
          Native Southerners
          By Perdue, ThedaTheda Perdue
          Vol. 11, No. 5, 1989, pp. 1, 4-8
          
          
            Southerners do not think very much about Indians unless, of course,
they are vacationing in the Great Smoky Mountains or perhaps south
Florida where the Cherokees and the Seminoles/Miccosukees maintain
tourist attractions. Instead, Southerners tend to associate native
peoples with the region's distant past (Pocahontas) or with the West
(cowboys and Indians). Yet in 1980 the South's population included
almost 190,000 people, excluding nearly 170,000 others in Oklahoma,
who identified themselves to census takers as Indian. Of these,
approximately 14,000 live on reservations while others maintain their
ethnic identity without federal recognition, a land base, or a
governing structure. The South's native peoples are enormously
diverse, yet they share a complex ancient culture and a recent history
that has challenged them to preserve that cultural tradition in
remarkably creative ways.
            Today's Southern Indians are descendants of people who have lived
in the region for thousands of years. In the millennia before the
arrival of Europeans, they developed an agriculturally based economic
system and organized themselves into large centralized
chiefdoms. These native Southerners were not hunters who roamed the
forests in isolated bands: they were farmers who lived in towns. Only
recently, in fact, has the South once again become as urbanized as it
was on the eve of 

European "discovery." The rich
bottomlands, a long growing season, and ample rainfall made it
possible for the region to support a population as dense as many areas
of Europe. In Their Number Become Thinned:
Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983), historical
demographer Henry Dobyns, for example, suggested that the current
state of Florida was home to nearly a million people. Quite clearly,
the South was not a wilderness in 1492.
            The demography, economy, government, and belief system of these
people promoted a sense of community and cooperation: they joined
together in performing large tasks such as planting and harvesting and
they maintained public granaries for visitors and villagers who fell
on hard times. The responsibilities and obligations of kinship
governed one's behavior; a strong community ethic balanced
considerable individual autonomy; and cosmological order demanded
temporal harmony. They did not operate in an individualistic way; the
community ethic was foremost.
            European invasion disrupted this way of life in several ways. Most
profound was the impact of disease. Native Americans had no resistance
to the diseases of Europe, and they suffered horrendous casualties not
only from common killers such as smallpox but also from milder
diseases such as measles. Dobyns and other demographers have suggested
that as many as 95 percent of native Americans died in the first
hundred years of contact with Europeans. In addition to disease,
warfare and slave-raiding claimed victims. Furthermore, Europeans,
particularly the English, demanded native land and allegiance. A
growing dependence on European goods left Indians little bargaining
room, and so they relinquished territory and sovereignty.
          
          
            Indians in Slavery
            In the South, the colonial economy quickly came to depend on
agriculture. In the early years, native peoples sustained this economy
through their land, which the colonists seized by the foreign practice
of treaty-making, and native labor, acquired by enslavement. Indian
prisoners of war took their place alongside African captives in the
tobacco and rice fields of colonial plantations. In 1708, for example,
South_Carolina's population of 9,58O included 2,900 Africans and 1,400
Indian slaves. In The Only Land They Knew: The
Tragic Story of the American Indians in the Old South (New_York:
The Free Press, 198I), historian J. Leitch Wright asserted,
however, that the number of Indian slaves actually could have been
much higher because of imprecision in recording the race of
slaves. Furthermore, he contended that many of the characteristics of
African_American culture may be native in origin rather than African
because of the high proportion of native people in the slave
population.
            By 1820, the native population in the South had declined to
approximately 100,000 people. Many of those who survived belonged to
five powerful nations-the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and
Seminoles-who had begun to adopt European culture in varying
degrees. Except perhaps for the Seminoles, they had centralized their
governments, recorded laws and established courts to enforce them, and
engaged in commercial agriculture. Some welcomed missions and schools,

adopted the English language, and bought African slaves. These peoples
came to be known as the "civilized" tribes, yet
their "civilization" offered little protection
from the land hunger and racism of the white South. In the 1820s and
1830s, the vast majority of these people, through fraudulent treaties
or by force, surrendered their homelands in the South and moved to
what is today eastern Oklahoma.
            Remnants of some of these peoples remained in the South. A group of
Cherokees held on to land in the Great Smoky Mountains in North
Carolina, some Choctaws retreated to the swamps and sand hills of
central Mississippi, the Creeks living along Poarch Creek in southern
Alabama retained their homes, and the Seminoles took refuge in the
Everglades of south Florida. In addition to these remnant nations,
other native peoples who had not been subject to the removal policy
struggled to maintain their status and identity as Indians in a South
that increasingly defined itself as biracial, that is, black and
white.
          
