Poarch Creeks

The Creek Nation ceded the last of its homelands to the United States by treaty in 1832. Individuals were supposed to be “free to go or stay as they please” (7 Stat. 366), but most were removed to Indian Territory during the 1830s and 1840s. Those who managed to stay were those Creek “mixed-bloods” loyal to the United States during the Creek War of 1813–14 who were living in the area around present-day Escambia and Baldwin Counties of southwestern Alabama.

By the end of the 19th century most of the scattered individual Creek Indians who had avoided removal were assimilated and no longer identified as Indians. There was, however, one group of Creek-descendant families living a few miles north of the present-day town of Atmore, Ala., at a place white settlers named “Poarch.” The group was locally acknowledged as an “Indian” community, numbering nearly 200 people in the U.S. Census of 1900.

The core of the Poarch Creek land base was an allotment to a Friendly Creek named Lynn McGhee under the treaty that concluded the 1813–14 Creek War. McGhee’s lands remained in federal trusteeship until 1924, but the community received no federal services. The Poarch Creek suffered land losses, extreme poverty, and discrimination during the first half of the 20th century. By the mid-20th century only fragments of native Muskogean language and custom survived. The Poarch Creek were thoroughly anglicized, Christianized, and acculturated.

Following World War II, one of Lynn McGhee’s descendants, Calvin McGhee, led a major movement to improve educational opportunities for the Poarch Creek, to press a land claim against the United States, and to improve community life and advance cultural pride. Under Calvin McGhee, the Poarch Creek led the way in forming the Creek Nation East of the Mississippi. The land claim and McGhee’s popularization of Indian identity stimulated many people long assimilated into the general population to declare their Creek ancestry. Eventually, there were many spin-off groups of self-styled “Creeks” in Florida, Alabama, and Georgia. Such groups continue to exist. Interest in Plains Indian–style powwows, which McGhee spurred, continues. The Poarch Creek annual Thanksgiving Day powwow, established in 1970, has grown into a major event, attracting thousands.

After McGhee’s death in 1970 (two years before successful settlement of the land claim), the Poarch leadership had already begun to dissociate itself from the larger Creek Indian land-claims coalition in order to concentrate on local needs of the historic Indian community near Atmore. Their most ambitious goal was to obtain federal acknowledgement of their community as a sovereign Indian tribe. Finally, in 1984, the United States acknowledged the Poarch Band of Creeks as a sovereign Indian tribe under federal law—the only Creek Indian group so identified east of the Mississippi and the only federally recognized tribe in Alabama or Georgia.

With federal recognition, many new opportunities came to the Poarch Creek. They had already begun to make significant gains in health care, senior citizen services, job training, and many other areas, but with federal recognition the Poarch Creek had all the benefits of tribal sovereignty and federal programs for which only recognized tribes are eligible. Today, tribal membership numbers approximately 2,000. The Poarch Creek have an expanding base of tribal trust lands and have developed an array of economic enterprises, including high-stakes bingo halls. Likewise, tribal government has established a full range of health and social services.

Some Poarch leaders have become prominent in American Indian affairs nationally through the National Congress of American Indians, the National Indian Health Board, the National Indian Gaming Commission, and in other arenas. Although the first Poarch community members to graduate from high school did so only in the late 1950s, by the early 2000s the tribe had many college graduates, including some from such prestigious institutions as Harvard and Duke Universities.

Along with their political and economic achievements, the Poarch Creek have also sought to strengthen their distinctive cultural heritage. Starting from an almost self-invented powwow “chanting” and dancing, through the years the Poarch Creek have fully adopted the established intertribal styles of the powwow trail. Since at least the 1980s, some Poarch people have tried to recapture their distinctly Creek language, religion, and traditions through contacts with Oklahoma Creek, despite the sometime strained political relations between the two tribal governments. A number of Poarch Creeks have participated in stomp dances at modern-day Oklahoma Creek Indian ceremonial grounds, and there are a few Oklahoma Creeks who are frequent visitors to Poarch. Some Poarch Creeks have become experienced enough to “lead” the distinctive calls associated with Oklahoma Creek stomp dances. Others are attempting, with the approval of the Poarch Tribal Council, to establish their own stomp ground on their reservation in Alabama.

From their obscure beginnings and long history of neglect and marginalization, the Poarch Creek appear to be well on their way to becoming a successful example of American Indian tribal revitalization and cultural restoration.

ANTHONY PAREDES
National Park Service

J. Anthony Paredes, ed., Indians of the Southeastern United States in the Late 20th Century (1992), in Anthropological Research: Process and Application, ed. John J. Poggie Jr., Billie DeWalt, and William Dressler (1992); Frank G. Speck, America Indigena (1947).

 

Powhatans

A paramount chiefdom of approximately 30 Algonquian-speaking tribes led by Wahunsenacawh (Chief Powhatan) occupied Virginia’s coastal plain when the English arrived in 1607. The Powhatan tribes were sedentary horticulturalists (most with riverine adaptations), and nearly all were affiliated with complex political structures. The John Smith map of 1612 is the earliest known document indicating tribal names and village locations in what came to be the Commonwealth of Virginia. However, the rapid English settlement of the colony and the importance of tobacco as a cash crop resulted in a demographic shift, with Europeans controlling the majority of Powhatan lands by 1700.

As signatories to colonial treaties, Virginia tribes were among the first native groups to be granted small tracts of reservation lands, although most tribes lost control of these lands by the early 1800s. However, the Mattaponi and Pamunkey tribes still hold two of the 17th-century reservations, thus making these reservations among the oldest in the United States.

The Acts of Assembly for October 1649 indicates that the freedom of movement of native people was restricted by the colonial government, and other colonial documents suggest that enslavement of Indians occurred in Virginia. The 1677 Treaty of Middle Plantation guaranteed civil and property rights of Virginia Indians and required Indians to pay annual tribute to the governor in lieu of property taxes. The presentation of tribute, typically of deer or other game, by the reservation-holding tribes continues to the present day.

Pressures to assimilate to non-Indian society in the 17th and 18th centuries led to the demise of traditional religious practices and the loss of native language. During the Great Awakening, many Virginia Indians converted to Christianity. Indian Baptist churches were, and remain, an important focus of support and tribal identity for the Virginia native community. Farming, fishing, and the wood and pulp industries were the Powhatans’ primary 20th-century economic activities.

In 1924 Virginia’s General Assembly passed the Racial Integrity Law requiring all segments of the population to be registered at birth in one of two categories: “white” or “colored.” Indian communities resisted the legislation by sending their children to church-sponsored schools rather than to segregated public schools. Some left the state seeking better educational and employment opportunities. Interestingly, anthropologist Frank Speck did fieldwork among the Powhatan tribes during the 1920s just as the state was denying the existence of Indians in the state with the newly enacted biracial legislation.

A period of openness on matters of native identity and history began with the repeal of the Racial Integrity Law in 1968 and the growing civil rights movement, and between 1983 and 1989 the Commonwealth of Virginia granted state recognition to eight Virginia tribes. Seven of these—the Mattaponi, Pamunkey, Chickahominy, Chickahominy Eastern Division, Nansemond, Upper Mattaponi, and Rappahan-nock—are descendant communities from the original Powhatan tribes. The eighth is the non-Powhatan Monacan Nation. In 1983 the state established the Virginia Council on Indians to act as an advisory board on matters pertaining to the state’s native population. Since 1999 six of the nonreservation tribes have sought federal recognition.

While more than 22,000 residents of Virginia indicated they were of American Indian ancestry on the 2000 U.S. Census, approximately 3,000 of this number are from Virginia’s eight state-recognized tribes. (Others are from elsewhere in the United States and the Americas.) The majority of state-recognized tribes have tribal centers located on or near ancestral lands, and several maintain tribal museums. Six of the state-recognized tribes hold annual powwows. Potters employing traditional ceramic designs sell their art at the Mattaponi and Pamunkey reservations.

The 2004 opening of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., has brought renewed interest in the history and traditional culture of the Powhatan tribes.

DANIELLE MORETTI-LANGHOLTZ
College of William & Mary

Helen C. Rountree and Randolph Turner, Before and after Jamestown: Virginia’s Powhatans and Their Predecessors (2002); Helen C. Rountree, Pocahontas’s People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia through Four Centuries (1990); Sandra Waugaman and Danielle Moretti-Langholtz, We’re Still Here: Contemporary Virginia Indians Tell Their Stories (2000); Danielle Moretti-Langholtz, In Our Own Words: Voices of Virginia Indians (video, 2002).

 

Puerto Ricans

According to the 2000 U.S. Census, 3,406,178 Puerto Ricans live in the United States, with 22.3 percent of them residing in the South. Texas is home to nearly 70,000 Puerto Ricans. Virginia has over 41,000, and both Georgia and North Carolina have Puerto Rican populations of over 32,000. Florida, however, has the largest concentration of Puerto Ricans in the South and the second-largest in the United States. A recent and continuing trend of Puerto Rican migration to Florida, both from the urban Northeast of the United States and the island of Puerto Rico, began in the 1970s. Termed by Puerto Rican activists as the “Florida phenomenon,” these migrants find central Florida particularly attractive because of its good schools, inexpensive housing, and climate. The 1990 census reported Florida’s Puerto Rican population at 241,000; by 2000, 482,000 Puerto Ricans lived in the state, with concentrations in Orlando, Miami, and Hialeah. Predominantly Democrats, Puerto Rican Floridians are beginning to become an active political presence through their growing numbers.

Puerto Ricans relocating to the mainland might simultaneously be considered immigrants and migrants because of the complex relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico. Since the United States claimed Puerto Rico as unincorporated territory in 1898, there have been three significant phases of Puerto Rican immigration to the mainland: the Pioneer Migration (1900–45), the Great Migration (1946–64), and the Revolving-Door Migration (1965–present). In each phase, Puerto Ricans have worked as migrant farm laborers in the South, especially harvesting crops such as peaches in Georgia and South Carolina. While Puerto Ricans began to establish permanent communities in the South before the 1960s, their numbers have increased significantly in the phase of revolving-door migration.

Puerto Rican communities maintain an active presence in the South through Spanish-speaking media and Latino organizations that celebrate the diverse influences that shaped Puerto Rican island culture (the indigenous Taino and Spanish and African heritages). In terms of religion, Puerto Ricans traditionally practice Roman Catholicism, although recent trends indicate that many former Puerto Rican Roman Catholics are converting to Pentecostal and charismatic churches. A number of Puerto Ricans have brought the religious practice of Santeria to the South, a religion that incorporates both the symbols of Roman Catholicism and Yoruban religions brought from Nigeria. As in voodoo, Catholic saints in Santeria have a double identity as African spirits. While some practitioners of Santeria consider themselves Roman Catholics, Santeria is practiced outside the church space and has its own priests, rituals (such as animal sacrifice), music, dancing, theology, and laws. A number of Santeria churches have been established in Florida, including the South Florida Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye in Hialeah.

Puerto Ricans have also brought traditional foodways, music, and dance that reflect the diverse roots of Puerto Rican culture. Puerto Rican cuisine offers a spicy mix of fruits and vegetables with rice and meat in dishes such as pernil (roast pork shoulder), pastels (green banana and meat patties wrapped in plantain leaves and boiled), and arroz con gandules (yellow rice with pigeon peas). Two key ingredients in Puerto Rican cooking are sofrito, a mixture of onions, peppers, olives, and spices, and achiote, which can be bought at supermarkets in Puerto Rican communities in the South. Restaurants, such as El Bohio in Palm Bay, Fla., La Casona in Tampa, Fla., Antojitos Criollos en Atlanta in Acworth, Ga., and Gran Sabana in Durham, N.C., offer Puerto Rican cuisine in a southern setting.

Puerto Ricans, like Cubans, have also brought salsa music and dance to the South. Salsa music can best be described as a combination of Latin American rhythms that reflect Spanish and African roots, jazz improvisation, and 1940s big band influences. The tremendous popularity of salsa music and dancing has inspired the opening of dance studios that offer salsa lessons, as well as clubs (such as Paracas in Tampa) that provide a forum for new dancers and an audience for Puerto Rican recording artists and radio stations.

Puerto Rican communities in the South organize numerous events to celebrate Puerto Rican heritage. One famous event, the Puerto Rico Cultural Parade and Folklore Festival, is celebrated on the last Sunday in April in the National Historic District of Ybor City, Fla. This parade features musical performances, dance, and papier-mâché masks of traditional Puerto Rican folk characters (such as Vejigantes, Sanqueros, and Cabezudos), which represent a fusion of African, Spanish, and Caribbean cultures. Other annual southern Puerto Rican festivals include the Puerto Rican Patron Saint Festival in Pinellas Park, Fla. (a celebration of the various patron saints of Puerto Rican cities) and the Puerto Rican Parade of South Florida in Orlando.

FRANCES ABBOTT
University of Mississippi

Maria Gonzalez, Puerto Ricans in the United States (2000); Ramon Grosfoguel, Colonial Subjects: Puerto Ricans in a Global Perspective (2003).

 

Quapaws

The Quapaw (Kappa) are the southernmost branch of the Dhegiha Sioux, a family that includes the Omaha, Osage, Ponca, and Kaw (Kansa) American Indian tribes. In 1673 the expedition of French explorer Louis Jolliet and Jesuit missionary priest Jacques Marquette found the Quapaw on both sides of the Mississippi River in present-day Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas

According to oral tradition, all Dhegiha Sioux had migrated west together from the lower reaches of the Ohio River. All but the Quapaw crossed the Mississippi and continued westward. The Quapaw turned down the east bank of the Mississippi River, continuing south to their 17th-century locations. The date of this migration is much debated, but there is a strong possibility that the Indians Hernando de Soto encountered in 1541 at the towns of Pacaha and Casqui were Quapaw. Other 18th- and 19th-century European names for the Quapaw included forms of the word “Arkansas” (such as “Akansea”), as well as Beaux Hommes, “Bow Indians,” “Arc” or “Ark,” and “Ozark” (Aux Arc).

In the 18th century the Quapaw were generally hostile toward their southeastern Indian neighbors—the Chickasaw, Natchez, Tunica, and Koroa. They were staunch allies of the French and helped maintain a hold on the French route along the Mississippi between New Orleans and St. Louis. When the French arrived, the Quapaw lived in four towns—Kappa, Tongigua, and Tourima on the Mississippi and Osotouy on the lower Arkansas River. Epidemics caused a drop in the population from an estimated 6,000 Quapaws in 1680 to around 2,000 by 1780. The towns combined and settled near Arkansas Post, a small French fort on the Arkansas River. The Quapaw fought with the French against the Chickasaw and other allies of Great Britain, served the Europeans as guides, and were traders. They traded corn, deer hides, bearskins and grease, beaver pelts, and bison hides and suet for utensils, guns, metal tools, and alcoholic beverages. Sometime in the mid-1700s they sent beautifully painted hides to the French king. These pictographic missiles, some of which may still be found at the Musee de l’Homme in Paris, showed scenes of hunting and warfare and the animal “crests” of the Quapaw clans and chiefs. When France ceded Louisiana to Spain in 1763, the Quapaw continued to be of strategic importance on the Mississippi River—evidenced by the fact that the Quapaw received 16 percent of the goodwill presents distributed to Indians in New Spain. Following the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, the Quapaw developed relations with the United States that were similar to those they had maintained with France and Spain.

