Story and Photos by Brian Rosenzweig
Graphic by Bonnie Zhang
For April Parker, her family’s hometown is almost a map of her heritage.
Parker grew up spending every summer in Chadbourn, North Carolina, a predominantly Black agricultural town in Columbus County that historically developed as a major producer of tobacco and cotton. Straddling the eastern North Carolina-South Carolina border, a region once known as the Carolina Border Belt for its ideal soil conditions, Parker says Chadbourn is a town where the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow are laid bare.
“It’s like you walk back in time,” Parker, a clinical assistant professor at the UNC School of Social Work, said. “There’s literally train tracks that split the town.”
Twenty-three percent of Columbus County is farmland, and many of the old agricultural industries that were historically worked by enslaved Black folk remain. Growing up, Parker says the fields were still where many in her family worked until the late 1980s.
Yet Chadbourn’s history with enslaved labor and its lasting legacy isn’t the only thing about the town that serves to viscerally remind Parker of her heritage; it’s also an area with a strong American Indian community.
Parker is a proud Black woman, but grew up only distantly aware that her grandmother’s side of the family was also Waccamaw Siouan, a southeastern tribe located along small communities like Buckhead and St. James in Columbus and Bladen counties.
Being physically detached from these communities, Parker and her immediate family hardly considered themselves Waccamaw Siouan.
In the decades since, Parker had rarely engaged with the question of her mixed-race identity.
That was until her son, Luke, began embracing his Waccamaw Siouan heritage with pride.
Early into fourth grade at Central Park School for Children in downtown Durham, Luke’s social studies teacher began a unit on indigenous and early colonial history in North Carolina by having students pick common roles from early settler colonies in the state. Luke had mentioned to his teacher that his family was Waccamaw Siouan.
When assigning roles to students, Luke’s teacher made a point of notifying the class that Luke was Waccamaw Siouan, and she asked him if he’d like to take up a role related to his tribe. Luke gladly took on the role of a beadworker, and told his mom about it that day after school.
That was a turning point for April and Luke learning more about their Waccamaw Siouan heritage, recounting it as a moment in which Luke felt particularly affirmed as a Black American Indian.
“I think when people hear ‘Native American,’ they have a picture in their mind of what the person is supposed to look like, and that’s not necessarily the case,” April said. “Native American people come in all shades of brown.”
That’s stuck with Luke since. Now in ninth grade, he says he proudly identifies himself to others as both Black and Waccamaw Siouan.
“I remember one time in fifth grade, they brought up something in history about the treatment of Black and Native people, and I said something about ‘being both,’” Luke said. “If somebody asks me, I tell them I’m Black and Native.”
April said that seeing Luke begin to recognize himself as Waccamaw Siouan despite his darker skin helped her begin seeing herself as such.
April had not only grown up physically removed from many Waccamaw Siouan residents in Chadbourn, but was raised without any of the traditions or ceremonies of the tribe. As such, she was insecure about embracing the identity as an adult, and how she would be received.
Still, over the past four years, April has slowly grown into her American Indian cultural heritage, coming to proudly identify herself as Waccamaw Siouan, and learning to accept the full complexity of her racial identity – a transformation she credits almost entirely to Luke.
When April and Luke began reconnecting with their American Indian roots, they started locally.
Though Durham, Chapel Hill, and surrounding areas sit atop unceded Occaneechi land, the Triangle area is also host to a massive collective of urban Indians, comprising tribes from all across the state and country.
With an estimated 10,000 American Indians living within Wake, Johnston, Durham, Orange, and Chatham counties, the Triangle holds one of the largest urban Indian populations in North Carolina, the state with the largest American Indian population east of the Mississippi River.
As such, intertribal and multicultural events are central to the area.
It started with visiting the North Carolina Museum of Natural Science’s American Indian exhibit during Native American Heritage Month. Then, the two started attending powwows in the area, such as the N.C. State Annual Powwow and the Inter-Tribal Powwow in Dorothea Dix Park.
At these events, April and Luke saw an expansive view of American Indians in the area, ranging in age, race, skin color, and even different histories of involvement in traditions. They observed dances from various tribes, ate traditional foods such as frybread, and made connections with tribal artists and leaders from across the state.
Luke said the powwows were helpful in dispelling the common misconception that American Indian tribes are monolithic. In seeing a wide range of traditions, cuisines, and even languages shared at these powwows, Luke further understood the diversity of urban Indians in the area.
“When I was younger, I thought it was one group of people,” Luke said. “It’s like in Africa; they’re all ‘the same race,’ but they don’t all speak the same languages and stuff.”
While there’s often been affirmation and clarity in the process of reconnecting with their American Indian roots, April also notes there have been instances of pain – a pain she refers to as “double,” in learning about the entwined histories of their Black and American Indian heritages.
The Waccamaw Siouan are one of seven state-recognized tribes that lack federal recognition. In North Carolina, only the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in the western mountainous region of the state have federal recognition. Federal recognition means the United States government recognizes a tribe as a “domestic dependent nation” within the U.S. which is thereby entitled to certain federal benefits. The Waccamaw Siouan tribe introduced a failed bill for federal recognition in 1948, and has only been state-recognized since 1971.
“That just frustrates me so bad, that I have to prove that I’m Native, or this tribe has to prove that they’re descendants of people who have been here for thousands of years,” April said.
Quin Godwin, a member of the Lumbee nation who serves as the associate director of the N.C. American Indian Heritage Commision, said federal recognition affects everything from access to healthcare to disaster relief.
“With FEMA, there’s money entitled to tribes almost immediately when a natural disaster happens, but that’s fully federally recognized tribes,” Godwin said. “The Lumbee tribe in particular, and the Coharie and Waccamaw Siouan suffered greatly in Hurricane Matthew and Hurricane Florence, but were unable to receive the same federal assistance.”
April says that learning about two distinct familial heritages of oppression in the United States has been especially difficult.
“As if it’s not bad enough that you know you’re a descendant of slaves, you’re part of a people who went through and survived a genocide,” April said. “It is a burden to carry our histories.”
At the same time, however, it’s convinced her of the urgency in her and Luke claiming their Waccamaw Siouan identity.
Luke says as a Black American Indian, that hasn’t always been easy.
“It sucks that people who are Native and mixed with other stuff, we aren’t really considered part of the culture,” Luke said. “I feel like some older people, they see it as an impurity.”
Godwin notes that while histories vary by tribe, many divides between mixed-race American Indians and their tribes arose in the Jim Crow South out of a need to distinguish their identities within racist systems.
“Neither of those identities is getting you anything great in the 1950s, from a civil rights perspective,” Godwin said. “Non-Native politicians and leaders in general just pitted one side against each other.”
Yet in the decades since Jim Crow, Godwin says there’s been a trend of mixed-race American Indians who had grown distant from their tribes reclaiming the identity, and of tribes working hard to undo the histories of separation.
“I would say the majority of tribes have embraced their mixed relatives,” Godwin said. “Knowledge of any sort about your ancestors just builds on your personal identity, and I like that people are finding those connections.”
April knows that when people look at her and Luke, their Waccamaw Siouan heritage might not be assumed. But whereas a few years back, that may have been enough to stop her from claiming the identity altogether, she now sees it as a chance to educate people about the plurality of American Indians, and affirm – for both herself and others – the myriad parts that make up her identity.
“Culturally, I really identify as a Black woman, because that’s what I was raised in,” April said. “I wasn’t raised in the Native American culture of the Waccamaw Siouan tribe, but I know who I am.”