          
            Coping with a "Biracial" Society
            For those Indians who constituted sizeable communities of readily
identified historical peoples, the task was somewhat simpler. The
Eastern Cherokees, for example, never had to defend their
"Indianness" although the means by which to
incorporate them into North_Carolina's political system was long in
doubt. However, the native people, now known as Lumbees, who lived in
Robeson County had considerable difficulty in resisting designation as
"free people of color," that is African_American,
in the ante-bellum period. With their origin in question and their
culture largely indistinguishable from that of frontier whites, North
Carolina questioned their claim to be Indian. In the Civil_War, the
Confederate army welcomed Cherokee enlistment, but officials
conscripted Lumbees as forced laborers building coastal
fortifications. The Lumbees responded with a guerrilla war that lasted
through Reconstruction. Historian William McKee Evans has suggested
that North_Carolina's failure to defeat the Lumbees insured their
designation as "Indian," since Southern racial
ideology made failure to win an Indian war more acceptable than
inability to subdue a black uprising. The result was state recognition
of the Lumbees as "Indian," creation of separate Indian schools in
Robeson County, and establishment of Pembroke University as a teacher
training school for Indians. The United_States Bureau of Indian
Affairs, however, has never extended full recognition or services to
the Lumbees, and they have continued to experience racial harassment
despite their highly publicized rout of the Ku Klux Klan in the
1950s.
            Smaller, less powerful Indian peoples have had a far more difficult
time than the Lumbees in achieving recognition as
"Indian." Until the second Reconstruction of the
1960s, many southern Indians shared the indignity of segregation with
other non-whites. When facilities specified
"white" and "colored," law
and convention forced most Indians to use the latter. White officials
usually barred them from "white" schools; their
own racism plus a desire to preserve their ethnic identity meant that
Indians rarely attended segregated schools. Parents sometimes raised
funds for private "Indian" schools, but the
precarious financial situation of most Indian communities limited this
option. In the late nineteenth century, the Catawbas in upcountry
South_Carolina welcomed Mormon missionaries who promised help in
educating their children, but other communities struggled along with
far less satisfactory solutions.
            Native Americans also found that they had few political rights in
the segregated South. The fifteenth amendment presumably protected the
right of non-reservation Indians to vote (reservation Indians were
"wards" not "citizens" of
the United_States until 1924), but many native peoples had difficulty
exercising the franchise. The same prejudices and tactics that kept
African_Americans from the polls denied 

the vote to Indians. Those who
lived on reservations finally received the right to vote by
Congressional act in 1924, but many found that the grant of
citizenship was an empty gesture. Southerners simply applied the
literacy test and poll tax to Indians with predictable results, or
they invented new legal subterfuges in order to exclude native peoples
from the political process. The Democratic-controlled counties of
western North_Carolina were so desperate to keep the Republican
Cherokees from voting that the legislature insisted that the 1924 act
did not apply to them. A separate Congressional act in 1930 that
specifically enfranchised the North_Carolina Cherokees still did not
mean ready access to the polls. As recently as 1988, some Lumbee
leaders were calling for a United_States Justice_Department
investigation of political corruption and discrimination in Robeson
County.
            The lack of educational opportunities, legal segregation, and
political disfranchisement compounded the economic problems
experienced by Southern Indians in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Living on marginal lands, they barely survived
through subsistence farming or sharecropping. Sometimes they even lost
what land base they had to unscrupulous individuals or state
governments eager to profit from the sale of lands for which no
recorded titles existed. Most Southern Indians lived far from urban
areas, and whatever industrialization and prosperity came to the
"New South" passed them by. Furthermore, racial
discrimination excluded most Indians from all except the most menial
jobs. While New_Deal programs brought some relief to Southern Indians
who lived on reservations, most native Southerners lived so marginally
that they barely noticed the waxing or waning of the Great
Depression.
            The boom in tourism that followed World_War_II provided minimal
economic benefits to the Seminoles and Cherokees whose locations near
national parks made them tourist attractions. Certainly tourism meant
employment opportunities, but the jobs usually paid poorly and the
work was seasonal. Furthermore, tourists' expectations of Indians
forced native peoples to project a stereotypical image that many found
demeaning, and the tasteless shops, restaurants, and motels built to
cater to the tourists gave native communities a cheap carnival
atmosphere. Most Southerners have driven down the strip in Cherokee,
North_Carolina that is lined with shops selling foreign-made
"Indian" souvenirs and Cherokees dressed in
polyester Plains Indian garb for tourists to photograph. While some
may have been appalled, this was most expected of Indians and Indian
reservations, and until recently, the limited economic resources of
the Cherokees gave them little alternative to catering to these
expectations.
          