The United States recognized the Quapaw claim to all the territory west of the Mississippi bounded by the Arkansas and Canadian Rivers on the north and the Red River on the south. By 1818, however, their territory had been reduced to a small reservation south of Little Rock and Arkansas Post. In 1824 they were asked to give up all of their land and move to the extreme southwest corner of present-day Arkansas, across the Red River and onto lands reserved for the Caddo Indians. Proud of the Quapaw reputation for never having shed the blood of white men, they acquiesced, signed a treaty, and threw their tribe on the mercy of the government. Chief Hekathon’s plea for just treatment was eloquent, but the tribe was forced on their own “Trail of Tears” during a terrible winter march.

The stay on the Red River proved short, as floods and epidemics split the tribe apart. Some returned to squat in the swamps of Arkansas, while others found refuge among Indian tribes along the Canadian River in Indian Territory (Oklahoma). Finally, in September 1834 the U.S. government granted the Quapaw a reservation of their own in the northeast corner of Indian Territory. The tribal headquarters and powwow grounds are today located on former reservation land near Quapaw, Okla.

Tallchief became the last hereditary chief in 1874. His daughter Maude Supernaw, until her death in 1972, continued to exercise the right to bestow clan names upon Quapaw children. Given in the Quapaw language, these names were different in meaning from their English names.

Political and economic affairs of the tribe were shared between the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs and an elected Quapaw chief and council between 1892 and 1956. At that time an elected business committee took over all tribal affairs, including lands and leases. The tribe now owns an industrial park, bingo hall, and convenience store. Each Fourth of July, a general council of all adult Quapaws who can trace their ancestry to the 1890 tribal roll meets at the tribal grounds near Quapaw, Okla., during a three-day public powwow.

GLORIA A. YOUNG
University of Arkansas

W. David Baird, The Quapaw Indians: A History of the Downstream People (1980); Gloria A. Young and Michael P. Hoffman, in Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 13: Plains, ed. Raymond DeMallie (2002).

 

Romanies

The Romani people are well represented among southern ethnic minorities. Romanies—popularly, though inaccurately, called “Gypsies”—maintain their distinctive language and way of life while remaining outside mainstream society. All Romani groups trace their ultimate heritage to 9th- or 10th-century India, but subsequent westward migration into Europe and from there to the Americas has scattered the original population, giving rise to a number of distinct ethnic subdivisions. In the South several of these subdivisions are represented, particularly the Romanichals, who came from the British Isles, and the Vlax (the x pronounced like ch in German achtung), who arrived later from southeastern Europe.

The first Romanies to reach the Americas came with Christopher Columbus on his third voyage in 1498 and were from Spain. The first to reach North America were probably those banished to serve in the Virginia plantations by Oliver Cromwell in 1664. The transportation of British Romanies to the American colonies continued sporadically until the mid-1800s, and the French began similar deportations to Louisiana after 1700. Spanish shipments to the same territory followed a proclamation issued in 1749; Romanies came as redemptioners from Germany to Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey following the Thirty Years’ War, and some of them eventually made their way south. The Vlax Romanies began coming to America in the middle of the 19th century, when 500 years of Romani slavery in the Balkan states ended.

Romanichals live throughout the South, probably numbering between 50,000 and 100,000. Particularly large communities are found in Texas, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Kentucky, and the Carolinas. Almost all own homes and land and at the same time participate in a variety of occupations, such as horse raising, blacktopping, roofing, and paving. Others involved in these occupations follow an annual migratory business circuit and move from campground to campground, living in motorized trailers. The Vlax Romanies arrange marriages and have little to do with the Romanichal population, whom they outnumber by perhaps five to one.

Romani culture requires that social contact with non-Romanies, whom the Vlax call gadjé (singular, gadjó) and the Romanichals call gorjers, be kept at a minimum. Part of their desire for separation stems from their ideology of “clean” and “polluted” states related to personal hygiene, sexual behavior, and food preparation. All outsiders are considered unclean (marimé in Vlax and mokadi in the Romanichal dialect). To avoid contact with the gadjé in the past, one man was often called the “Gypsy king” by the media, and he negotiated with the gadjé community, but Romani communities do not actually have kings or queens. Women dress modestly, keep their legs covered, and cover their heads if married. Otherwise, Romanies avoid calling attention to ethnic identity and emphasize keeping a low profile.

Negative stereotypes of “Gypsies” have fostered historical and contemporary prejudice against Romanies at both the popular and administrative levels; consequently, Romanies have had little motivation to draw attention to their ethnicity. One Mississippi law stated that “gypsies … for each county … shall be jointly and severally liable with his or her associates (to a fine of) two thousand dollars” (State Code, 27-17-191). Another law in Georgia required that “upon each company of gypsies engaged in trading or selling merchandise … $250 is to be collected” (Acts & Resolutions, 1927, Pt. 1 [ii].56). As a consequence, while Romani culture in the South is vigorous and in little danger of disappearing, the general public is hardly aware of it.

In recent years two independent movements, one sociopolitical and the other evangelical, have begun to bring changes within the Romani American population. The former has resulted in the creation of a national website called Patrin, the purpose of which is to bring news of national and international Gypsy-related matters to the Romani population, and the establishment of the Romani Archives and Documentation Center at the University of Texas at Austin. A number of ethnic organizations have also been created, such as SKOKRA and the U.S. Romani Alliance. The Christian evangelical movement has also led to the establishment of a newsletter, Romany Fires of Revival. While many Romanies are devout Eastern Orthodox Christians or Catholics, Protestant Romani churches, both Vlax and Romanichal, are now found in many southern cities, including Atlanta and Houston.

IAN HANCOCK
University of Texas at Austin

Irving Brown, Gypsy Fires in America: A Narrative of Life among the Romanies of the United States and Canada (1924); Ian Hancock, The Pariah Syndrome (1987), We Are the Romani People (2001); Andrew A. Marchbin, “A Critical History of the Origin and the Migration of the Gypsies” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 1939); Anne Sutherland, Gypsies: The Hidden Americans (1986).

 

Russians

The first Russians to inhabit North America carried out Imperial Russia’s colonial endeavors in Alaska and California in the late 18th century, but Russians have played several key roles in southern history. Ivan Vasilevich Turchaninoff (John Basil Turchin), who served as a colonel in the army of Russia’s czar Nicholas I before immigrating to the United States in 1856, became a brigadier general in the Union Army. His Eighth Brigade was based in Elizabethtown, Ky., and fought in Civil War campaigns in Tennessee and Georgia. St. Petersburg, Fla., was cofounded in 1888 by Peter Dementev-Demens (1849–1919), a railroad builder who named the city for his Russian birthplace.

The 2000 U.S. Census lists 2,652,214 persons with Russian ancestry living in the United States. These include both recent immigrants and first- and second-generation Russians born in the United States to immigrant parents or grandparents. The 2000 census also indicates that at least 706,000 persons over the age of five in the United States speak the Russian language at home. Historically, Russian immigrants formed communities around major cities, especially New York, but now such places as Sunny Isles Beach in South Florida are becoming known as “little Moscows.” According to the 1990 census, 44 percent of persons claiming Russian ancestry lived in the Northeast, while just 18 percent lived in the South. However, by 2000, more than 400,000 persons of Russian heritage lived in southern states, especially Florida (201,500), Texas (56,500), Virginia (45,000), and Georgia (32,000). Active resettlement programs for Russian Jews have been initiated throughout the South, including locales such as Houston and Chapel Hill, N.C. The largest populations of persons claiming Russian ancestry are in the southern cities of Houston, Atlanta, and south Florida’s Miami, Boca Raton, and Sunny Isles Beach.

Russians in the South work in all spheres of the economy, including the science and health care sectors, education, computer technology, the arts, service industries, and private business. Most Russian immigrants are well educated but may find the skills they acquired in the Soviet educational system difficult to apply in certain spheres of American science and industry.

Cultural programs, including concerts, films, art exhibitions, and other performances, help Russians in the South maintain a sense of community. Cities such as Atlanta and Miami frequently host exhibitions of Russian artists and concerts of popular Russian musicians. Video stores near Russian neighborhoods stock recently released Russian films. Russian and Russian-Jewish cuisine is a focal point for many communities of Russians in the South, and many southern cities boast an array of Russian specialty shops, restaurants, and cafés with nightly Russian music and advertisement signs in the Cyrillic alphabet. In communities with significant populations of new Russian immigrants, local stores now stock traditional Russian foods, vodka, and Ukrainian chocolates. Many southern communities are now even seeing the growing popularity of Russian and Turkish steam baths.

Russians mark special days, particularly birthdays and New Year’s Day, with lavish celebrations, usually in private homes and featuring Russian cuisine such as buckwheat pancakes, stuffed cabbage rolls, and salted herring. Russian Orthodox Christmas celebrations begin on 7 January in accordance with the old Julian calendar. Banned after the 1917 Russian Revolution, the holiday was not openly observed again in Russian until 1992. Russian southerners also may have the traditional Holy Supper on Christmas Eve—a meatless meal that begins with a symbolic porridge called kutya, which is eaten from a common pot. (The grain of the porridge represents hope, and the poppy seeds and honey used for flavor guarantee happiness and nights of untroubled sleep.) Christmas trees may be adorned with colored eggs, but these are more common at Easter, when they are made in two types: pisanki (ornamented and painted in two to four colors) and krashenki (unornamented and painted in one color). Decorated eggs are often given as Easter gifts.

The Russian Orthodox Church is central to the identity of Russians in the South. Sizable parishes include the Joy of All Who Sorrow Russian Orthodox Church in Cummins, Ga. (outside Atlanta), St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Church in Houston, and St. Vladimir Church in Miami. St. Nicholas (the patron saint of Russia) is also a popular dedication for Orthodox churches. Russian Jews are active in the congregations of synagogues throughout the South. While many Russian communities have historically formed around synagogues, Jewish community centers, and churches, today many Russians also utilize community-building resources such as the Internet.

SARAH D. PHILLIPS
Indiana University, Bloomington

Dan N. Jacobs and Ellen Frankel Paul, eds., Studies of the Third Wave: Recent Migration of Soviet Jews to the United States (1981); Paul R. Magocsi, The Russian Americans (1989); Viktor Petrov, ed., Russkie v Istorii Ameriki [Russians in American History] (1988); Dennis Shasha and Marina Shron, Red Blues: Voices from the Last Wave of Russian Immigrants (2002); Vladimir Wertsman, The Russians in America: A Chronology and Fact Book (1977).

 

Salzburgers

Late in 1731 Count Leopold von Firmian, the Roman Catholic prince-archbishop of Salzburg, Austria, told the 20,000–30,000 Lutherans in Salzburg that they must accept Catholic doctrine or be expelled. Many of those who left settled in German towns and provinces. Others, under the leadership of Pastor Samuel Urlsperger, pietist Lutheran pastor at Augsburg, secured a welcome to go to George Oglethorpe’s new colony of Georgia. The Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge in England also supported the Salzburgers’ immigration to Georgia. Leaving Rotterdam, Netherlands, on 8 January 1734, they reached Savannah on 12 March 1734. Other groups followed from 1734 to 1752.

Salzburgers were initially expected to adapt themselves to the English colonial lifestyle, but they preferred to settle outside the Savannah limits in order to retain their language and customs. Thirty miles northwest up the Savannah River, they established Ebenezer (a biblical name that means “stone of help”). Ebenezer was modeled after Savannah and divided into “tythings,” a sort of neighborhood that promoted familial living. Each tything had 10 households. The spiritual and secular leaders were Pastor Johann Martin Boltzius and Pastor Israel Christian Grounau, both of whom came to Ebenezer in 1734. The Ebenezer location was unfortunate: it had poor soil, malaria, and lowlying land that was prone to flooding. One-third of the group died in 1736.

In that year the Salzburgers moved to New Ebenezer, situated higher on the banks of the Savannah River. There, each family received a town lot and farmland. The new settlement was very successful agriculturally. Salzburgers introduced the first sawmill and silk mill in Georgia and the first gristmill and rice-stamping mill in the colonies. New Ebenzer also had the first Sunday church school and one of the first public schools in the southern colonies.

The Salzburgers also established the first orphanage in the American colonies at New Ebenezer in 1737. Pastor Boltzius modeled the project after his own orphanage in Halle, Germany, the center of German Lutheran pietism. (Credit for the first American orphanage is frequently and inaccurately attributed to George Whitefield, who established the Bethesda Orphanage near Savannah, Ga., in 1740.) The orphan house served as a refuge for the poor, widows, and the infirm and feebleminded, as a hospital for the sick, and as a school for children. Until a church was built, it also was used for all religious services, including daily evening worship for the whole settlement. The orphan house is now a museum.

Jerusalem Lutheran Church was first constructed as a frame building in 1741 and replaced in 1767–69 by one of the first brick structures in Georgia. With 21-inch thick walls and handmade bricks of local clay, some of which still bear fingerprints, the church is still in use today.

After the death of Boltzius in 1765, New Ebenezer went into decline. The British occupied and burned much of the town during the Revolutionary War and used the Jerusalem Church as a hospital and stable. Damaged by the war, New Ebenezer was never the same again.

In the post-Revolutionary period, New Ebenzer native John Adam Treutlen was elected as the first governor of Georgia in 1777. In 1782 the Georgia legislature met in New Ebenezer, which served as the first capital of Georgia for a short time. In 1830 the town, except for Jerusalem Church, burned, and during the Civil War General William T. Sherman used the church as his headquarters. Today, the church, a cemetery, and one house (built in 1755) are all that remain.

In 1925 the Georgia Salzburger Society was created to promote Salzburger heritage, and it still publishes a newsletter quarterly. Common surnames in the area today are Zeigler, Metzger, Seckinger, Lastinger, and Treutlen. Each Labor Day, Salzburger descendants have a heritage festival with a markt platz (a German-style marketplace selling farm products and crafts that were sold in the 19th century), heritage displays and lectures, posters about skills and trades Salzburger ancestors needed to survive in colonial Georgia, and traditional foods. Many participants dress in dirndls or other traditional attire. As the Huguenots wear a uniquely shaped cross, the Salzburgers adopted Martin Luther’s symbol of the swan in 1734, and descendants now wear swan pins.

