 

Conchs

A Conch today is regarded as any native of the Florida Keys. Identity requires no other imperative commonly associated with ethnicity, not even the distinction of being a descendant of the first Conchs of the Florida Keys.

Origins, vocation, and association with the conch (an edible gastropod mollusk of tropical waters) were the primary defining characteristics of the original Conchs. They were British subjects of the Bahamas who came to the Florida Keys in the early 19th century. Hailing from British, Irish, and African stock, they were white, black, and of mixed lineage. Many had been slaves or were a generation removed from slavery in the British West Indies and probably British Florida. Some were descendants of separatists known as Eleutheran Adventurers, who left England for the Bahamas in 1649 seeking freedom from the English church and government. According to one source, most among the Adventurers had been fisherfolk of Cockney origin, and in the Bahamas they dwelled mainly on the island of Abaco. Their number expanded significantly when British Loyalists fled the North American mainland for the Bahamas during the American Revolution. Eventually, the opportunities in fishing, sponging, turtling, and wrecking drew Conchs to the Florida Keys. As late as the 1930s, workers for the Federal Writers’ Project reported that an English lilt was noticeable in the speech of Florida Conchs.

As in the origins of the name “cracker,” competing theories explain the Conch derivation. The term almost certainly originated in the Bahamas and derives from the conch and its place in the culture of the island dwellers. According to one theory, Conchs got their name when at some point they informed British authorities that they would rather eat conchs than pay taxes to the Crown. Given that the conch was a principal source of protein in the diet of Bahamians, the story seems apocryphal. Sources also say that when Bahamians recaptured Nassau from the Spanish in 1783, they raised a flag with a conch shell emblazoned on its canvas. In yet another story, inhabitants of a small island, uncertain of which national flag to honor during the British and Spanish struggle over the Bahamas, returned a salute from a passing American ship by raising a conch shell attached to the end of a pole. Although politics may have been a factor, ethnonym derivation likely has more to do with diet and the conch shell’s use as a horn. When blown, it allowed for communicating across and between islands.

Through the early 20th century, Florida Conchs remained a distinguishable people who, with one notable exception, generally confined themselves to the Keys. Following World War I, black Bahamians began migrating to the south Florida mainland for seasonal jobs in farming and at resort hotels. A permanent colony that established itself on Singer’s Island in Lake Worth and later at Riviera acquired the name Conch. The men tended to work as fishers, and the women wove palmthatch baskets, hats, purses, and other items for sale to tourists.

With Key West as the nominal capital, the Florida Keys are now known as the Conch Republic, made popular by the music and culture of Jimmy Buffett. A symbolic designation rather than a legally constituted entity, the Conch Republic arose in 1982 when residents staged an act of secession from the Union in protest of a U.S. Border Patrol blockade set up north of the Keys on U.S. 1.

Much like Cajun culture, Conch heritage has been co-opted by distorted symbolism, popular culture, and tourism. Whether built by Conchs or not, the historic houses of 19th-century wood-frame construction in Key West are commonly referred to as examples of classical Conch architecture. The original Conch houses, however, were constructed from mortar made from a mixture of water, sand, and lime (obtained from burning conch shells), with conch shells serving in place of bricks and stones. The Conch diet is preserved in the nouveau cuisine of Florida conch chowder, conch fritters, conch salads, and conch stew found on restaurant menus and in popular cookbooks. At retail outlets throughout the Keys, tourists can buy conch shells as keepsakes, which the original Conchs believed brought bad luck. Finally, newcomers with no ancestral link to the original Conchs are given the appellation “Freshwater Conchs” when they establish permanent residence in the Keys.

JACK E. DAVIS
University of Florida

Abbie M. Brooks, Petals Plucked from Sunny Climes (1880); Mark Derr, Some Kind of Paradise: A Chronicle of Man and the Land in Florida (1989); Federal Writers’ Project, Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State (1949); Stetson Kennedy, Palmetto Country (1989); Raymond A. Mohl, Florida Historical Quarterly (January 1987); Maureen Ogle, Key West: History of an Island of Dreams (2003); Chris Sherrill and Roger Aiello, Key West: The Last Resort (1978).

 

Coonasses

“Coonass” commonly refers to Cajuns in Louisiana and Texas. However, the origin and precise meaning of the term and its suitability in regional discourse are matters of debate among Cajuns and scholars who study Cajun culture.