          
            Debating Federal Termination
            In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, some native peoples
did manage to secure a reservation, a commonly held tract of land
whose title was protected by the federal_government, and the services
of the Bureau of Indian Affairs including schools, health_care, and
financial support for various tribal ventures. In the 1950s the
federal_government's termination policy threatened these
benefits. Most Southern Indians who had federal recognition sought to
avoid the termination of their relationship with the federal
government and the allotment of their assets, including land, to
individuals. Among the Cherokees and Seminoles, however, considerable
dissension existed from different quarters. Highly acculturated
Cherokees sought termination because they felt that federal
restrictions on the alienation of land thwarted free enterprise, while
very conservative Seminoles organized a separate Miccosukee tribe in
order to disassociate themselves from federal programs they believed
undermined traditional culture. Neither the Cherokees, Seminoles, nor
Miccosukees were terminated, but the Catawbas of South_Carolina and
the Alabama-Coushatta were.
            Mississippi Choctaws, Eastern Cherokees, Florida Seminoles, and
Miccosukees today have federally recognized reservations on which most
of their members live. Other peoples such as the Tunica-Biloxi and the
Poarch Creeks have won federal recognition and are acquiring land to
be placed in trust. Only people whose names appear on the official
membership rolls of these tribes enjoy federal status as Indians. The
health, education, and other benefits that accrue to these people are
limited to those indi-

viduals who are on the rolls; that is, a Cherokee
grandmother does not automatically entitle a person to BIA services
unless her/his name appears on the roll. These benefits are not a
special kind of Indian "welfare" but represent
payment for ceded lands and fulfillment of federal obligations.
            Most native Southerners do not have federal recognition. Some
Southern_states operate state reservations; other states acknowledge
Indian groups within their borders but provide relatively little in
terms of services. State reservations, recognition, and organization
of Indian councils, however, represent official acceptance of these
people as Indian by the larger society. Furthermore, most
non-recognized tribes have incorporated pursuant to state
law. Nevertheless, federal recognition is a goal for many because of
the expanded services and sovereignty involved.
            Federal recognition, which can be pursued administratively through
the Bureau of Indian Affairs or legislatively in Congress, is
difficult for Indian peoples to achieve. First of all, they must
demonstrate identification as a specific native people through
time. In other words, a group of people cannot merely assume an Indian
name and expect federal acceptance as Indian. Furthermore, they must
demonstrate that they have long occupied a particular site as an
Indian tribe and that a tribal government has exercised continual
influence over the group. Historical circumstances make these
provisions almost impossible for most native Southerners to meet. Many
tribal groups in the South are composites of remnant peoples who
joined together to forge a new tribal identity. This is true not only
of nonrecognized peoples but also of some such as the Catawbas, whom
the BIA at one time recognized, and the Seminoles. Furthermore, many
native peoples fail to occupy traditional lands through no fault of
their own; indeed, whites forced many of them to relinquish their
homelands. By the same token, state governments denied political
authority and sovereignty to tribal governments, and so their
inability to govern often had little to do with the wishes of their
own people.
            Federal recognition, however elusive, offers native Southerners an
opportunity to reaffirm their Indian identity in a political and
economic sense as well as their public image as Indians. Federally
recognized tribes come under the jurisdiction of the federal
government which, in recent years, has been more protective of the
civil_rights of minorities than state and local governments. This is
particularly important to peoples like the Lumbees who have been
subject to overt racism in recent years. Furthermore, federally
recognized Indians can govern their own lands and establish their own
priorities for their communities. Federal recognition gives tribes a
corporate identity under which they can file suit, enter contracts,
and apply for grants (this also applies to the tribes that have
incorporated under state law), and it usually removes them from the
jurisdiction of state law. Since federally recognized native peoples
acquired far greater control over their own affairs in the 1970s,
these advantages have provided a means to challenge the poverty and
impotence they historically have suffered.
            As a result of the expanded sovereignty that federal recognition
provides, many Southern Indians have significantly improved their
economic situation. The most controversial exercise of sovereignty and
economic ingenuity is the opening of bingo parlors on Indian
reservations. The pioneers in this enterprise were the Seminoles. In
the 1970s, at their reservation just north of Fort Lauderdale, the
Seminoles set up a "smoke shop," where they sold
cigarettes without paying state tax, and a high-stakes bingo parlor,
which violated state law. Later they added establishments at their Big
Cypress reservation near Fort Myers and on tribal land in Tampa. The
state of Florida tried to close the businesses, but in 1982 the United
States Supreme_Court ruled that bingo and smoke shops were legal and
were not subject to state law. Since then, the Cherokees have followed
suit and opened a high stakes bingo parlor in North_Carolina, as have
the Poarch Creeks in Alabama.
            Bingo is big business for Indians whose reservations are so remote
and poor that few other economic opportunities exist. In 1985 Seminole
tribal chairman James Billie told the Florida legislature that the
Seminole tribal income was over seven million dollars; of this,
two-thirds came from bingo. The effects on the tribe have been
significant. The employment rate has increased by twenty percent. More
Seminole children can afford to go to college, and bingo revenue has
provided services ranging from health_care to day care. Each enrolled
Seminole also receives an annual dividend which she/he can use to
improve her/his life through the purchase of a new stove or the
payment of college tuition. The tribe also offers loans to members who
want to begin their own businesses. Indeed, the Seminoles 