DONALD S. ARMENTROUT
University of the South

George Fenwick Jones, The Georgia Dutch: From the Rhine and Danube to the Savannah, 1733–1783 (1992); George Fenwick Jones, The Salzburger Saga: Religious Exiles and Other Germans along the Savannah (1948); Carl Mauelshagen, Salzburg Lutheran Expulsion and Its Impact (1962); Mack Walker, The Salzburger Transaction: Expulsion and Redemption in Eighteenth-Century Germany (1992).

 

Sapponys

Formerly the Indians of Person County, the Sappony (or “Saponi”) Indian tribe is one of North Carolina’s small tribes with state, but not federal, recognition. Person County’s most significant precolonial Indian tribes included the Saponi, Tutelo, and the Occaneechi. The Sappony likely descend from these and other tribes. Some members are “triracial” (of Indian, European, and African origins). The Sappony once spoke a dialect of a Siouan language that was similar to those of the neighboring and related Tutelo and Occaneechi. Like these tribes, they also had settlements in Virginia.

About 1,000 persons claim tribal membership today. Most older members reside in the High Plains community of northern Person County, while a few live across the state line in Halifax County, Va. Many of the younger tribal members have settled elsewhere in North Carolina and the United States.

Early explorers noted that Indians moved freely within the region. Traveling in the mid-17th century, John Lederer made contact with the Occaneechi, Saponi, Tutelo, Eno, and other tribes that were relocating their villages to escape the warring Iroquois. In 1670 the Saponi moved from southwest of what is now Lynchburg, Va., to the junction of the Staunton and Dan Rivers, where the Occaneechi were already settled on one of three islands. The Tutelo later joined them. By the early 1700s the three tribes had moved south into North Carolina. The Occaneechi briefly settled on the Eno River in Orange County, and the Saponi and Tutelo located along the Yadkin River in Davidson County. For security reasons, they moved again across the Roanoke River and closer to Anglo settlements in Virginia, where later travelers met them.

According to William Byrd, the Saponi and Tutelo villages were located in the path of the Iroquois and Catawba Indians, and this prompted their move into North Carolina. Byrd found no settled Indians in the area of what is now Person County during his trips in the early 1700s.

Half a century later, in 1755, Governor Dobbs listed 14 men and 14 women of Saponi background in Granville County, which included present-day Person County. Some Sappony now claim descent from the 19th-century Cherokee “Green Martin” (Sa-mi-usdi, as he was called before he took the name “Green”). In 1850 Green moved in with a Person County Indian community and married the daughter of its largest landowners, William Epps (a Cherokee) and Nancy Stuart (of the Powhatan Confederacy). The Martins had seven children whose descendants are linked to the Sappony people. However, the present generation retains no living memory of cultural traditions or speech from those particular Indian ancestors.

Separate educational institutions helped maintain a sense of Indian identity. In the late 19th century two acres of land donated by Green Martin became home to an Indian school. A second school was constructed several years later, located east of the original. In 1904 Diotrion W. and Mary Epps deeded land for a third school in which the Indian children of Person County, as well as those living in Virginia, enrolled. A new school was built in 1925. An all-Indian high school, High Plains School, opened in 1948 with 24 students and closed only with integration in 1961.

Religious faith has also kept Sap-pony communities tightly knit. The first independent Indian church formed in 1830 at the High Plains settlement. Baptist, Holiness, and Methodist denominations are prevalent, although since the late 19th century many have wished to create an all-Indian Methodist conference.

For many years Person County depended upon agriculture, primarily tobacco, as the major source of employment and income. Most Indians now work in some type of industry rather than farming.

In 1913 the North Carolina General Assembly designated the group as the “Indians of Person County,” regardless of their clouded genealogy. Although not referencing a tribal name, the bill did state that the Indians had been known as “Cubans.” State recognition was unintentionally rescinded during the 1970s. In May 1997 the General Assembly passed another bill officially recognizing the Indians of Person County. In 2003 the General Assembly approved a name change to “Sappony.”

The Sappony are currently seeking federal recognition as American Indians. Living in distinct communities with a history of their own educational institutions and churches, the Sappony have maintained a sense of their own Indianness as they continue to adapt to changing social and economic conditions. Their current participation in powwows signals their Indian identity to both other Native Americans and to their non-Indian neighbors, who have always regarded them as different. A seven-member council governs the tribe and appoints the chief. Each council member represents one of the seven major surnames of tribal members. The Sappony have an annual gathering on Labor Day weekends.

THOMAS E. ROSS
University of North Carolina at Pembroke

Madelin Hall Eaker, The Heritage of Person County, vol. 2 (1983); Douglas L. Rights, The American Indian in North Carolina (1947); Thomas E. Ross, American Indians in North Carolina: Geographic Interpretations (1999); Ruth Y. Wetmore, First on the Land: The North Carolina Indians (1975).

 

Scots, Highland

Highland immigration to the South was most dramatic in the colonial period. Highlanders fleeing the late 18th- and 19th-century “Clearances” more commonly went to Canada. Colonial immigration to the South is often romantically portrayed as a government-enforced exile of Jacobites. The last Jacobite Rising to replace a Stuart on the British throne ended with the 1746 defeat at Culloden of Prince Charles Edward Stuart. Fewer than 200 Jacobites were transported to the American colonies. While shiploads of political prisoners may not have swarmed southern shores, the social, political, and economic aftermath of Culloden drove Highland emigration patterns. When high rents became unbearable, “tacksmen”—military leaders who also leased land to clan members for their chiefs—often organized their clansfolks’ exodus. Highlanders frequently immigrated communally in groups of hundreds at a time and resettled together.

North Carolina attracted more Highland Scots in the 18th century than any other state. Some may have arrived by 1729, but large-scale immigration began about 1732, increased in the 1760s, and peaked in 1774–75 before being temporarily banned. The majority (estimates vary between 15,000 and 30,000) came to North Carolina’s Cape Fear Valley, including the Jacobite heroine Flora MacDonald and the Gaelic poet John MacRae (Iain Mac-Mhurchaidh). The “Mayflower” of the Cape Fear Scots was a ship called the Thistle that sailed in 1739 with 350 passengers, mostly from Argyllshire. Later Highlanders came from Ross, Sutherland, and the Isle of Skye. A much later group, organized by the British Napier Commission, arrived in 1884.

Most immigrants were Presbyterians, but it was not until 1758 that the first Gaelic-speaking minister, James Campbell, arrived with the simultaneous founding of Barbecue, Long-street, and Bluff churches. English replaced Gaelic as a primary language by the mid-19th century. In the late 20th-century a few elderly descendants of 18th-century Highlanders, some still farming land settled by their immigrant ancestors, could repeat Bible verses in Gaelic. Others actively study the language and compete in Gaelic singing competitions called mòds.

Descendants of Cape Fear Valley Highlanders were pioneers in Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Texas, and they settled “Argyle” in Florida’s Panhandle in the 1820s. Colonel John McKinnon, a signer of the Florida state constitution, was among them, as were McLeans, McCaskills, Gunns, and MacBrooms. Several early settlers have memorials in the Euchee Valley Presbyterian Church Cemetery and are otherwise remembered at Argyle’s annual Highland Games.

Scottish Americans in 19th-century and ancient Celtic dress at the Loch Norman Highland Games near Charlotte, N.C., 1994 (Celeste Ray, photographer)

Highlanders also contributed to the settlement, politics, and place names of Georgia. In 1736 trustees for the colony of Georgia solicited hundreds of Highlander families (Mackays and Mackintoshes predominant among them) to settle the pine barrens of the Georgia coast and protect the fledgling colony from Spanish invasion. Under military governor James Oglethorpe, the Highland Rangers and the Highland Independent Company of Foot guarded the settlement first called New Inverness, then Darien, until it was disbanded in 1749. In the 1750s Highlanders moved out from the settlement to raise cattle and begin the lumber business that would remain the focus of Darien’s industry until the Civil War. The town of Darien (population 1,800) in McIntosh County holds a “Scottish Day” in March, and a living history unit called the “Oglethorpe Highlanders,” set about 1742, reenacts the settlement period.

In contemporary Scottish heritage celebrations, descendants of Lowland Scot and Scots-Irish immigrants also embrace a Highland vision of Scottish identity engendered by Sir Walter Scott long after their ancestors left Scotland or Ulster. Today, descendants of various Scottish ethnic groups commemorate their heritage by joining societies modeled on the Highland clan system and donning “clan tartans” largely invented in the 19th century. Southern states were the first to adopt state tartans, and before Tartan Day (6 April) became a national holiday, Tennessee declared one in 1996, followed by North Carolina in 1997. Currently, about half of American Scottish-related societies are southern based, and more than one-third of America’s almost 250 annual Highland Games and festivals occur in the region—the most prestigious being the Grandfather Mountain Highland Games near Linville, N.C. (founded 1956). In addition to standard athletic, bagpiping, and dance competitions, Highland Games in the South have a regional style, often devoting time for religious services and showcasing barbecue or Lowcountry boils, fiddling, clogging, or calf roping depending on the subregion of the South in which they occur.

CELESTE RAY
University of the South

Duane Meyer, The Highland Scots of North Carolina, 1732–1776 (1961); Michael Newton, We’re Indians Sure Enough: The Legacy of the Scottish Highlanders in the United States (2001); Anthony Parker, Scottish Highlanders in Colonial Georgia: The Recruitment, Emigration, and Settlement at Darien, 1735–1748 (1997); Celeste Ray, Highland Heritage: Scottish Americans in the American South (2001), Transatlantic Scots (2005).

 

Scots-Irish

The Scots-Irish from Ulster were one of the largest immigrant groups to arrive in the North American colonies in the 18th century. Traditional estimates suggest 250,000 arrived before the American Revolution; recent scholarship has revised that number to 130,000 for the period from 1680 to 1815. Ulster immigration continued well into the 19th century. In 18th- and 19th-century America, these immigrants were identified as “Irish,” “Protestant Irish,” or “Scotch-Irish,” and only rarely as “Scots.” They have been called “Ulster-Scots” in Britain and Ireland in recent times and “Scots-Irish” in America since the 19th century. The complexity of their origins created ambiguity about their name.

Their ancestors were predominantly Border people from Lowland Scotland and northwestern England. They were an overwhelmingly Protestant (mostly Presbyterian), impoverished, and English-speaking people who sought a better life in Ulster when King James I established the “plantations” of Ulster in 1609 to consolidate Britain’s conquest of Gaelic Catholic Ireland. The frontier environment of Ulster recast the culture of this immigrant community in the 17th century. The Ulster experience of tenantry, disenfranchisement by a landowning Anglican elite, and hostility from the Irish Catholic majority redefined them. The Scots-Irish immigrants who left Ulster for America in the 18th century were no longer in any sense simply “Scots.”

Trade routes and geography combined to lead most Scots-Irish immigrants to the South. They moved from the Delaware Valley southwest along the Great Wagon Road into Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and the Carolina piedmont. Periodically, smaller numbers of Ulster immigrants arrived at southern ports such as Charleston, Savannah, and Wilmington. Concentrations of Scots-Irish settlements grew in several places along inland routes. In such “cultural hearths”—Lancaster and York Counties, Penn., Rockbridge County, Va., and the region between the Yadkin-Pee Dee and Catawba Rivers in the Carolinas—they were exposed to powerful new cultural influences. There they demonstrated a remarkable adaptability to new physical environments and to a wide range of ethnic influences, including those of other Europeans, Native Americans, and African Americans. From those cultural hearths they launched further migrations into the South, settling in later generations throughout Appalachia and west and southwest to the Ozarks and the Gulf Coast region.

The cultural adaptability of the Scots-Irish has made them difficult to identify. They did contribute to a rural cultural synthesis that characterized the southern Backcountry, including settlement patterns marked by a preference for dispersed single-family homesteads rather than nucleated villages; a mixed agriculture that emphasized open-range livestock grazing and summer herding to upland pastures; and distinctive language use, storytelling, and musical traditions. Backcountry culture also included a distinctive Presbyterianism that arose in Ulster and was characterized by an enthusiasm for evangelical open-field gatherings, or “holy fairs.” These elements of their old-country traditions were especially well-suited to the southern Backcountry. At the same time, change and adaptation were an essential part of the Scots-Irish experience. Presbyterianism provides such an example. The Presbyterian insistence on a seminary-trained clergy and active participation in the synodal structure of the church hindered the faith in more remote communities such as those in Appalachia and the Ozarks. Nevertheless, even there the Scots-Irish carried their Ulster Calvinism into their new Baptist and Methodist churches. In much of the southern Backcountry, Presbyterianism endured as a marker of the Scots-Irish presence.

The Scots-Irish are a subject of myth within American immigration traditions. Many Americans proudly claim Scots-Irish ancestry with only a vague notion—too often shaped by uninformed stereotypes of Celticness, independence, clannishness, violence, and love of place—of what that legacy entails. For many recently, Highland Scots imagery has mistakenly come to represent Scots-Irish identity.

H. TYLER BLETHEN
Western Carolina University

CURTIS W. WOOD
Western Carolina University

H. Tyler Blethen and Curtis W. Wood Jr., From Ulster to Carolina: The Migration of the Scots-Irish to Southwestern North Carolina, revised ed. (1998); H. Tyler Blethen and Curtis W. Wood Jr., eds., Ulster and North America: Transatlantic Perspectives on the Scots-Irish (1997); David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989); James G. Leyburn, The Scots-Irish: A Social History (1962); Patrick Griffin, The People with No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots-Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689–1764 (2001); Celeste Ray, ed., Transatlantic Scots (2005); Marianne S. Wokeck, Trade in Strangers: The Beginnings of Mass Migration to North America (1999).

 

Seminoles and Miccosukees

Descended from late prehistoric-era moundbuilding cultures of the interior Southeast, the Seminole and Miccosukee people were settled in the major river drainages of Georgia and Alabama by the era of European colonial contact in the 17th century. Depopulation and shifting settlement patterns initiated by European contact in the 1540s changed aspects of traditional native culture. By the 1700s many native groups were actively involved in an English-based deerskin trade connecting them to European economic and political networks.

By mid-century, as Spain, France, and England struggled for control over the Gulf Coast, bands of Creeks (as they were then called) began moving south into the Florida peninsula. Florida’s native people, decimated by European disease, slave raids from the Georgia and Carolina coasts, and the destruction of the Spanish missions, were now few in number and living in isolated swamp refuges. The Creek transplanted their farming way of life to the Florida hammocks and began herding cattle across the prairies of the old Spanish ranchos. Distancing themselves from the politics of the Creek Confederacy and taking on their own identity, they became known as the Seminole, from the Spanish word cimarron for “wild one” or “runaway.”