An often-cited explanation for the origin of coonass suggests the ethnonym derived from the standard French word conasse, meaning a stupid person, a bungling prostitute, or an unhealthy prostitute. It was allegedly used by continental French soldiers during World War II to describe Cajuns serving in France, whom they viewed as francophone bumpkins. Conasse was then supposedly anglicized into “coonass,” and it gained widespread currency as a negative label for Cajuns. However, this hypothesis has never been substantiated. Other interpretations offer coonass as a play on the epithet “coon” that alludes to the alleged “racial impurity” of Cajuns or portrays them as lower in status than African Americans. What is known is that coonass was frequently used in reference to Cajuns by the 1950s and was also applied to elements of Cajun culture—“coonass food” and “coonass music,” for example. Despite its original negative connotations, Cajuns appropriated coonass within the context of ethnic revival of the 1960s and 1970s as an exotic self-ascriptive ethnic label. This rehabilitation of the word was evident in the proliferation of coonass bumper stickers, T-shirts, and even tattoos.

Not all Cajuns accept coonass as a suitable appellation. In 1977, for example, a Cajun filed a lawsuit against his employer after he was terminated for protesting a supervisor’s repeated use of the label. Various organizations devoted to the preservation of Cajun culture—and often led by socioeconomic and intellectual elites—began to oppose the use of coonass, denouncing it as a vulgar term. They treat it as an ethnic slur parallel to those used for African Americans and Hispanics. Spurred by these sentiments, in 1981 the Louisiana State Senate passed a resolution to “condemn the use of the term ‘coonass’ and to condemn the sale or promotion of any items containing that term.”

Some writers associate coonass with a particular component of the Cajun population. Some scholarship, for example, suggests that it is used primarily by young working-class Cajun males with a vague sort of identification with the traditions and symbols of Cajun culture and who use coonass as a macho assertion of their “earthy pungent masculinity.” This interpretation also proposes that their use of coonass is a critical reaction to the elitism in some factions of the Cajun ethnic movement. Other scholars follow a related theme by proposing that coonass is overwhelmingly part of male speech and that some young men prefer it to Cajun as a means of resisting the increasing commodification of the label “Cajun” for cultural tourism.

Despite opposition to the term, many Cajuns commonly use coonass and its “polite” variant, “coonie.” Men more frequently make reference to coonasses, but Cajuns of both sexes and all ages frequently self-ascribe the term and employ it in reference to elements of local culture, especially in conversations with outsiders.

“Coonass” interchanges with “Cajun” in ethnic jokes, but it also evokes positive traits linked to Cajun identity. Whether male or female, a person who demonstrates proficiency in French, speaks English with a pronounced Cajun accent, cooks Cajun food well, or is an outdoors enthusiast may be called a “real” or “pure” coonass.

While commonly self-ascribed by Cajuns, the use of coonass by non-Cajuns can spark a wide variety of responses, ranging from indifference to hostility when insulting modifiers like “dumb” or “damn” accompany the term. Thus, the term “coonass” and/or the specific contexts where it is used serves to articulate ethnic group boundaries. At the same time, controversy over the label indicates diversity within a population often perceived as a homogeneous entity. As identities have gradually creolized from disparate traditions in the American South, the involution and division within this ethnic group (itself shaped in the southern context) offers an interesting view of identity politics and contestation and reveals the continuing importance of regional ethnic identities in a globalizing age.

ROCKY SEXTON
Augustana College

Shane K. Bernard, The Cajuns: Americanization of a People (2003); James Dormon, The People Called Cajuns (1983); C. Paige Gutierrez, Cajun Foodways (1992); Rocky Sexton, Cajuns, Germans, and Les Americains (1996); Nicholas Spitzer, Zydeco and Mardi Gras (1986); Shana Walton, Flat Speech and Cajun Ethnic Identity in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana (1994), “Louisiana’s Coonasses: Choosing Race and Class over Ethnicity,” in Signifying Serpents and Mardi Gras Runners: Representing Identity in Selected Souths, ed. Celeste Ray and Eric Lassiter (2003).