have used
bingo revenue to expand and diversify their economy because they
realize that bingo is not a very secure source of funding for the long
term, particularly if the state legalizes gambling. The Seminoles like
many other native Southerners are adapting their traditional corporate
ethic to the modern economy. Rejecting a rigid free enterprise
ideology, the tribe actively tries to improve the economic life of all
its members, and it marshals community resources to accomplish that
goal.
            In some ways the Choctaws pioneered this approach to solving tribal
economic problems. In 1969 the Choctaws formed a development
corporation that built over four hundred houses and upgraded another
two hundred. Furthermore, the Choctaws have used tribal land and
federal loans to construct an eighty-acre industrial park. One of the
industries that located here manufactures hand-finished greeting cards
while another makes electrical harnesses for GM automobiles. Many
Choctaws work in these industries but so do non-Indians: today the
Choctaws are the largest employer in Neshoba County. In addition to
providing employment these industries generate profits that fund
tribal services. In an era of federal budget cuts, such non-
government sources of income are essential. This is a major reason why
the Cherokees, for example, acquired a mirror company that is not
located on the reservation. Although its factories will employ few
Cherokees, the income the company produces will help improve the lives
of all the people who live on the reservation through expanded
services.
            The growing independence and self-confidence of native Southerners
has led to a renewed interest in their past and a desire for more
authentic representations of their culture. Native peoples have become
involved in protecting archaeological and historic sites. The
Cherokees, for example, joined environmentalists in trying
unsuccessfully to stop the Tellico reservoir in east
Tennessee. Although Cherokees no longer live there, the valley
contained some of their most important eighteenth-century village
sites. The Seminoles acquired land in Tampa and built a cultural
center (and a bingo parlor) because the site had historical
significance for them. Many native peoples have constructed modern
museums and "living villages" in order to help
visitors understand their ancestors' way of life. Powwows and
community centers strengthen community bonds and ties to the past.
            Perhaps the most authentic way in which Southern Indians have
embraced their past and reasserted their culture, however, is in using
their traditional communal ethic, which emphasized the welfare of the
group over the individual, to modify the institutions of
twentieth-century America. Native peoples such as the Choctaws have
employed the tools of capitalist America to provide social services,
offer educational and economic opportunities, and preserve ethnic
integrity and independence. Contrary to current conventional wisdom,
they have improved substantially the standard of living on their
reservations not through trickle-down economics and free enterprise
but through direct aid and a commitment to community. Although some
leaders verbally have rejected the idea of preserving distinct native
cultures and communities and have advocated assimilation, the effect
of native economic expansion has been to reaffirm
"Indianness" and offer us an important model for
economic_development. Native peoples, not white bureaucrats, clearly
are the best engineers of their own futures. Unfortunately, the Bureau
of Indian Affairs' stringent requirements for recognition deprive most
native Southerners of the institutional structure needed to benefit
fully from this model. Because the South has so many non-recognized
Indians, it is a matter of regional concern and may well be a pressing
cultural and racial issue of the twenty-first century.
          
        