When Florida became a territory of the United States in 1821, General Andrew Jackson quickly implemented plans for removing the estimated 5,000 Seminoles and attacked Seminole towns deep in the Spanish colony, striking as far south as the Suwannee River. Between 1817 and 1858 the U.S. government engaged in three wars with the Seminole. The most consequential of these, the Second Seminole War (1835–42), resulted in the forced removal of nearly 4,000 Seminoles to Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma (where many of the 12,000 members of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma now reside). By 1860 fewer than 200 Seminoles remained in Florida in the deep fastness of the Big Cypress Swamp and the scrub forests around Lake Okeechobee. A farming way of life was replaced by a hunting-fishing-gathering subsistence more suitable for life in the south Florida swamps. With the possible exception of the Pine Island Ridge settlement, towns did not exist. People lived in small clan camps occupied by families related matrilineally. By the end of the 1800s, tentative contact with settlers and traders in the areas of present-day Miami and Fort Myers brought food and manufactured goods to the Seminole in exchange for animal pelts, alligator skins, and bird plumes. Missionaries and government agents soon followed, and the Seminole again were inevitably drawn into the affairs of the outside world.

The contemporary Seminole and Miccosukee people are descended from those few survivors of the Seminole wars remaining in Florida after 1858. By the 1920s some Seminoles began moving onto federal reservation lands set aside for them between 1907–11 in Collier, Martin, and Broward Counties. By 1950 the reservation Seminoles were participating in a number of government programs and filed a land claims suit under the conditions of the Indian Claims Commission Act of 1946. One faction further pushed for federal recognition, which was approved in 1957 with the formation of the Seminole Tribe of Florida, now based in Hollywood, Fla. Another group living along the Tamiami Trail (U.S. 41), who had not supported the land claims suit, organized separately as the Miccosukee Tribe of Florida and was granted federal recognition in 1962. Seminole tribe members speak two distinct native languages: Mikasuki and Creek-Seminole (Muscogee). Members of the Miccosukee tribe are predominantly Mikasuki speakers.

Today, the 2,600 members of the Seminole Tribe of Florida and the 500 Miccosukees are striving for economic self-sufficiency through a mixed strategy based on gaming, agriculture, tourism, and diversified corporate interests. Both groups maintain a strong connection to their cultural past. The traditional Green Corn dance still occurs in early summer. The dance emphasizes purification and social harmony and reinforces clan bonds. Participants congregate in clan camps organized around the dance circle. Among the Seminole, eight clans now exist, although according to both written and oral sources there were more in the recent past. The present clans are Snake, Wind, Tallahassee, Otter, Bird, Little Bird, Panther, and Bear. Seminoles stress exogamy in the selection of marriage partners.

While Seminoles and Miccosukees viewed formal education as an intrusion of the outside world just a generation ago, it is now a top priority. Boosted by casino revenues, tribal education initiatives fund programs spanning preschool through college, with scholarships covering tuition, books, and housing. Challenges still remain, but an increasing number view education as a path to economic independence without sacrificing their cultural identity. Seminole and Miccosukee pride in identifying as the “unconquered people” bodes well for their cultural survival.

BRENT R. WEISMAN
University of South Florida

James W. Covington, The Seminoles of Florida (1993); Harry A. Kersey Jr., An Assumption of Sovereignty (1996); John K. Mahon and Brent R. Weisman, in The New History of Florida, ed. Michael Gannon (1996); William C. Sturtevant, in North American Indians in Historical Perspective, ed. Eleanor Burke Leacock and Nancy Oestrich Lurie (1971); Brent R. Weisman, Unconquered People: Florida’s Seminole and Miccosukee Indians (1999).

 

Shawnees

The Shawnee are a Native American people with a complex history spanning the whole of the southern United States and much of the Ohio River Valley region. By the end of the 20th century, the Shawnee were universally fluent in English, but some tribal members also continued using their tribal language. The Shawnee language belongs to the Algonquian language family. The name Shawnee derives from their own ethnonym, which means “person of the South.”

At the time of contact with Europeans, the Shawnee homeland was in what are today the states of Ohio and Kentucky, but during the colonial era the Shawnee ranged widely over eastern North America and lived in association with many other groups, including the Iroquois, Delaware, Yuchi, Creek, Kickapoo, and Caddo. At least since European contact, the whole of the Shawnee people have never lived in a single contiguous settlement. During the 18th century Shawnee settlements existed in the present-day states of Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, and Indiana. In the 19th century American expansion policies pushed the Shawnee west, where they settled in present-day Ohio, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas. In the later 19th century the Shawnee settled permanently in what is today Oklahoma. The “Eastern Shawnee” are found near the town of Miami in northeastern Oklahoma. The “Loyal Shawnee” reside in the vicinity of White Oak and Vinita, where they are settled on land obtained from the Cherokee Nation. The “Absentee Shawnee” live near the towns of Shawnee and Little Axe. (The designation “absentee” refers to those not living on the Shawnee reservation in Kansas when it was allotted.)

Historically, the Shawnee shared a basic economy with other Native American groups from eastern North America. Hunting and farming supplemented participation in the European fur trade, through which the Shawnee obtained manufactured goods. Like other southeastern Indian groups, the Shawnee long participated in a frontier-exchange economy in which there was considerable cultural, social, and economic exchange—not only between the Shawnee and their native allies, but also between these groups and the European and African populations found on the southern, and later western, frontier. For example, much that is distinctive about southern foodways can be traced back to this world of cultural exchange. As a token of their aboriginal southern heritage, the Shawnee possess at least 15 different forms of cornbread, one of which is the centerpiece of the annual “Bread Dance” ceremonies. They also continue to grow tribal heirloom varieties of corn and to grind cornmeal by hand.

Given their complex settlement history, traditional Shawnee social organization is difficult to characterize. Familial interactions revolved around a patrilineal “Omaha” type kinship system. Individuals also belonged to a special kind of “clan” or “name group” based on the “Indian” name one is given at birth. Finally, in addition to belonging to one of three modern tribes, Shawnees live in local settlements established around a ceremonial life.

The traditional religion of the Shawnee is based on a yearly cycle of ceremonies linked to the change of season, the yearly round of economic activities, and a gendered division of labor in which men are closely associated with hunting and warfare and women are responsible for horticulture and domestic activities. Ceremonies combine daytime rituals with all-night social dances. All communal rituals serve both as a thanksgiving for the bounty provided by the Shawnee Creator and the natural world and as a petition for continued well-being.

In addition to communitywide ceremonies, Shawnee families observe a number of rituals domestically, including first-fruits feasts, ancestral memorials, and baby namings. Some Shawnees have adopted various Protestant faiths, and many others have taken up the beliefs and practices of the Native American Church or Peyote Religion as a compliment to traditional ceremonialism.

Living today on the western margins of the American South, the Shawnee are socioeconomically integrated into the modern United States, but they also are among the most culturally conservative American Indian populations in the region. They impressively preserve their own language, religion, community order, and customs despite centuries of forced relocation and policies aimed at either destroying them or forcing them to abandon their heritage for European traditions. The famous Shawnee chief and orator Tecumseh galvanized the opinions of many American Indian peoples against such colonial policies in the early 1800s, and the Shawnee today remain important advocates for the preservation of distinctly native ways of life.

JASON BAIRD JACKSON
Indiana University

Charles Callender, in Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 15: Northeast, ed. Bruce G. Trigger (1978); James H. Howard, Shawnee! The Ceremonialism of a Native American People and Its Cultural Background (1981).

 

Spanish

Spain was the first European power to establish and impose a culture upon the aboriginal inhabitants of the American South. In 1513 Juan Ponce de Leon sighted a land mass he named La Florida. A series of ambitious explorations and expeditions brought Spanish settlers and missionaries to the American Southeast, the gateway to North America. Expeditions by Pánfilo de Narváez (1528) and Hernando de Soto (1539) explored large portions of Florida and the Southeast, bringing contagious diseases to some of the region’s most populous Indian settlements. Imported Andalusian cattle and pigs thrived in the New World.

Spanish explorers reached as far north as Virginia, and the Spanish presence contributed to the founding of St. Augustine, Mobile, and Pensacola. A vigorous Franciscan missionary system shaped early attitudes and relationships toward Native Americans and African slaves. Spain was ultimately unsuccessful in maintaining its empire, ceding Louisiana (which it had gained in 1763) to France in 1800 and Florida to the United States in 1821. Another legacy of the modern South, Texas, remained a part of the Spanish borderlands until Mexican independence in 1821.

Despite the inability to sustain settlements in the United States, Spanish culture infused the South with a distinctive spirit. Spanish ways influenced the legal systems, land-use patterns, traditions of self-government, and economic affairs of Louisiana, Texas, and Florida. Ranching, with its colorful traditions, owes much to Spanish customs. Spain’s Roman Catholicism provided the first European religious influence on the southern landscape. New Orleans, after the fire of 1788, was rebuilt in the Spanish design, characterized by wrought-iron grillwork, shaded patios, arcades, and fountains. The Spanish also added to the cosmopolitan nature of Louisiana, most notably in the Delta, where Isleños from the Canary Islands farmed in settlements such as New Iberia. Today, the Spanish language in Louisiana survives on the Delacroix Islands.

Spanish settlements were rare on the eve of the Civil War; only Louisiana claimed more than 1,000 Spanish immigrants. Beginning in the 1850s, the pace of Spanish emigration quickened because of economic, political, and diplomatic developments, as Spain wished to increase its loyalist population abroad. Key West emerged as a significant refuge during the Ten Years’ War in Cuba (1868–78). A number of Spanish cigar manufacturers relocated their beleaguered factories in Key West, creating a thriving American institution with the skills imported from Cuba and Spain.

Later, during the mass influx of “new” immigrants between 1890 and 1921, relatively few Spaniards entered the United States, and even fewer migrated to the South. Spain encouraged emigration to its own colonies, especially Cuba, and Florida became a safety valve in times of political turmoil for Hispanics on that island. Tampa, Fla., evolved into the greatest Spanish American enclave outside of New York City. In 1885 Spanish manufacturers Vicente Martínez Ybor and Ignacio Haya, after considering offers from Galveston, Mobile, and Pensacola, chose Tampa as the new center for their cigar industry. Ybor City, organized as a company town in 1886 and soon incorporated into Tampa, attracted thousands of tabaqueros (Spanish, Cubans, and Italians), called “Latin” in the vernacular. By 1900 over 1,000 Spanish workers—many in highly skilled positions—had settled in Tampa, providing the organizing genius for the city’s 100 cigar factories. In contrast, the next-largest Spanish center in the South was New Orleans, with 493 Spaniards. By 1920 almost 4,000 Spaniards (and 5,000 Cubans) had created a cohesive Latin culture in Tampa.

Spanish immigrants left a rich legacy of organizations. In 1887 Spanish doctors organized La Iguala, the first of many medical cooperatives in Tampa; these group enterprises aroused antipathy from the American medical establishment. Spaniards also erected magnificent clubhouses to house their mutual aid societies, Centro Español and Centro Asturiano. These societies provided complete medical care with the erection of modern hospitals amid a thriving cultural milieu. During the Spanish-American War in 1898, the U.S. Army took over Centro Español. During the New Deal, the Centro Asturiano housed America’s only WPA Spanish-language theater. The stringent immigration quotas imposed in 1924 severely curtailed the Spanish population flow to America, an act especially injurious to the Spanish because of the imbalance of men over women.

A small but forceful group of Spanish anarchists coalesced in Ybor City between the 1890s and 1920s, serving as social critics and intellectual leaders. They supplied a class ideology that helped shape a labor consciousness of lasting power. Moreover, through their clubs, newspapers, educational work, and debating forums, they articulated a leftist orientation to the social problems of the day. By the 1920s the radical edge of the Ybor City labor movement had dulled. The labor wars of attrition had taken their toll, as had vigilante police tactics, especially evident during the long strikes of 1901, 1910, and 1920 and the Red Scare (1918–19).

The South’s trajectory has come full circle in the new millennium. A region once part of New Spain has again witnessed an astounding upsurge of hispanidad. The South’s Hispanic population (principally Mexican outside Florida) exploded in the 1980s and 1990s. Hispanic population growth was especially dramatic in states that had historically hosted relatively few immigrants. North Carolina’s Hispanic population grew by almost 400 percent in the 1990s, only slightly higher than Arkansas (337 percent) and Georgia (300 percent).

GARY R. MORMINO
University of South Florida

Gilbert Din, The Canary Islanders of Louisiana (1988); R. A. Gomez, The Americas (July 1962); Gary Mormino, Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida (2005); George Pozzetta and Gary Mormino, The Immigrant World of Ybor City (1987); Southern Folklore Quarterly (1937–41); David Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (1992); Glenn Westfall, Don Vicente Martínez Ybor, the Man and His Empire (1987).

 

Swiss

As many as 10,000 Swiss may have settled in the South in the colonial era. By 1790 the descendants of Swiss colonial immigrants are thought to have numbered 389,000. Immigration continued throughout the 19th century, and 1920 census estimates revealed that 1.019 million Americans were of Swiss descent. Later in the 20th century, Swiss professionals pursued careers in industrial or research centers and have settled in significant numbers in southern towns such as Spartanburg, S.C. Over 86,000 southerners indicated Swiss as their first ancestry in the 2000 census.

The first known Swiss on southern soil was Diebold von Erlach, a member of the French Huguenot expedition establishing Charlesfort (in present-day South Carolina) in 1563. In 1607 some “Switzers” served as craftsmen at Jamestown, and in 1687 Jean François Gignilliat of Vevey, Switzerland, received a 3,000-acre land grant from the South Carolina Proprietors. In 1709 Baron Christoph von Graffenried established New Bern, N.C. In 1732 Jean Pierre Purry founded Purrysburg 20 miles upriver from Savannah, Ga., and brought some 450 people to the Carolinas, among them the portrait painter Jeremiah Theus. Johannes Tobler settled in new Windsor and led about 100 Swiss to South Carolina. John J. Zubly [Züblin] from St. Gallen, a pastor in Savannah, Ga., served as Georgia delegate to the Second Continental Congress, but he opposed independence. Between the 1750s and 1780s the French Swiss Henry Bouquet, the brothers Prévost (Jacques, Augustin, and Marc), and Frédéric Haldimand were high-ranking officers in British service. Three insightful novels by Carol Williams of Lexington, S.C., feature 18th-century Swiss immigrants in the Congarees.