 

Coushattas

From the 1800s to today, the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana has centered its community three miles north of the town of Elton. Referring to themselves in their own Muskogean language as the Koasati, the Coushatta originally lived in the area of the Upper Tennessee River Valley. The tribe first entered the historic record after encountering Hernando de Soto in 1540; by the mid-1700s, the Coushatta had migrated to the present-day region of Alabama and were affiliated with the Creek Confederacy. Over the next 500 years, the Coushatta relocated several times in order to remain neutral in conflicts between the Spanish, French, British, and American governments.

The Coushatta tribe was officially terminated from the rolls of the federal government in 1953, despite protests from tribal members; they petitioned for and again received recognition as a federal Indian tribe in 1973. In the subsequent 30 years, the tribe has expanded its reservation land base, created an administrative complex that provides a multitude of services to the community, and, in 1995, opened a land-based casino that has made a significant economic impact on the region. Despite centuries of hardship, the Coushatta people have a vital, thriving community and receive wide recognition for their well-preserved cultural traditions.

Many of the Coushatta tribal members still speak Koasati as their first language, although the tribe is considering the necessity of developing language preservation programs for its young people. The Indian church has consistently played a major role in community cohesion. In addition to religious services and social events, the church serves an educational function. Until the 1960s Coushatta children went to elementary school in a small two-room schoolhouse located behind the Indian church building. Portions of the church services are still conducted in the Koasati language, as are other major community events.

The Coushatta are particularly known for the high quality of their traditional handcrafts, most notably their baskets woven from swamp cane or longleaf pine needles. Coushatta baskets are displayed in museums throughout the world. Older Coushatta basket makers recall the days when longleaf pine needle trees were plentiful in the area. Today, however, most of the land surrounding the tribal community has been clear-cut by timber companies, who reforest with shortleaf pine trees. Coushatta basket makers now experience difficulty obtaining sufficient quantity and quality of longleaf pine needles.

Another popular practice in the Coushatta community is traditional and contemporary Indian dancing. Tribal members have performed dances throughout the surrounding area, most notably at events such as the annual tribal powwow held in Kinder, La., every October, and traveled to compete in powwows throughout the United States and Canada. With its contemporary dance styles and customs, the powwow provides an avenue for community members and visitors to gather together and share Indian culture.

The Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana is governed by a four-member elected tribal council and an elected tribal chairperson, functioning as the tribe’s CEO. The five-member tribal council oversees all of the tribe’s programs and services, including the Departments of Health, Education, Housing, Social Services, Maintenance, and Law Enforcement—all of which provide comprehensive services to the tribal community. The tribal council also directs all economic development activities of the tribe, one aspect of which, Grand Casino Coushatta, has made the tribe a major economic force in Louisiana. As a federally recognized Indian tribe, the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana is a sovereign nation within the United States, with all of the legal, judicial, and economic rights associated with that status.

LINDA PARKER LANGLEY
Louisiana State University at Eunice

David H. Corkran, The Creek Frontier, 1540–1783 (1967); Bobby H. Johnson, The Coushatta People (1976); David Jurney, “Diaspora of the Alabama-Koasati Indians across Southeastern North America” (Ph.D. dissertation, Southern Methodist University, 2001); Geoffrey D. Kimball, Koasati Grammar (1991); John R. Swanton, Early History of the Creek Indians and Their Neighbors (1988).

 

Creoles

Always a confusing and controversial term, the word “Creole” means many things to many people. According to etymologists, the term derives from the Latin creare, meaning “to beget” or “to create.” After the European discovery of America, Portuguese colonists used crioulo to denote an American-born slave of African descent. The word eventually came to be applied to all American-born colonists living along the Gulf Coast, regardless of ethnic origin, including those living as far eastward as Mobile and Pensacola. The latter groups were eventually called Gulf Coast Creoles in order to distinguish them from Creoles residing in present-day Louisiana—the state that has been most commonly associated with all things Creole. There, in the 18th century, the Spanish introduced the word criollo, which evolved into “Creole,” meaning persons of African or European heritage born in America.

By the 19th century, black, white, and mixed-ancestry Louisianians used the term to distinguish themselves from the foreign-born and from Anglo-American settlers. During the antebellum period, mixed-ancestry Creoles of Color (gens de couleur libre, or “free persons of color”) became a distinct ethnic group with many of the legal rights and privileges of whites. They often possessed property, received formal education, and occupied a middle social ground between whites and enslaved blacks. After the Civil War, however, with the development of an increasingly biracial social hierarchy, most Creoles of Color lost their privileged status and joined the ranks of impoverished former black slaves.

