We Have a Saying in the Native World

Collection:

Prompt: What does community mean to you?

Yes. So we have a saying in in the native world, at least that you know it’s not who you claim, but who claims you. And so we our communities are rooted in kinship, in knowing who your family is, who your family, who your grandparents and great grandparents are. You know, a lot of these tribes will say, you know, who’s your people? Yeah. Who are, and and that’s one of those things that you you talk about. You know, how you’re connected to somebody, and so community for me is is about kinship. It’s about supporting one another, maintaining our traditions alive. South Carolina is very unique in its history. Our tribes became essentially de-tribalized in the colonial era. We there was a time in which we didn’t have elected chiefs, and we had to reorganize ourselves later. And if it’s okay to throw out a little history, yeah, no, go ahead. South Carolina has the a unique population known as settlement Indians, and the settlement Indians were those who sided with the colony of South Carolina and chose to reside within the colony and not live in the back country. And so we were granted special protection, and our ancestors that were part of the settlement Indian communities would have included tribes like the PD, the Natchez, which we share kinship with as well, the Cape Fear peoples, the Kusabe, and because we were designated as free Indians in Amity with the state, we were allowed to stay in our ancestral homeland, and we evaded removal. And for a while, South Carolina wanted to revoke recognition for the descendants of South Carolina settlement Indian population. And so we were basically pushed into the free person of color classification. So if you go and look at our records, a lot of our ancestors. Went from being natives to all of a sudden being free persons of color, and even though we had always asserted our native identity, the government did not always want to acknowledge that. Yeah, and so it’s important for us to be able to tell our history, yeah, and our unique history with the state of South Carolina. 

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