In 1817 the Virginia lawyer William Wirt, born to Swiss immigrants in Bladensburg, Md., became U.S. attorney general. In 1848 French-Swiss “Plymouth Brethren” formed a religious community in Knoxville, Tenn. Among numerous Swiss who served in the Confederate army during the Civil War was the three-time congressman from Tennessee, Brigadier General Felix K. Zollicoffer, whose family hailed from Canton St. Gallen. Henry Hotze was born in Zurich, grew up in Mobile, Ala., and was an effective propagandist of the southern cause in Europe. In 1865 Henry Wirz from Zurich was appointed commandant of Georgia’s Andersonville Prison for Union soldiers and later was executed by the U.S. government on controversial mistreatment charges. In the 1880s Peter Staub of Bilten, Canton Glarus, a businessman and three-time mayor of Knoxville, Tenn., promoted the settlement Gruetli-Lager in Grundy County, which by 1886 counted some 330 Swiss. In 1881 two Swiss entrepreneurs initiated Bernstadt, a settlement in Laurel County, Ky., which by 1888 was home to about 1,000 people; other Swiss went to East Bernstadt, Grünheim, and Crab Orchard in Lincoln County. Cities such as Louisville, Ky., had in 1889 some 900 Swiss who, like those in other cities, founded benevolent and social associations whose members congregated in the “Swiss Park” from about 1850 to the 1990s.

Thoni descendants dedicating a historical marker to an ancestral Swiss immigrant in Grundy County, Tenn. (Photograph courtesy of Lynda Harper, archivist, Grundy County Swiss Historical Society)

The U.S. Census counted 134 Swiss in Texas in 1850 and 453 in 1860. Jacob Boll (1828–80) worked as a botanist who identified 32 Texas species of extinct vertebrates. In Dallas, which in the late 1880s counted some 200 Swiss, Benjamin Lang served as a post–Civil War mayor and U.S. district commissioner. Getulius Kellersberger (1821–1900), in Texas since the late 1840s, was a noted engineer and surveyor who served in the Confederate army. George H. Hermann (1843–1914) of Houston and Henry Rosenberg (1824–93) of Galveston were successful businessmen and philanthropists, while the Italian Swiss Cesar M. Lombardi (1845–1919) was a Houston grain merchant and publisher. Edward W. Eberle (1864–1929), born of Swiss parents in Denton, northwest of Dallas, became superintendent of the Naval Academy in 1915 and was involved in the U.S. Navy’s modernization efforts.

Historically, most Swiss throughout the South lived so-called ordinary lives, but a good number of their descendants are actively involved in shaping the South’s vibrant culture. Today, Swiss organizations exist in many large cities across the South, including Nashville, Tenn., Sarasota, Fla., Houston, Tex., Charlotte, N.C., and Spartanburg, S.C.—many of which have popular “fondue evenings” and Swiss musical and dance performances.

LEO SCHELBERT
University of Illinois at Chicago

John Paul von Grüningen, ed., Swiss in the United States (1940); Adelrich Steinach, ed., Swiss Colonists in 19th-Century America (in German, 1889; with new introduction and indexes by Urspeter Schelbert, 1995); Leo Schelbert, ed., America Experienced: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Accounts of Swiss Immigrants to the United States (2004); Herman E. Baumann, Baldwin County’s Bit of Switzerland (1999).

 

Syrians and Lebanese

Arab immigrants from Syria and Lebanon first began to arrive in America in the late 1870s. About 25 percent settled, either initially or eventually, in southern states. Almost exclusively Christian, these early Arab immigrants included a few Protestants and mostly sects affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church (Maronites, Melkites, and Chaldean Catholics) and with Eastern Orthodox churches. The persecution of Christians in the Muslim Ottoman Empire encouraged emigration, as did economics, the desire to escape military duty, and the lure of America.

Most Syrian and Lebanese immigrants were unskilled and subsisted in their native land on small family farms. The modified plantation system they encountered in the South, characterized by tenancy and sharecropping, was completely alien. Many hoped to make money and return to their homeland and were not interested in settling on farmland. The preferred occupation of these early immigrants was peddling household goods from farmhouse to farmhouse. Peddling required little capital and minimal command of English. The South’s vast rural areas, lacking easy access to stores, provided a ready market, as did the coal-mining towns of Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia.

By the 1890s peddlers had become suppliers and, eventually, shopkeepers. By 1910 Syrian and Lebanese communities thrived in places such as Beaumont and Texarkana, Tex., Valdosta, Ga., Lake Charles, La., Vicksburg, Miss., and Roanoke, Va. A Syrian Business Directory of 1908 listed approximately 50 Arab-owned businesses in Alabama, 60 in Georgia, 65 in Mississippi, over 100 in Virginia, and over 150 in both Louisiana and Texas; over 70 percent of these businesses were grocers and dry goods stores.

As Arab immigrants became more settled and visible, they encountered considerable prejudice. In 1907 Alabama congressman John Burnett, protesting the influx of immigrants, declared, “I regard the Syrian and peoples from other parts of Asia Minor as the most undesirable, and the South Italians, Poles, and Russians next.” In Georgia (1909) and South Carolina (1914 and 1923), court cases challenged the right of Syrians and Lebanese to naturalization.

In response to prejudice, and to preserve their heritage from the forces of assimilation, Syrians and Lebanese began to form local clubs and associations. In 1931 over 400 representatives from dozens of these clubs throughout the South created an umbrella organization, the Southern Federation of Syrian Lebanese American Clubs. The federation’s annual convention became an important political venue for discussing common concerns and a social venue for those seeking suitable spouses. Along with the local club, the church served as the center of social and cultural life for Syrians and Lebanese. Although most were Christians, the early immigrants were members of uniquely Middle Eastern sects, and thus tended to build their own churches instead of joining established ones; this also allowed them to conduct religious services in their own language. Under pressure to assimilate, however, some left their “ethnic” churches in the mid-20th century for Roman Catholic or Protestant congregations, and many Syrians and Lebanese changed or modified their names; for example, “Tannous” became “Thomas,” “Elias” became “Ellis,” and “Haddad” became “Smith.”

The Ellises, a first-generation Lebanese American family, mother with children, Port Gibson, Miss., 1921 (Photograph courtesy of James G. Thomas Jr.)

By the 1970s the grandchildren of the early Syrian and Lebanese immigrants identified as Americans and southerners. Exogamy has become common, and the primary links to a Syrian or Lebanese heritage are church affiliations; foodways such as kibbe (baked ground lamb), tabouleh (a bulgur wheat salad), and stuffed grape leaves; and the use of a few Arabic words of endearment. The Southern Federation of Syrian Lebanese American Clubs remains active and as of 2006 had affiliated clubs in every southern state.

A new wave of immigration from the Middle East began in the 1970s, motivated by civil war in Lebanon, general regional conflict, and a relaxation in U.S. immigration laws. Many of these new immigrants are Muslims. Some come to attend universities and later decide to stay. Many are professionals or academicians and tend to settle in locales such as Houston, Miami, Atlanta, Birmingham, and the suburbs of Washington, D.C., in Northern Virginia.

Noted southerners of Syrian or Lebanese ancestry include Dr. Michael Debakey, renowned heart surgeon; U.S. congressmen Nick Rahall (West Virginia) and Chris John (Louisiana); Joe Robbie, former owner of the NFL’s Miami Dolphins; Bobby Rahal, professional race car driver; Joseph Jamail, prominent Houston defense attorney; Robert C. Khayat, chancellor of the University of Mississippi; Richard Ieyoub, attorney general of Louisiana; and Tommy Hazouri, former mayor of Jacksonville.

WILLIAM MARK HABEEB
Arlington, Virginia

Naff Arab-American Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Eric J. Hooglund, ed., Crossing the Waters: Arabic-Speaking Immigrants to the United States before 1940 (1987); Gregory Orfalea, Before the Flames: A Quest for the History of Arab Americans (1988); Afif Tannous, American Sociological Review (June 1943).

 

Texans

While on the South’s western border, Texas (particularly the eastern half of the state) has a southern history. Some Texans identify with the South, but all Texans have a distinct identity within the region and the nation. The modern history of Texas traditionally dates from 1822, when settlers from the Upper South began to take advantage of the Spanish and then the Mexican governments’ offers of free land to farming families who would settle in this outermost part of Mexico. By 1835 Texas was heavily populated with these white southerners and their slaves, who together outnumbered the native Indian groups and the pockets of Mexican settlers at the forts of Bexar and Nacogdoches.

In 1836 the six-week Texas Revolution made the former colony of Mexico an independent nation. The trauma of the deaths of those defending the Alamo and the final victory over the Mexican president Santa Anna at the battle of San Jacinto became defining moments for Texans. Part of the “heroic” westward expansion of the times, early Texas history fostered a unique identity within the South.

During the years when Texas was a separate nation under the larger-than-life president of the republic, Sam Houston, Texans developed a strong sense of identity that endures to the present. At his presidential inauguration, George W. Bush tellingly read the famous letter by William B. Travis. Travis was commander of the Alamo and his letter, addressed “To the People of Texas and All Americans in the World,” declared he would never surrender or retreat and ended with the vow, “Victory or Death.”

The history and identity of Texans have become fixed in the American imagination and mythologized in history books, novels, and films (The Alamo, Hud, The Last Picture Show, Giant, Urban Cowboy, and Lonesome Dove are among the most memorable Texas-themed movies). The sometimes fierce sense of difference from other Americans that Texans profess is one that newcomers to the state readily adopt as they become part of the Texas culture. Often this means taking on the cowboy persona—an antimodernity, antiintellectual attitude that extols love of sky and spaciousness, closeness to the land, willingness to “go it alone,” and common sense folk knowledge. Texan identity is also based on a wry, ironic sense of humor combined with blunt speech, exaggeration, and bluster. Humorous writers such as J. Frank Dobie, William Brammer, Molly Ivins, Larry L. King, and Kinky Friedman and politicians such as Sam Houston, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and Ann Richards have all played up a Texan identity with self-deprecating jest and hyperbole.

Besides Anglo-Protestant Texans, Mexicans have been the most influential cultural group in Texas. They share Catholicism with the many Irish, German, and Czech immigrants to the state. Many Hispanic Texans speak Spanish or “Tex-Mex” (a hybrid of Spanish and English), eat Tex-Mex cuisine (tamales, tortilla soup, and chili), and wear Mexican-derived vaquero (cowboy) hats and boots. In Texas politics, patron-client relationships are the norm, and the Mexican style of storytelling and exaggeration has become a Texas tradition.

While immigrants from the Upper South brought slaves with them to Texas, Mexicans there were opposed to slavery. After Texas independence, slavery was a primary reason why the United States was reluctant to make Texas a state. Texas acquired statehood in 1845, seceded from the Union in 1860, and fought with the Confederacy. Texan slaves learned of the Emancipation Proclamation on 19 June 1865, and the date is now celebrated with “June-teenth” festivities by Texans of all ethnic backgrounds and by African Americans across the country. After the Civil War, poverty was widespread, and Texas was more isolated from the United States. The coming of the railroad at the end of the 19th century provided a small boost to the state, but it was the early 20th-century discovery of oil that catapulted it into prominence nationally and internationally and added the “Texas oil man” dimension to stereotypical Texan identity.

The pre–Civil War cattle industry remains a strong part of the Texas economy and identity. Owning a “ranch” is a personal statement of Texanness. Seemingly every Texas politician has one, although many would-be ranchers are derided as being “all hat, no cattle.”

Texans are a diverse group that includes a large Mexican population, African Americans, descendants of English, Irish, and Scottish southerners, and those of direct immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and Czechoslovakia. The product of a unique creolization, the Texan identity remains distinct within the South and the nation and is an identity to which recent immigrants from around the globe still assimilate even in an age of multiculturalism.

ANNE H. SUTHERLAND
University of California, Riverside

Molly Ivins, Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She? (1992); Don Graham, Giant Country: Essays on Texas (1998).

 

Tigua Indians of Ysleta del Sur Pueblo

The Tigua Indians of suburban El Paso, Tex., present one of the most remarkable cases of ethnic persistence on the American landscape. The modern Tigua are descendants of Tiwa-speaking Indians from Isleta Pueblo on the Rio Grande in central New Mexico. Following the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, refugees and captives from Isleta accompanied retreating Spaniards downriver to El Paso del Norte, where a new pueblo and mission were established. The new settlement was called Ysleta del Sur, and the inhabitants received a land grant from the king of Spain in 1751.

Since that time, while generally assimilating into the regional Hispanic culture, the Tigua have also preserved a distinct Native American identity. They have always maintained their own government, using Spanish titles such as cacique (chief) and capitán de guerra (war captain) in the manner of the Pueblo Indians. A tusla, or ceremonial lodge, has always been at the heart of the community. During the 1800s the Tigua served as Indian scouts, fighting alongside Mexicans and Texas Rangers to defend the area from Kiowas and Apaches. Well into the 20th century they continued to dry farm and hunt deer and rabbits in the surrounding desert while gardening in their irrigated mission neighborhood.

Anglo speculators defrauded the Tigua of much of their original Texas lands after the Mexican War. Because Texas was part of the Confederacy when Lincoln granted land patents to various tribes along the Rio Grande, the Tigua did not receive federal protection. Maneuvers to transfer titles, involving disregard of the Spanish grant and the ultimately illegal incorporation of Ysleta between 1871 and 1874, left the Tigua destitute. By the early 1900s tribe members had congregated in an area a few blocks east of the old pueblo. This neighborhood became known as El Barrio de los Indios, though the Tigua grew somewhat less visible as Indians, having adopted the Spanish language and Mexican American dress, foodways, and wage-work patterns.

Ysleta was annexed by the city of El Paso in 1955, and the impoverished Tiguas faced onerous property taxation. They responded with a campaign to secure protection as a surviving Indian tribe, achieving state recognition in 1967 and federal status the following year. Arguments for their Indian identity rested on continuing Puebloan traditions. The cacique kept a white rooster caged in front of his house, analogous to the traditional chief’s emblem of a captive eagle. The community held ceremonies honoring a kachina spirit called Awelo (from Spanish abuelo, meaning “grandfather”) and the patron of the New Mexico pueblo, Saint Anthony. Tigua households had hornos, Puebloan bread ovens, in their yards. There were still traces of matrilineal clans and the Tiwa language. A stylized sun pictograph at Hueco Tanks, a syenite formation in the desert northeast of Ysleta used as a campsite by many tribes, was attributed to the Tigua and cited as further evidence of their native heritage.

Under state and then federal trusteeship, the Tigua built a reservation, transforming Ysleta with modern housing and a tourist complex, which became the showcase for retained, revived, and newly imported customs, including dances and pottery making. They began efforts to restore the Tiwa language. The tribal rolls grew as individuals who previously did not acknowledge Indian ancestry emerged to claim a Tigua identity.