All the while, however, the word “Creole” persisted as a term also referring to white Louisianians, usually of upper-class, non-Cajun origin—although, confusingly, even Cajuns sometimes were called Creoles, primarily by non-Cajuns. Like the Creoles of Color, these white Creoles (also called French Creoles) suffered socioeconomic decline after the Civil War. In rural south Louisiana, newly impoverished white Creoles often intermarried with the predominantly lower-class Cajuns and thus were assimilated into Cajun culture. Many names of French Creole origin, like Soileau, Fontenot, and François, are now widely considered Cajun in rural south Louisiana.

In cosmopolitan New Orleans, “Creole” is still invoked to describe upper-class white society. Along with enslaved blacks and Creoles of Color, French-Catholic white Creoles dominated early New Orleans society. After the Louisiana Purchase (1803), however, they increasingly shared the city, albeit begrudgingly, with Anglo-Protestants who inhabited the city’s aptly named “American Sector.” By the mid-19th century, French Creoles, Anglo-Protestants, and other ethnic groups of European descent were intermarrying in New Orleans and thus blurring distinctions between their previously distinct populations. “Creole” also describes New Orleans cuisine, which, although clearly influenced by European foodways, focuses on spicy dishes abundant with local seafood. Staples include dishes like shrimp remoulade, bouillabaisse, and crawfish bisque.

Creole girls, Plaquemines Parish, La., 1935 (Ben Shahn, Library of Congress [LC-USF33-006159-M1], Washington, D.C.)

Elsewhere in present-day Louisiana, the term “Creole” refers most commonly to persons of full or mixed African ancestry, their French dialect, and their Roman Catholic traditions. Creoles of African heritage generally employed the term “Creole of Color” in reference to Creoles of mixed-ancestry and used the term “black Creole” to refer to Creoles solely or largely of African descent.

In recent decades both of these African-derived groups have downplayed distinctions based on skin color and social standing in order to work for cultural preservation. More often describing themselves as simply Creole, they founded a preservation group in 1982 named C.R.E.O.L.E., Inc. (Cultural Resourceful Educational Opportunities toward Linguistic Enrichment). Zydeco, an accordion-based music that draws heavily on Afro-Caribbean and rhythm and blues influences, is their most well-known form of expressive culture. The rural community of Plaisance hosts the annual celebration of the genre at the Southwest Louisiana Zydeco Festival.

Ultimately, the meaning of the word “Creole” remains elusive, with some black, white, and mixed-ancestry individuals futilely claiming exclusivity to the ethnic label.

SHANE K. BERNARD
Avery Island, Louisiana

Carl A Brasseaux, Keith P. Fontenot, and Claude F. Oubre, Creoles of Color in the Bayou Country (1994); James H. Dormon, ed., Creoles of Color of the Gulf South (1996); Nicholas Spitzer, ed., Louisiana Folklife: A Guide to the State (1985), in Creoles of Color of the Gulf South, ed. James H. Dormon (1996); Sybil Kein, Creole: The History and Legacy of Louisiana’s Free People of Color (2000); Joseph G. Tregle, in Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization, ed. Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon (1992), Louisiana History (Spring 1982).

 

Cubans

The Cuban communities in Miami and south Florida represent the largest concentration of Cubans in the United States. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, 700,000 (60 percent) of the 1.2 million Cubans in the United States reside in metropolitan Miami, making it the largest ethnic group in the city. The community traces its origins to 1959, when political and social changes implemented by the Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro triggered a mass migration of political exiles to south Florida. Since then, Miami has served as the main point of entry for Cuban immigrants, and the city has experienced four periods of increased Cuban migration: 1959–62, 1965–73, 1980, and 1994–95. Miami is today the city with the third-largest concentration of Cubans in the world.

Florida has welcomed Cuban migrants since the 1830s, when high tariffs and labor strife in Cuba led to the relocation of the cigar industry to Key West and the creation of the first Cuban community in the state. In the 1860s the cigar industry expanded into Tampa, attracting thousands of Cuban cigar workers and their families, who helped found Ybor City. The two communities grew rapidly in the next 30 years until Cuba won its independence from Spain in 1898. In the 20th century Florida became a favorite and convenient haven for Cuban political leaders and activists. From the 1920s to the 1950s, political opponents of every Cuban government sought asylum in Miami. Members of those exile communities were usually small in number, ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand. When Fidel Castro overthrew dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959, there were 35,000 Cuban exiles living in the United States. Most returned after the revolutionary triumph and were soon replaced by those disaffected with the revolutionary government.

The current Cuban communities in Miami and south Florida were founded by political exiles hoping to return to Cuba as soon as its political climate changed. However, the longevity of Castro’s regime, the failure of U.S. measures to incite political change in the country (e.g., the Bay of Pigs invasion and the economic embargo), and the passing of the first generation of exiles—coupled with the coming of age of a second and third generation of Cuban Americans—transformed the community from one of temporary political exiles to permanent residents and citizens with an active interest in government. Miami, Hialeah, Coral Gables, and Sweetwater all had Cuban American mayors by 1985. Cuban Americans also made impressive gains in the Florida legislature, and in 1989 Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican Florida state legislator, became the first Cuban American woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. In 2004 Republican Mel Martínez became the nation’s first Cuban American U.S. senator.

The Cuban community’s success in American politics has been surpassed only by its economic and educational success. Cubans have the highest income and educational rates of all Latino groups in the United States, and their entrepreneurship has helped make Miami a financial center for Latin America. Today, the city boasts more than 50 international banks (many of them owned or managed by Cuban Americans), two major Latin American television networks (Univision and Telemundo) that transmit exclusively in Spanish, dozens of Spanish-language newspapers, and more than 40,000 Cuban-owned businesses.

Cubans have also had a deep cultural impact on the region, from religion to culinary practices, music, art, and popular festivals. Cuban sandwiches and Cuban restaurants such as the Columbia are famously associated with Tampa. Ybor City (now within Tampa’s metropolitan boundaries) remains home to Cuban social clubs, grocery stores, bakeries, and Spanish-speaking Catholic churches. Afro-Cuban religions like Santeria also migrated to the South, and botanicas (Santeria stores) can be found throughout south Florida. Cuban music—led by “Miami sound” creators Gloria and Emilio Estefan and popularized by superstars like Celia Cruz, Albita Rodriguez, and John Secada—is almost synonymous with Miami. Every year since 1980, the Miami Cuban community hosts the Calle Ocho Open House to celebrate Cuban culture with music, food, and art. The event, usually attended by more than 1 million people, has become the largest Latino festival in the United States.

FÉLIX MASUD-PILOTO
DePaul University

María Cristina García, Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959–1994 (1996); Miguel González-Pando, The Cuban Americans (1998); Guillermo Grenier and Lisandro Pérez, The Legacy of Exile: Cubans in the United States (2003); Félix Masud-Piloto, From Welcomed Exiles to Illegal Immigrants: Cuban Migration to the United States, 1959–1995 (1996); Alejandro Portes and Alex Stepick, City on the Edge: The Transformation of Miami (1993).

 

Czechs

Since the mid-1800s Czechs have formed an important, though relatively small, ethnic group in the South. Czechs created settlements in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, Arkansas, Texas, and Oklahoma. By the beginning of the 20th century, over 250 Czech communities had developed in Texas in places such as Flatonia, Dubina, Caldwell, Richmond-Rosenburg, and Houston. These communities have long shared a commitment to keeping their land and maintaining strong family units. Particularly in rural areas, families often live on inherited or shared land that places them in close proximity to extended family members. Such strongly interwoven communities perpetuate transgenerational traditions.

From the late 1800s to the early 1900s, Czechs in the South often established presses and published newspapers and bulletins in their language. Additionally, they formed lodges and sokols (social groups) in many communities. Lodges generally maintained support of widows and orphans, assisted the poor, and provided socialization for the men of the community. No longer extant, southern sokols were dedicated to creating “sound minds and bodies.” They were focused on gymnastics and provided entertainment in the forms of contests and educational games until the mid-20th century.

Czech communities throughout the South celebrate their heritage and culture at yearly festivals dedicated to the sharing of genealogical information, history, foodways, material culture, music, and dance. The well-known kolache, a Czech fruit-filled pastry, has become a Texas favorite. In other parts of the South, kolaches have become a commercialized food sold at doughnut shops and bakeries. Sometimes, kolaches are filled with sausage and look more like the commonly known pig in a blanket. Many Czech cooks make poppyseed cakes, braided holiday breads, and a wide array of traditional cookies. Czech gatherings also feature roast goose, duck, and pork and an array of sausages. Dumplings often accompany these dishes. At one time, Czechs were noted beer brewers and winemakers.