Acting as a sovereign nation, the tribe opened a casino in 1994. Revenues from the operation reached $60 million per year, and the reservation became a major employer and economic generator for El Paso. Litigation that the tribe had begun to restore land losses was suspended as the Tigua were able to buy tracts outright, from lots around the old pueblo to a huge game ranch near Valentine, Tex. Tribe members enjoyed annual per capita distributions and developed a superb community infrastructure, including cradle-to-grave social services, civic buildings, restaurants, a chain of convenience stores, and an upscale housing complex in the neighboring town of Socorro. A challenge to Indian gaming from the state of Texas, however, led to a U.S. Supreme Court decision against the Tigua in February 2002, and the casino was shut down. Their economic future is uncertain, but some 1,200 Tiguas still benefit from recent gains, and their Indian identity appears secure.

DANIEL J. GELO
University of Texas at San Antonio

Rex Gerald, in Apache Indians III, ed. David Agee Horr (1974); Nicholas P. Houser, in Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 9: Southwest, ed. Alfonso Ortiz (1979); Bill Wright, The Tiguas: Pueblo Indians of Texas (1993).

 

Travellers

Although they are often referred to as “Gypsies,” the Travellers have quite separate origins from Romani people. Travellers have formed communities across the South from Florida to Texas and maintain social networks between them. Travellers sometimes refer to each other as “Pavee” and to non-Pavee as “country people.” To varying degrees, they retain their own form of speech, which they call the “Cant” and which some scholars call “Gammon.” The Cant is a derivative of the argot of Travellers in Ireland (often called “Shelta” in Ireland), which has an English-based syntax and a core vocabulary from Irish Gaelic.

Some theories suggest that Travellers are descended from Irish “spalpeens,” landless and seasonally migrant farm laborers who took to the road permanently because of evictions, poverty, and famine. Many Irish Travellers were metalworkers and were called “Tinkers” (now a highly pejorative term) because of the sounds of tinsmithing. They sold tin mugs and repaired tin ware and other objects, performed odd jobs such as cleaning chimneys, and became famed as horse dealers in Ireland (some of the same livelihoods they pursued in the South). Travellers may have come to the South as indentured servants prior to 1800, but the majority descend from Irish and Scottish Traveller families who came to America in the 19th century. They arrived mostly in Boston, New York City, and Pittsburgh and then made their way south after the Civil War. Today, the more affluent Travellers may visit Ireland or import Irish goods and Catholic icons for their homes.

Travellers are generally Roman Catholic and often give generous donations to their local parishes. Women may attend Mass every morning, and men go on Sundays, although they may remain outside talking and enter the church only to take Holy Communion. Priests play an important role mediating between exclusive Traveller communities and the outside world. Murphy Village near North Augusta, S.C., is named for a 1960s Catholic priest, Father Joseph Murphy, who helped the Travellers acquire land and settle.

In Murphy Village many Travellers have built sizable homes in a distinctive architectural style with multiple gables and large windows. While the older generations and women stay in Murphy Village, men travel across the country in the spring and summer as pavers, roofers, lightening rod installers, barn painters, or landscapers. They sometimes have regular, seasonal customers, but they are also widely known for scamming the unsuspecting and even banking institutions. When children are not in school, many Traveller families still go on the road together. Travellers based in Forth Worth, Tex., leave for the road at Eastertide with large mobile homes and return again in September or October. The community has now purchased a mobile home park, and some Travellers have built houses nearby. For the community based out of Memphis, Tenn., the traveling season may last from Easter until October or November. The same pattern takes place in large communities in Atlanta and Dallas.

Travellers are endogamous, marriages are often arranged, and a dowry is still expected. Murphy Village is home to about 545 families, all of whom have one of just 13 surnames. More than 200 families have the surname Carrol; the next-largest group is named Riley, followed by Sherlock. Other common surnames include Costello, Carpenter, Gormon, Lewis, McNalley, O’Hara, Roche, Sheedy, Joyce, and Hartnet. Until recently, divorce was quite rare. A strong emphasis on community and extended family means that the elderly are always given care within the home and that hundreds, or thousands, of Travellers from multiple communities attend funerals, weddings, and christenings. While young people frequent local restaurants and shopping malls and enjoy active social lives, they do not as often mix with “country people,” as many leave public school by the eighth or ninth grade, when boys generally join their male relatives on the road. To avoid outside influences, many are homeschooled. Some Catholic parishes offer GED programs especially for Traveller teenagers. A few southern Travellers have left their communities to become medical doctors and academics.

Travellers are the subject of rumor and exposé television shows such as Dateline and 20/20 (which focus on their scamming activities) and several works of fiction. The gritty 1997 film Traveller, written by Jim McGylnn, tells the story of a young man’s return to a North Carolina community from which he is descended. The 2004 work of juvenile fiction by Kim Ablon Whitney, See You down the Road (about a young woman considering abandoning the Traveller life), begins in Florida. While they are magnanimous with the “country people” they befriend, their unsavory interactions with outsiders are what characterize public perceptions of Travellers. Except for the work of Jared Harper in Georgia, their lives have not been ethnographically documented in the South and much about their communities remains veiled.

CELESTE RAY
University of the South

George Gmelch, The Irish Tinkers (1977); Ian Hancock, American Speech (Fall 1986); Jared Harper, “The Irish Travellers of Georgia” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Georgia, 1977), in The Not So Solid South: Anthropological Studies in a Regional Subculture, ed. Kenneth Morland (1971); Jane Leslie Helleiner, Irish Travellers: Racism and the Politics of Culture (2000); May McCann, Séamas O Síocháin and Joseph Ruane, Irish Travellers: Culture and Ethnicity (1994).

 

Tunica-Biloxi

The Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana is the result of a 20th-century merger of historically distinct tribes, the Tunica and remnants of the Biloxi, Avoyel, and Ofo (all of the Mississippi Valley). The Tunica was the larger of the groups prior to their merger in the 1920s and spoke a different language from the Biloxi (the last Tunica speaker died in the 1930s). Although their initial contact with Europeans may date to Hernando de Soto’s mid-16th century expedition, the first documented reports of definitive European contact with the Tunica date from 150 years later, with the mission work of French priests François de Montigny and Antoine Davion and their accompanying layman Jean-Baptiste La Source.

By this time, the Tunica had migrated south from the region in which they may have encountered de Soto and were residing in villages near where the Yazoo River meets the Mississippi. Davion established a mission and worked with the tribe for 20 years. This connection helped foster a close relationship with the French that would last throughout the colonial period. During the 18th century the Tunica were important allies for the French in their wars with the Natchez and other Mississippi Valley tribes. By the time of the Louisiana Purchase (1803), the Tunica had again moved, this time into present-day Louisiana on the Prairie des Avoyelles, near the current location of Marksville, where they would largely remain into the early 20th century.

Much less is known of the Biloxi tribe, which spoke a language in the Siouan language family and whose ancestral lands were located on the eponymous Biloxi Bay on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The French were again likely the first Europeans to contact them when, in 1699, the explorer Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d’Iberville, and his brother Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, visited one of their villages. Increasing pressures from both French colonialists and other native tribes, particularly the Choctaw, led to a number of westward movements during the 18th century. By the end of the century the Biloxi had also settled near Marksville in Avoyelles Parish and at Bayou Boeuf in Rapides Parish, near Alexandria. Over time, the tribes came under French, English, and Spanish colonizing powers, eventually facing the challenge of resisting assimilation into American society.

Proximity and persistent population loss on the part of both tribes led to their merger in the 1920s under the leadership of Elijah Barbry. The population further declined during the Great Depression, when perhaps half of the tribe left to find work in Texas. The last chief, Joseph Pierite (whose family was considered Biloxi), revived the campaign for official government recognition in the 1960s. The Tunica gained state recognition in 1975 and federal recognition under the U.S. Department of the Interior in the 1981, officially becoming the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana. The united tribe resides on a 740-acre reservation south of Marks-ville with an estimated population of near 1,000 members. The Tunica-Biloxi were one of the first American Indian tribes to operate a tribal museum with an artifact preservation program. The program came about through the need to conserve the “Tunica Treasure,” native and European items from the colonial period taken from Tunica graves and kept at Harvard University with poor conservation. The Tunica regained the treasure only after litigation that set precedents for the later Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

Under the guidance of current chairman Earl J. Barbry Sr., the Tunica opened Paragon Casino and Resort, Louisiana’s first land-based casino, in 1994. The casino employs over 1,700 persons and helps the tribe maintain self-sufficiency.

BENJAMIN D. MARSEE
University of Tennessee

Jeffrey Brain, George Roth, and Willem J. de Reuse, in Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 14: Southeast, ed. Raymond Fogelson (2004); Hiram F. Gregory, in Native America in the Twentieth Century, ed. Mary B. Davis (1994); Michelle K. Moran, in The Gale Encyclopedia of Native American Tribes, ed. Sharon Malinowski and Anna Sheets (1998); Kenneth Shepherd, in The Gale Encyclopedia of Native American Tribes, ed. Sharon Malinowski and Anna Sheets (1998); John R. Swanton, The Indian Tribes of North America (1952).

 

Turks

Since World War II, Turks have come to the United States predominantly for higher education, aided by immigration policies that favor elite professionals and skilled laborers over unskilled workers. High unemployment in Turkey since the 1960s, waves of economic crises and political strife, and negative reception of Turks in Western Europe have brought many Turks to the United States. Ethnic Turks have also immigrated from all the Turkic countries (Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan). Between 185,000 and 210,000 ethnic Turks had come to live in the United States by 1995.

In the South, Turks have created state and regional cultural associations in Florida, Georgia, and Washington, D.C. Members of many of these associations meet to share food, network, enjoy performances of Turkish music, or watch soccer games. At some gatherings, non-Turks are welcomed, and prizes of Turkish dolls, fabrics, or crafts may be raffled in aid of a community cause. Turkish groceries, cafés, and restaurants have now opened in southern locations as diverse as Cary, N.C., Chesapeake, Va., Newport, Ky., Dallas, and Atlanta. Since many Turks come to the South for higher education, Turkish student associations have been established near colleges and universities in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. These associations promote Turkish culture and the maintenance of Turkish identity through public celebration of secular Turkish national holidays, Turkish-language classes, patronage of Turk-owned businesses, and organization of support for Turkish musical groups, films, athletes, and diplomats.

Most Turks in the South are Muslims, and some southern mosques are associated with the American Muslim Turkish Association. Muslim religious holidays, such as Seker Bayrami and Kurban Bayrami—the two holidays that mark the end of Ramazan (Ramadan) and the end of the Hajj, respectively—are usually celebrated privately, although the cultural associations often serve as ways for people to meet each other for more intimate gatherings. The celebration of the Children’s Day National Holiday (23 April) in Atlanta, sponsored by the Turkish American Cultural Association of Georgia, consists of performances of several children’s groups from the area who represent Turkish and other world cultures. Displays of Turkish folk arts, foods, and history line the hallways of the elementary school where the celebration is held, along with displays celebrating the cultures of other students who attend the school.

In private get-togethers, Turks are likely to invite guests from other cultures and take pride in being generous hosts. Foods served often include Turkish specialties such as Çerkez tavuu (Circassian chicken with walnuts), böreks (pastries) filled with meats or spinach and feta cheese, and Turkish tea as well as American-style hamburgers and southern pecan pie.

Most immigrants from Turkey to the South have arrived since the 1960s and have aligned themselves with light-skinned peoples in the racial status quo. In Atlanta, for example, Turks have primarily settled in European American middle- and upper-class neighborhoods to the north and northeast of downtown, but they do not live in ethnically segregated neighborhoods. Correspondingly, the activities of Turkish cultural associations primarily appeal to the middle- and upper-class immigrant populations from Turkey. Public presentation of Turkish identity reflects the Turkish national cultural ideal of an upper-class, western-oriented lifestyle. Thus, southern cultural associations may aid many Turks in making initial contacts with each other and maintaining communities in which to speak their language and share their experiences in a new land, but they may also distance other ethnic Turks who do not necessarily identify with the western image of Turkish identity that such associations project.

PATRICIA FOGARTY
Emory University

 

Tuscaroras

The Tuscarora are one of at least four Indian nations (the other three being Cherokee, Meherrin, and Nottoway) with Iroquoian linguistic affiliations that originally migrated out of northern Appalachia into Virginia and the Carolinas during the late prehistoric period. Archaeological evidence suggests that the ancestral Tuscarora first settled in northeastern North Carolina about 900–1000 A.D. These early Tuscarora peoples eventually displaced or absorbed the Indian societies they encountered in the region between the Roanoke and Neuse River Valleys by 1200–1400 A.D. The Tuscarora inhabited their southern homeland for nearly a millennium before they were ultimately driven out of the South in the face of war and colonial oppression between 1713 and 1803. Today, most federally recognized Tuscaroras live on the Tuscarora Reservation in New York, where they retain their cultural identity, speak their native language, and continue to practice elements of social or political customs that have ancient roots.

Unlike many historically known Indian nations in the South, the Tuscarora were not culturally associated with southeastern Mississippian societies. Historic Tuscarora cultural practices were more closely associated with the Woodland societies of the Mid-Atlantic region. Tuscarora settlements in North Carolina included palisaded villages and dispersed farmsteads located along rivers and tributary streams, as well as seasonal hunting and fishing camps. Tuscarora subsistence practices included a mix of hunting, fishing, and agriculture, with maize, squash, and beans as major crops. Wild floral resources were seasonally gathered and included, among other items, leafy greens and herbs, berries and fruits, tubers, nuts, and goosefoot or amaranth seeds ground for flour. Hunting efforts focused on white-tailed deer and other mammals, especially during the fall and winter seasons, but Tuscarora communities relied most heavily on aquatic resources such as turtles, freshwater mussels, and fish throughout the year. The subsistence focus on farming and fishing in an environment rich in wild resources enhanced the development of a nearly sedentary society with a ranked social structure well before the period of European settlement in eastern North Carolina.

Contacts with armed European settlers and traders after 1650 led to the European enslavement of Tuscarora peoples, bitter trade disputes, and colonial encroachment of Tuscarora settlement lands and hunting territories. Conflicts between all indigenous inhabitants of eastern North Carolina and European settlers erupted well before the end of the 17th century. While the region’s coastal Algonkian chiefdoms were significantly diminished from disease and warfare by 1700, the Tuscarora remained a populous sociopolitical entity that was relatively unaffected by war or European diseases until 1711. Tuscarora influence in colonial affairs during the early 1700s was due to their sizable warrior population (1,200–1,500 armed men) and their strong cultural and political ties with the powerful northern Iroquois Confederacy (the Five Nations).

Tuscarora hegemony over eastern North Carolina ended in March 1713 when the Tuscarora, in the wake of the Barnwell Expedition (1711–12), were defeated by an expeditionary force of some 1,000 South Carolina militiamen and Indian mercenaries at the Battle of Neoheroka Fort, the last major engagement of the Tuscarora War (1711–15). There, Colonel James Moore’s well-armed force of Indian auxiliaries besieged the fortification near the Tuscarora community of Neoheroka and killed or enslaved some 900 Tuscarora men, women, and children. The defeated Lower Tuscarora fled to New York, where they eventually became the Sixth Nation of the Iroquois Confederacy in 1722.

The Upper Tuscarora communities, situated between the Roanoke and Tar-Pamlico Rivers, remained neutral during the Tuscarora War and stayed in North Carolina for a time. In 1717 these Upper Tuscarora communities, pressured by Catawba Indian raiding parties, congregated on a small reservation. Punctuated migrations beginning in 1713 ended in 1803, when the Indian Woods Reservation was abandoned and the last politically cohesive community of Tuscaroras in North Carolina dispersed.

While most of the North Carolina Tuscaroras chose to resettle in New York during the period of the Tuscarora diaspora (1713–1803), some individuals and familial groups removed to other English colonies. Some relocated to environmentally marginal areas in North Carolina, and other small groups settled in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina, where they intermarried with other ethnic groups and eventually disappeared into the fabric of history and legend. In the 1960s and 1970s, several North Carolina groups distinguished themselves from the Lumbee and reclaimed Tuscaroran identities. Four groups in and around Robeson County have petitioned unsuccessfully for federal recognition. The Tuscarora Nation East of the Mountains, the Tuscarora Tribe of North Carolina, the Tuscarora Nation of North Carolina, and the Tuscarora Nation of Kau-ta-noh now have a combined population of approximately 3,000 to 5,000 members.

CHARLES L. HEATH
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Douglas W. Boyce, in Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 15: Northeast, ed. Bruce G. Trigger (1978); John E. Byrd, Tuscarora Subsistence Practices in the Late Woodland Period (1997); David Landy, in Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 15: Northeast, ed. Bruce G. Trigger (1978); John Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina, ed. Hugh T. Lefler (1984); E. Lawrence Lee, Indian Wars in North Carolina, 1663–1763 (1963); Thomas C. Parramore, North Carolina Historical Review (July 1982, October 1987); David S. Phelps, in The Prehistory of North Carolina: An Archaeo-logical Symposium, ed. Mark A. Mathis and Jeffrey J. Crow (1983).

 

Vietnamese

Between 1800 and 1973, an estimated 6,000 Vietnamese lived in the United States. This small figure changed when, after the fall of Saigon in April 1975, the U.S. government granted political asylum to South Vietnamese refugees. Many first arrived at resettlement centers in the South, such as Fort Chaffee, Ark., and Eglin Air Force Base, Fla. Local churches sponsored Vietnamese individuals and families to resettle in their communities. Many Vietnamese with ties to the former Saigon regime chose to live in the Washington, D.C., area. This began the huge influx of professional and middle-class Vietnamese immigrants into Northern Virginia. As a result of American military involvement in Southeast Asia, many southern servicemen came home with Asian wives, and many Vietnamese already had relatives living in the South who sponsored their relocation there.

Today’s Vietnamese American population is likely to be 25 to 40 percent higher than the 1,122,528 recorded in the 2000 U.S. Census. Close behind the West Coast with the second-largest Vietnamese population in the country, the South has a Vietnamese population of 335,679 according to the census, or 30 percent of the total number of Vietnamese Americans. If one adds the 43,709 in the Washington, D.C., area—considered by the census to be an eastern metropolitan area despite its deep roots in southern culture and history—then the already sizable number of Vietnamese southerners becomes even larger.

The South’s warm climate and continued economic prosperity during the last several decades attracted Vietnamese refugees seeking a better life after 30 years of bitter war. In addition to the Washington, D.C./Northern Virginia area, the Vietnamese community has tended to congregate around Houston, Dallas–Fort Worth, Atlanta, and New Orleans. Other substantial Vietnamese communities in the South include Tampa and Orlando, Fla., Beaumont–Port Arthur, Tex., Charlotte and Gastonia, N.C., and Rock Hill, S.C.

The French Catholic tradition of New Orleans and southern Louisiana is a strong draw for the Vietnamese given their long colonial relationship with France. Roughly 30 percent of all Vietnamese southerners are Roman Catholic. Moreover, the French-style architecture of traditional houses in the Creole country reminds Vietnamese people of the homes and buildings they left behind in their homeland. Like native New Orleanians, the Vietnamese love their strong-drip café au lait and crusty French bread. French cooking has enhanced the complex and subtle flavors of Vietnamese cuisine, and a popular Vietnamese lunch or snack is their own rendition of po’ boys made with fried soft-shell crabs, grilled pork, or pâtés stuffed with carrot strips, cilantro, and jalapeños. Today, New Orleans brims with Vietnamese restaurants. But as the Vietnamese become American southerners, they are assimilating the local southern culture while adding their own flavors.

Vietnamese culture emphasizes strong family ties and community awareness. Although the majority of non-Catholic Vietnamese practice a form of Mahayana Buddhism derived from China, all Vietnamese are steeped in the ethics and values of Confucianism with its focus on duty, obligation, and filial piety. Vietnamese tradition puts a premium on respect for the elderly. The reverence for education is exceedingly strong, and Vietnamese parents push their children to achieve a good education. The Vietnamese find the southern emphases on sense of place, family, and community appealing cultural parallels.

The Gulf Coast proved popular for Vietnamese fishers arriving from seaside villages during the early 1980s. There they pooled resources to buy shrimping and fishing boats. Lacking the education and urban skills of the first wave who came to the United States after 1975, these second-wave immigrants tended to be economic rather than political refugees. In Gulf Coast port towns, where Vietnamese shrimpers settled in significant numbers, there were unfortunate tensions as the Ku Klux Klan tried exploiting the fears of native-born southern shrimpers who felt their way of life was being threatened by newcomers. Today there is a general acceptance of the Vietnamese, and both native and Vietnamese shrimpers together face severe competition from underpriced shrimp from China and Vietnam.

The Vietnamese in the South can be found mostly in suburban communities and have constructed shopping malls in Houston, New Orleans, Atlanta, and Falls Church, Va., to cater to their growing communities. Many work as professionals in southern universities, medical facilities, scientific labs, and high-tech companies found in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park and Tennessee’s Oak Ridge area.

Today, the Vietnamese American community represents the third-largest Asian community in the United States. The increase in intercultural marriages and the globalization of American foodways also mean that Vietnamese restaurants and shops are becoming popular among other southerners. The Vietnamese are one of the latest waves of newcomers to the South who are successfully introducing their own unique ingredients into the southern cultural gumbo.

ALPHONSE VINH
National Public Radio

Nathan Caplan, John K. Whitmore, and Marcella H. Choy, The Boat People and Achievement in America: A Study of Family Life and Cultural Values (1989); David Haines, Refugees as Immigrants: Cambodians, Laotians, and Vietnamese in America (1989); Kali Tal, Southeast Asian-American Communities (1992).

 

Waccamaw-Siouans

Located primarily in North Carolina’s coastal plain in Bladen and Columbus Counties, the Waccamaw-Siouan tribe traces it roots back to the 17th century. In the 1670s John Swanton noted that elements of the tribe were reported to be on South Carolina’s Pee Dee River in the company of the Winyaw and Pedee tribes. By 1700 John Lawson, the celebrated explorer who traveled much of the Carolina Backcountry, reported that the tribe known to locals as the “Woccon” (apparently another name for the Waccamaw) was not far from the Winyaw and a number of other Siouan-speaking tribes in the vicinity of the Neuse River.

While the original Waccamaw homeland was along the modern border between North and South Carolina, the warfare and unrest accompanying the movement of the colonial frontier brought such havoc to the Waccamaw and neighboring tribes that numbers of Indian people migrated to the North Carolina coastal plain during the 17th and 18th centuries. Swanton suggested that a number might have allied with the Catawba (who were themselves an amalgamation of displaced native people) by the middle of the 18th century, but he thought that the largest numbers had moved north along the Lumber River in what is now North Carolina. Historian Douglas Rights came to a similar conclusion, writing that as early as 1715 “the Siouan tribes, Waccamaw, Peedee, Winyaw, Cape Fear, and other native tribes of the region … could find a natural inland retreat to the swampy regions of the Robeson County area, where they would be more secure than in the exposed neighborhood of the [white] settlements.” Thomas Ross, who has written the most comprehensive survey of the tribe’s history, believes that the Waccamaw were pushed out of South Carolina before 1600 and settled at the confluence of the Pee Dee and Waccamaw Rivers. In 1705 some elements moved north to the Lower Neuse River; they stayed there until 1718, when they moved to the Black River area. Two years later they moved yet again to the Lumber River, remaining there until 1733, when they settled around Lake Waccamaw and Green Swamp. They have remained in that locale to this day. County land records suggest that the Waccamaw-Siouan have held clear title to lands on Lake Waccamaw and Green Swamp since 1800.

While the Waccamaw-Siouan were invariably described in 19th-century census records as “free persons of color,” they were also widely considered to be Indian people. As with a number of other southeastern tribes, the Waccamaw-Siouan used education to shield the tribe from some of the worst effects of Jim Crow legislation and the social segregation that Indian people experienced through the 1960s. As early as 1885, tribal members built and ran their own schools, funding them on a subscription basis. At least four all-Indian schools were opened in Buckhead between 1885 and 1934. In the early 1950s several high schools for Indian students also opened, including the Waccamaw Indian School, which was in operation between 1954 and 1969. These schools became crucial in the maintenance of tribal identity, and many Waccamaws viewed the era of desegregation with mixed emotions as it meant the loss of one of the tribe’s most cherished institutions.

In 1970 the Waccamaw-Sioux began a powwow that continues as a two-day event that merges pan-Indian elements with local cultural traditions, symbols, and identity. The event is intertribal and includes a community parade to the powwow grounds and the selection of a “Miss Waccamaw” to represent her people at local, regional, and state gatherings.

The state of North Carolina officially recognized the Waccamaw-Siouan tribe in 1971, by which time the tribe had nearly a half-century’s experience of governing itself. W. J. Freeman was the recognized chief from 1924 until 1949. The Waccamaw-Siouan Development Association was created in 1971 with an elected five-member board that oversees programs in job training, housing, and community service. The tribe is currently governed by a tribal council and chief according to procedures established in 1978. Efforts to secure federal recognition have so far failed.

CLYDE ELLIS
Elon University

John Lawson, A New Voyage To Carolina, ed. Hugh T. Lefler (1984), A Vocabulary of Woccon (1998); Patricia Lerch, Waccamaw Legacy: Contemporary Indians Fight for Survival (2004); C. J. Milling, Red Carolinians (1969); 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); Douglas L. Rights, The American Indian in North Carolina (1957); Thomas E. Ross, American Indians in North Carolina: Geographic Interpretations (1999); Ruth Wetmore, First on the Land: The North Carolina Indians (1975).

 

Waldensians

North Carolina’s first Waldensians (also known as the Waldenses) were French-speaking Italian Protestants who settled Valdese, N.C., in 1893. The Waldensians were pre-Reformation Protestants who traced their religious ancestry back to at least the 12th century. Theirs is one of the oldest Protestant traditions in existence. Persecuted as heretics for centuries in France and Italy, Waldensians took refuge in Switzerland, returning to the Cottian Alps on the French-Italian border in 1689, where they were bound to the land for centuries. In 1848 King Charles Albert issued the Edict of Emancipation, which permitted Waldensians to live anywhere in the Duchy of Savoy and gave them permission to own businesses and attend public schools and universities.

Waldensian descendants playing bocce (Photograph courtesy of Jules Bounous/Waldensian Heritage Museum)

In the first few decades after freedom, their numbers grew. In the late 1800s Waldensians established colonies in other parts of Europe and in South America. Some created small enclaves in New York City, Chicago, Missouri, Texas, and Utah. They established their largest colony in North Carolina in 1893, when 222 Waldensians moved to what would become Valdese.

Many Waldensians began farming as soon as they arrived, and three served in the U.S. military during the Spanish-American War just five years later. Others left for service work in northern cities, while some moved to nearby towns and worked in textile mills. Some of those millworkers returned and opened textile and hosiery mills in Valdese, creating industries that became central to the town’s economy. While many Valdese businesses, even the bakery, are no longer owned by those of Waldensian descent, the nonprofit Waldensian Heritage Wines Winery opened in 1989 and is staffed by volunteers interested in keeping the traditions of Waldensian wine making alive.

The Waldensians repeated many of the features of their Italian lives in North Carolina. They emphasized the centrality of their church in Valdese’s first constitution and organized Le Phare Des Alpes, a mutual assistance society for Waldensian immigrants. Settlers adapted their Alpine rock-building traditions to their North Carolina homes, barns, and communal bake ovens. Other Old World traditions the Waldensians brought to the South include a predominantly French patois, foodways, and the game of bocce.

Since 1967 a summer outdoor drama, From This Day Forward, has told the story of Waldensian persecution and migration. A Waldensian Museum (opened in 1974) also explains Waldensian social and religious history and displays household items, clothing, carpentry tools, books, and family Bibles brought to North Carolina from Italy. After trips to Italy, local historian John Bleynat helped reconstruct just over a dozen Italian buildings and monuments related to Waldensian history in Valdese as part of “The Trail of Faith.” He and other community members give tours (especially for schoolchildren) in which they explain the architectural traditions of the Waldensians both in Italy and North Carolina, describing how each structure relates to the Waldensian past.

In 1897 townspeople began building a substantial Romanesque-style church that resembled the churches of their home valleys. They constructed the church out of rocks gathered from local fields and quarries, applied traditional stucco, and dedicated the building on 4 July 1899. While approximately 2,000–2,500 people in the general area of Valdese are of Waldensian descent, the church is now Presbyterian and its membership is only 49 percent Waldensian. Through exogamy and out-migration, other descendants have joined different congregations or moved away from the region, but Waldensian heritage remains an important part of congregational life.

On the second Saturday in August, Waldensian descendants celebrate the “Glorious Return” of their ancestors in 1689 from exile in Switzerland to Italy. The annual festival includes a church service, a street festival, a bocce tournament, and a traditional meal at the church’s “Pioneer Hall” featuring soutissa, a sausage with cinnamon, nutmeg, garlic, and allspice. On 17 February of each year, the community gathers for a meal, a lecture, and French hymn singing in memory of their 1848 emancipation. In honor of their ancestors who lit bonfires on the mountaintops around their valleys after hearing of the Edict of Emancipation, the Waldensians conclude the event with a bonfire on the church lawn. Throughout the months of February and August, the church congregation sings at least one French hymn each Sunday. For commemorative events, a few women still don the traditional costume of a plain dark dress and kerchief (called a cuffio in the Waldensian dialect). To accommodate ongoing local and touristic interest in their origins, the Waldensians doubled the size of their local museum in 2005.