Many Czechs continue to be devoted to needleworking, carving, whittling, and quilting. Needle artists often crochet pieces derived from older Czech patterns, producing table scarves, doilies, and other crocheted items. Many Czech communities have maintained a strong commitment to dance traditions, and they continue to produce Czech dancing costumes. These entail a white, lace-trimmed blouse, a black or red vest embroidered with flowers or other traditional motifs, with a red skirt for women and black pants for men. Some community members make jewelry from Czech glass beads. The kraslice, an egg-decorating tradition using a wax-and-dye method, has survived in many Czech communities. These eggs are elaborately decorated with intricate traditional designs, and Czechs often give them as Easter presents.

Czechs continue to play traditional music at dances and gatherings. Among the many native dances popular at gatherings is the polka. The accordion, clarinet, and tuba form the backbone of most Czech musical groups, and Czech music regularly features in the programming of some central Texas radio stations. Singing and instrumental music remain important aspects of Czech culture.

Czech descendants in Texas and the Louisiana Red River Valley annually gather to commemorate their heritage and enjoy traditional dancing, music, and Czech cuisine. Here a young woman prepares traditional Czech pastries called kolaches (Photograph courtesy of Lisa Abney)

Initially, when Czechs first came to the United States from the Czech portions of Silesia and from Bohemia and Moravia (three of the regions that later became Czechoslovakia), most immigrants practiced Catholicism. However, in the South many have become Methodists, Episcopalians, Lutherans, or Baptists. Most Czech settlers farmed (predominantly growing tobacco and cotton) or were craftspersons (especially woodcarvers, stonemasons, and leatherworkers). Others owned businesses ranging from saloons to clothing stores. Their industriousness and tightly knit communities, coupled with their use of Czech languages, did not allow for extensive relationships beyond the Czech community. Over time, and with their growing use of the English language, Czech communities have become less endogamous. While they maintain strong family ties and friendships, they embrace visitors to their community festivals and celebrations. Czechs now proudly celebrate both their American and Czech heritage and demonstrate a deeply rooted sense of patriotism for both countries. Many Czechs entered the military during both world wars and subsequent conflicts, and current military members receive strong support from their communities.

In the contemporary South, Czech folk traditions survive in varying ways, although Czech-language speakers are dwindling in number. Unlike some immigrant groups to the United States whose traditions have been overshadowed by mainstream American culture, Czechs continue to document, transmit, and preserve their culture.

LISA ABNEY
Northwestern State University

Karel Bicha, The Czechs in Oklahoma (1980); Sean N. Gallup, Journeys into Czech-Moravian Texas (1998); Clinton Machann and James W. Mendl, Czech Voices: Stories from Texas in the Amerikán Národní Kalendár (1991); Rosie Ann Locker Walker, A History of the Rural Schools of the Czech Communities of Kolin and Libuse (1986).

 

English

In 1994 Bill C. Malone, the leading historian of country music, was asked to address a Shakespeare festival in New Orleans. The organizers were convinced, he recalls, that “Appalachian folk culture was Elizabethan and that the old mountain ballads and love songs were survivals from the days of Shakespeare.” A local paper publicized the lecture with a feature article titled “The Bard with a Gun Rack?” Malone was compelled to inform his hopeful audience that neither country music nor any other aspect of the modern South was a pure survival of English culture, but it is doubtful that he did much damage to their faith in the theory. They were expressing one version of a remarkably persistent idea of southern identity: that the South or some part of it represents the miraculous survival of antique English ways in an otherwise modern America. We can recognize this idea in legends about remote Appalachian coves whose residents still address one another in Elizabethan idiom, but also—at nearly the opposite end of the socioeconomic spectrum—in the determined Anglophilia of wealthy southerners from the 18th century onward. Amid the Victorian Gothic buildings of the University of the South, one may even now glimpse students and professors hurrying to class in black, Oxford-style academic gowns, an explicit bow to the idea of English origins for southern culture.

The idea, of course, is not altogether fanciful. Though the French and Spanish arrived in the region first and many ethnic groups followed, the European settlers who most strongly shaped the culture of the American South were English, beginning in 1607 at Jamestown. By 1660 some 50,000 of them had arrived in Virginia and neighboring Maryland. Though initially their numbers were thinned by disease, Indian attacks, and the inability of the mostly male population to reproduce itself, eventually a stable and recognizably English culture was established in the Chesapeake. Indeed by 1660 that culture was becoming determinedly English, and English in a particular way. From 1641 to 1676—the term of Sir William Berkeley’s long governorship of Virginia—the colony became a haven for emigrating cavaliers, for Royalist refugees during the Cromwell interregnum, and for the younger sons of Royalist families after the Stuart Restoration of 1660. Berkeley went out of his way to recruit such colonists, and he found most of them, as David Hackett Fischer has shown, in the same place: a cluster of 16 counties in the south and west of England that Fischer, borrowing from the novelist Thomas Hardy, calls “Wessex.” (The nearly simultaneous settling of New England drew overwhelmingly from the culturally different counties of East Anglia). From Wessex came the families—Byrd, Randolph, Carter, Washington, Lee, and others—who for generations formed the economic and political elite of Virginia and whose mode of life created a pattern for would-be aristocrats throughout the South. When these aristocrats felt the need for a theoretical justification of their lives, they could look, as the proslavery writer George Fitzhugh did in the 1850s, to the work of Robert Filmer, the 17th-century Royalist philosopher from Kent whose own relatives had joined the migration to Virginia and helped form that transplanted Wessex elite. The same region, as Fischer also shows, supplied not only the aristocracy of the new colony but also most of its indentured servants—many of whom eventually became landowners themselves. To a remarkable degree these settlers preserved cultural usages—architectural, culinary, religious, erotic, and many others—of the English region from which they came.

Through most of the 17th century one could speak of Virginia, Maryland, and eventually the other southern colonies as ethnically as well as culturally English. Afterwards, however, the immigration of many other groups—French Huguenots fleeing oppression, Scots-Irish and Germans seeking land and opportunity, and of course African slaves in ever-increasing numbers—enlarged and considerably complicated the ethnic picture of the South. And though English folkways did not disappear any more than did the aristocratic families who had helped transplant them (a Byrd continued to represent Virginia in the U.S. Senate until 1983), increasingly “Englishness” became a mythic and chosen hallmark of southern identity, rather than a literal and unavoidable matter of fact. During the Civil War, for instance, Confederate partisans found it useful to characterize the conflict in ethnic and cultural terms, identifying southerners as literal descendants of English cavaliers, hard-wired with inherited affinities for chivalry and aristocracy, and Yankees as latter-day Roundheads, a democratic mob contemptuous of order and tradition. This information might have surprised the typical unruly, anarchic, and very likely Scots-Irish volunteer in General Robert E. Lee’s army—just as a rhinestone-clad denizen of Nashville’s Music Row might be astonished to be identified as a living avatar of Shakespeare’s England. But many southerners, both past and present, would take great pleasure in the idea that, by carefully burnishing whatever English ancestry they could boast, they were simultaneously perfecting their “southernness.”

JOHN GRAMMER
University of the South

David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989); T. H. Breen, ed., Shaping Southern Society (1976); Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (1988).

 

French

French settlers have come to the South for over four centuries. Their influences are most clearly discernible in specific areas, especially Charleston, S.C., and the southern parishes of Louisiana.

In May 1562 French Huguenot Jean Ribault founded the short-lived settlement of Fort Charles (named for his king, Charles IX) in present-day South Carolina. Huguenots arrived in Virginia between 1619 and 1621, financed by the English Crown, to produce silk and wine (although they grew tobacco instead). More French Huguenots came to the shores of South Carolina and southern Virginia in the wake of Louis XIV’s 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. By the early 1700s Huguenot merchants occupied entire streets in Charleston, and the current Church and Market Streets became the French Quarter. Other Huguenots emulated English planters in growing cotton, indigo, and rice further up the Santee River and became so populous that the river was called the “French Santee.”

The first French Huguenot church organized in Charleston as early as 1681 and still operates as the only independent Huguenot congregation in America and celebrates a commemorative liturgical service in French every spring. Huguenots also left their imprint on Carolinian architecture and city planning and through individuals’ contributions to colonial history. The paternal grandparents of Revolutionary War hero Francis “Swamp Fox” Marion were both industrious Huguenots from New Rochelle. Henry Laurens served as a president of the Continental Congress and was a signer of the Treaty of Paris. His son John was an aide-de-camp of George Washington, a special envoy to Paris (securing French aid during the American Revolution), and a chief negotiator after General Charles Cornwallis’s Yorktown surrender.