ELIZABETH CAMPBELL
Greensboro, N.C.

CELESTE RAY
University of the South

Elizabeth Campbell, “Everlasting Rocks: Conversations about the Rock Buildings of Valdese, North Carolina” (M.A. thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1998).

 

West Indians

For thousands of black emigrants from the British West Indies, assimilation to the South was complicated by the need to adapt to patterns of racial stratification in addition to cultural differences. A flow of West Indians became regular after the Civil War and was directed primarily toward Florida, where over 2,000 lived in 1880. They formed one stream in a growing migration from the British West Indies that carried newcomers to Michigan, New York, and Massachusetts. Because of its proximity to the island homelands, Florida was a major point of entry from which West Indians fanned out to settle in neighboring states. By 1900 over 7,500 immigrants (37 percent of the foreign-born black population) lived in the South-Atlantic and South-Central states. As the influx continued, the West Indian population in the South-Atlantic states alone grew to nearly 13,000 by 1930.

A sizable proportion of the newcomers were skilled workers, and most had sufficient schooling to read and write English. Other young adult males came to take jobs in agriculture and construction during the labor shortages of World War I. Over 3,200 laborers from the Bahamas arrived to work on government construction projects in Charleston, S.C., and on the truck farms of Florida’s east coast.

Although the West Indian population in the South grew substantially in the early 20th century, West Indians were migrating in greater numbers to the cities of northeastern states such as Massachusetts and New York. Industrial and commercial jobs were more available there than in the South, where the proportion of West Indians employed in rural jobs was 10 times higher than in the Northeast. The percentage of black immigrants who lived in the southern states shrank from 37 percent in 1900 to 15 percent by 1930.

The communal life of West Indians in the South was profoundly affected by proximity to the home islands. The West Indian community of Florida provides a valuable case study. The relative ease of going home from the peninsula produced a high rate of return migration. A third of all departing black aliens in the 1920s left from Florida.

The migratory flow between the West Indies and Florida kept alive attachments to home island traditions. Many West Indians worshipped as Episcopalians and revered the British royal family. A study of West Indian immigrant life indicated that the cultural forms persisting strongly after migration were customs relating to death and burial, courtship and marriage, spiritualism, folk narratives, and a semitropical diet. The West Indians stressed and displayed proudly their English traditions, partly to differentiate themselves from native southern blacks and to impress southerners with their cultural sophistication. Unwilling to exchange an identity as a British subject for American citizenship under Jim Crow laws, West Indians in Florida became naturalized at one-half the rate at which West Indians in New York were becoming citizens.

Even during the post–World War II economic expansion and lessening of racial discrimination, West Indian immigrants avoided permanent settlement in the South. The West Indian population in the South grew only 8 percent from 1960 to 1970, while in the Northeast it more than doubled in size. Unlike the communities of the Northeast, those in the South contained a much higher proportion of transient males, which produced a gender imbalance that limited endogamous family formation. In 1960, while the sex ratio was nearly even among West Indians in the Northeast, West Indian males in the South outnumbered females by three to one. The difficulties of maintaining permanent employment and finding marriage partners may have discouraged newcomers from flocking to the South. Also, West Indian immigrants may have wanted to avoid the pressure of merging with the southern black community and so chose to settle in Boston or New York City, where they could be identified as another immigrant group. Still, by 1970 over 17,000 West Indians had made their homes in the South, and in the subsequent decades newcomers arrived on the currents of legal and illegal migration from the Caribbean.

New immigrants continue to negotiate their way through American ideas of race. They both identify with, and distance themselves from, African Americans and often maintain close-knit relationships with other West Indians. Immigrants from Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad, and the Bahamas continue to socialize with Caribbean social organizations (which may also include immigrants from coastal Honduras, Cuba, and Haiti). According to the 2000 U.S. Census, the largest number of West Indians in the South are in Florida (almost 500,000, or 3 percent of the state’s population), followed by Georgia with 45,380 and North Carolina with almost 16,000.

REED UEDA
Tufts University

Milton Vickerman, Crosscurrents: West Indian Immigrants and Race (1998); Thomas Sowell, Race and Economics (1975); Reed Ueda, in Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, ed. Stephen Thernstrom, Ann Orlov, and Oscar Handlin (1980).

 

Wichitas

The Wichita people call themselves Kitikitish, which roughly translates to “raccoon-eyed people.” This designation refers to the traditional practice among the Wichita of tattooing their faces and upper bodies. The term “Wichita” may be derived from the Choctaw term wia chitoh, or “big arbor.” The Choctaw term is probably in reference to the traditional architecture of the Wichita, especially their arbors for drying corn and their large, beehive-shaped, grass-thatched houses.

Known today as the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, the historic Wichita were actually distinct bands that spoke different dialects of the Wichita language. These bands were united by their language, religion, and shared traditions, but they maintained distinct and separate identities. The tribe today consists of the Wichita, Tawakoni, and Waco bands, as well as members of the Keechi tribe. Although a completely separate tribe with their own language and traditions, the Keechi became affiliated with the Wichita while in Texas and have maintained a close relationship with them ever since.

The Wichita’s traditional homeland is a vast territory ranging from Kansas through Oklahoma and into Texas. Their command of such a vast territory is but one of the reasons the Wichita may be considered one of the most important tribes on the southern Plains. The Wichita worked out a particularly successful adaptation to this environment by combining horticulture and life in settled villages with extended hunting and trading expeditions throughout the Plains and adjacent areas.

The Wichita have always maintained strong relationships with other Caddoan-speaking tribes, such as the Pawnee to the north and the Caddo to the southeast. After their removal from Texas in 1859, the Wichita, Caddo, Keechi, and Delaware tribes were settled on a reservation on the north side of the Washita River in Caddo County, Okla. Following the allotment of reservation land to Indian people at the turn of the 20th century, white settlers occupied the remaining land. Allotment—along with other policies of the U.S. government, Christian missionaries, and attendance at boarding schools—have all had detrimental impacts on the traditional culture of the Wichita people. Even so, Wichita people are actively working to preserve their traditions and pass them on to future generations. For example, a series of classes, coordinated with a local university, provide a place for elders and young people to gather and discuss Wichita history, culture, and language. The Wichita tribe maintains its governmental headquarters and tribal dance ground, where an annual powwow is held each August just north of Anadarko, Okla.

RHONDA S. FAIR
University of Oklahoma

Robert E. Bell, Edward B. Jelks, and William W. Newcomb, Wichita Indian Archaeology and Ethnology: A Pilot Study (1967); George A. Dorsey, The Mythology of the Wichita (1995); Elizabeth A. H. John, Storms Brewed in Other Men’s Worlds: The Confrontation of Indians, Spanish, and French in the Southwest, 1540–1795 (1975); Muriel H. Wright, A Guide to the Indian Tribes of Oklahoma (1968).

 

Yorubas

The Yoruba who came to the American South hailed primarily from the southwestern region of Nigeria. Their central city of origin is Ile Ife, followed by Oyo, Benin, Ibadan, and a range of smaller village settlements throughout the southwest region of Nigeria. It was not until recent times that Yoruba gained recognition as an ethnic identity that encompassed religion, language, food, and shared history. Prior to the 1700s Yoruba people self-identified as citizens from the city-states of Oyo, Benin, or Ibadan under the domination of the Oyo Empire.

With Oyo dominance as the preeminent state, the characteristics of what would become Yoruba identities and cultural practices took shape. This included the formation of new standards for Oyo-Yoruba identity, including the development of the cluster of Kwa-speaking peoples who developed common Oyo-language standards, foodways, and cultural and religious practices. Over time, however, with the increasing spread of Fulani-Islamic influences from the north (through warfare) and the encroachment of European colonial powers from the south, the urban centers became zones of warfare, slave trapping, and raids. The Oyo Empire crumbled by the early to mid-1800s, and the height of slave raids and the export of captives led to the dispersal of Kwa-speaking people who would eventually be classified as “Yoruba”—a Hausa word that described the people of the state of Oyo and was given wider circulation by the 1840s by Christian missionaries.

The first wave of Yoruba-related settlements in the Americas took place in the late 16th to 17th centuries, when Yoruba-Dahomean captives were brought as slaves to Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, and Trinidad. One of the Kwa languages included Lukumi, and with the movement of African slaves to the Americas the slaves popularized a language system known as Lukumi and religious practices known diversely as a form of orisa worship or Vodou. The second distinct wave of arrivals to the Americas was a small number of Lukumi-speaking captives brought to the American colonies for sale in slave auctions. With the growth of a plantation economy, increasing numbers were transported to the American South. In New Orleans there were marked numbers of Lukumi-speaking, Vodou-practicing slaves, some of whom were formerly living in Haitian plantations. However, it was not until the 1960s and 1970s that voluntary immigrants from three distinct groups of recognizably Yoruba people began settling in the American South.

The first significant group included a small number of black American revivalists who, in the spirit of the Black Power movement, moved from the American North to the South and developed a religious movement toward the reclamation of African, specifically Yoruban, religious traditions. The second group moved from Cuba and Puerto Rico and settled in southern Florida, especially in cities such as Miami and Fort Lauderdale. Characterized as “Afro-Cubans” with a joint African-Yoruba and Cuban heritage, they migrated after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and settled by the thousands, continuing the celebration of Afro-Cuban cultural, social, and religious practices. Finally, the third group represented some thousands of Yoruba immigrants directly from southwestern Nigeria who had immigrated to the American South in search of a better life. These recent arrivals have settled in cities such as Atlanta and Savannah, Ga.; parts of North and South Carolina; Houston and Austin, Tex.; Nashville, Tenn.; and Jacksonville, Fla. Unlike the second group, they are mostly Christian, and many still hold Nigerian citizenship, claiming a Yoruba identity in the United States. Although adapting to “things American” whenever possible, they maintain some of their national cuisine, traditional ceremonies, and social practices; live in extended families; and still encourage endogamy and Yoruba-language competency for their children. Nevertheless, many have pursued an American education, developed professional careers, and participate in the development of Yoruba cultural life in the South through celebrations of births, rituals of death, Nigerian Independence Day events, Yoruba drumming traditions and folk music (prominent in Afro-Latin and Caribbean music styles), and various festivals.

Today, all three groups continue to represent different aspects of what constitutes “Yoruba” in the Americas and how Yoruba life, in its diversity, can be lived in the 21st century.

KAMARI MAXINE CLARKE
Yale University

Kamari M. Clarke, Mapping Yoruba Networks: Power and Agency in the Making of Transnational Communities (2004).

 

Yuchis

The Yuchi Indians (also known as the “Euchee,” “Uchi,” or “Uchee”) are perhaps best known as inhabitants of some of the many autonomous towns (tvlwv) that coalesced to form the Creek Confederacy in the South during the 18th century. They are now part of the Creek or Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma. Writers in the 17th and 18th centuries referred to the Yuchi under numerous ethnonyms, including the “Chisca,” “Rickohockans,” “Tomahitan,” and “Westo.” Not until 1715 and their participation in the Yamasee War do they appear under the ethnonym “Yuchi.”

The Yuchi traded slaves and deerskins with the English and allied with Governor James Oglethorpe for the protection of the early Georgian settlement of Savannah. The Yuchi also played a part in the survival of the Austrian Salzburger settlement at Ebenezer, Ga. With the continuing encroachment of the English, the Yuchi moved farther west, settling along the Chattahoochee and Flint Rivers in western Georgia and allying themselves with Lower Creek towns. For negotiation purposes, the U.S. government recognized them only as one of the many Creek towns that comprised the confederacy.

Unlike the other confederacy towns that resided in a central location with one ceremonial fire, the designated “Yuchi Town” maintained several settlements and ceremonial grounds. During their brief tenure with the Creek in Georgia, the Yuchi lived in three separate residential villages. This residence pattern persisted after their removal to Indian Territory.

In the 1830s, unwilling to cede their eastern lands and be removed to Indian Territory, the Yuchi fought with other Creek towns and later with the Seminole. Labeling the Yuchi as hostile, the federal government forcibly removed them without funds or goods to assist them in their new homeland. The Yuchi settled in the northwest section of Creek lands in Indian Territory, geographically removed from most of their Creek neighbors. Again, they resided in three geographically close but separate areas with ceremonial grounds active in all three locations. The three Yuchi stomp grounds (religious geographical areas) are Mother Ground, or “Polecat” (near Kellyville, Okla.), Duck Creek (near Glenpool, Okla.), and Sand Creek (near Bixby, Okla.). These ceremonial grounds, with sacred fires brought from the Southeast, still serve as central meeting places for religious and social activities. The Yuchi continue their stomp dance tradition as part of their religious obligations and hold Green Corn ceremonies each summer. Individuals either belong to a stomp ground or a Christian church (usually Methodist) or may fluctuate between them at different periods in their lives.

Their residence patterns, ceremonial activities, and language use helped maintain Yuchi identity. Language distinguished the Yuchi from their neighbors. The language is an isolate and unrelated to the Muskogee language of most Creek towns. Until the 20th century the majority of Yuchi used their own language for most communication needs. However, fewer than 20 people still speak the Yuchi language today. Early subsistence practices entailed women working the fields and men hunting. Gendered division of labor continues, but most Yuchi people hold wage-labor jobs. Women and men compete against each other in Yuchi-style football games during the summer. Such gatherings may be followed by an evening meal of fried pork, fry bread, sofke (corn soup), fried potatoes, and fried corn. While 19th-century marriage patterns tended strongly toward endogamy, by the 1990s marriage with other groups was increasing as young people left their home areas to attend colleges and join the workforce. The Creek Nation has recently recognized the Yuchi Indian tribe as distinct from the Creek, but the tribe has yet to secure federal recognition. Continuing to thrive in Oklahoma, members of the Yuchi tribe may be commonly heard to remark, “I am Yuchi, not Creek.”

PAMELA WALLACE
Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History

J. Joseph Bauxar, Ethnohistory (Summer 1957); Verner W. Crane, in American Anthropologist (July-September 1918); Jason Baird Jackson, Yuchi Ceremonial Life: Performance, Meaning, and Tradition in a Contemporary American Indian Community (2003); Mary Lynn, “A Grammar of Euchee (Yuchi)” (Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, Bloomington, 2001); Frank G. Speck, Ethnology of the Yuchi Indians (1909); John R. Swanton, Early History of the Creek Indians and Their Neighbors (1922); Pamela S. Wallace, Ethnohistory (Fall 2002), “Yuchi Social History since World War II: Political Symbolism in Ethnic Identity” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Oklahoma, 1998).