In 1682 René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, descended the Mississippi from Canada claiming the vast territory he traversed for Louis XIV and calling it “Louisiane.” Two years later, La Salle returned with 400 colonists and began the ill-fated Fort St. Louis settlement on the Texan eastern coast. In 1699 Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d’Iberville, established Fort Maurepas at present-day Biloxi, Miss. He became first governor of Louisiana and was later succeeded by his brother Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, who, in 1718, established a settlement he named La Nouvelle-Orléans (New Orleans) in honor of Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, then the regent of France. New Orleans soon became the capital of Louisiana, with early settlers living on the river in a fortified square referred to as the Vieux Carré (Old Quarter, at the heart of New Orleans’s now-renowned French Quarter). After British acquisition of maritime Canada, Acadians began arriving in the 1760s. They became the “Cajuns,” in distinction from the “Creoles” whose families had come directly from France or Spain or by way of the Caribbean. Creoles tended to settle in New Orleans and along the Mississippi up to Baton Rouge (the state capital since 1849), whereas many Cajuns moved to the south-central region of Lafayette and toward the southwestern bayous.

Fleeing the French Revolution, a sizable influx of noble refugees settled in the New Orleans area and began a theater and other refinements, so that the city soon became the “Paris of America.” French Creoles built the finest homes between Levee and Bourbon Streets, with porte cochère entrances (then popular in France), interior courtyards, gardens, and iron stairways leading to upper apartments with iron balconies. During the Haitian Revolution (1791–1803), more than 15,000 immigrants settled in Louisiana, including French planters, francophone free people of color, and slaves who served both of those groups. All became part of the Creole population.

After the Americans’ 1803 purchase of the Louisiana Territory, French customs continued. Creoles still wielded power in southern Louisiana and encouraged the adoption of a civil law code based on the Latin-inspired model of Napoleonic France. Louisianian civil law remains quite different from the British-inspired common law of the other 49 states. Throughout the 19th century, French political refugees continued to seek shelter in New Orleans as various revolutionary moments played out in France. They established opera and debutante evenings at Theatre d’Orleans, Catholic services at the Saint-Louis Cathedral, periodic soirées dansantes (evening dancing parties), the King’s Ball opening Carnival Season with gâteau des rois (king cake), French-language newspapers, a library with contemporary books in French, and a general joie de douceur reminiscent of their homeland.

Elsewhere, an abortive experimental settlement for grape and olive production brought French to Demopolis, Ala., in 1816. No more successful would be Victor Considérant’s 1850s utopian settlement in Texas, although some of the French settlers would play prominent roles in the early life of Dallas. Recruited by enterprising Frenchman Henri Castro, Alsatians came to Castroville, Tex., in 1844, and annual St. Louis Day festivals celebrate ancestral origins with both Texas barbecue and Alsatian sausage.

French traditions endure in Louisiana. In New Orleans, French foodways blended with the spicy seasonings of Spanish and Caribbean cooking. To the west, Cajuns developed hearty and peppery dishes with African and Antillean influences such as “dirty rice” and gumbos. Cajuns also preserved French folktales and continued a circle dance, perhaps of Breton origin, now known as the fais-do-dos. The use of French, however, has waned through the 20th century. By the 2000 U.S. Census, more Floridians and New Yorkers spoke French in the home than Louisianans. With the influx of Haitians during the 1990s and with more Québécois choosing the Sunbelt for retirement, Florida boasts the largest number of French speakers in the South and in the United States, being second only to the province of Quebec for the North American continent.

GEORGE POE
University of the South

Mathé Allain and Glenn Conrad, eds., France and North America: Over 300 Years of Dialogue (1973); Ronald Creagh, Nos Cousins d’Amérique: Histoire des Français aux Etats-Unis (1988); Jerah Johnson, Contemporary French Civilization (Summer/Fall 1994); Virginia Brainard Kunz, The French in America (1966); Bertrand Van Ruymbeke and Randy Sparks, eds., Memory and Identity: The Huguenots in France and the Atlantic Diaspora (2003).