The Waccamaw people were an Indigenous people of the Southeastern Woodlands , who lived in villages along the Waccamaw and Pee Dee rivers in North and South Carolina in the 18th century.
35-656: Woccon may refer to: the Waccamaw people the Woccon language Topics referred to by the same term [REDACTED] This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the title Woccon . If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article. Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Woccon&oldid=1221700405 " Category : Disambiguation pages Hidden categories: Short description
70-535: A 143-word vocabulary of the possibly related Woccon language in 1709. People in the area have built sedentary villages since at least 3,000 to 500 BP . Maize became a staple crop in the regions. Complex chiefdoms first arose in the area between 1150 to 1200 AD. Tribes neighboring the Waccamaw included the Sewees , Santees , Sampits (Sampa), Winyahs , and Pedees . According to ethnographer John R. Swanton ,
105-671: A council to oversee community issues. A school funded by Columbus County to serve Waccamaw children opened in 1934. At the time, public education was still racially segregated in the state. Before this, the Waccamaw had been required to send their children to schools for African Americans. North Carolina recognized the Waccamaw Siouan Tribe of North Carolina in 1971. The community is centered in Bladen and Columbus counties, North Carolina. They have unsuccessfully tried to gain federal recognition . They hold membership on
140-697: A force which defeated the Yamasees at Salkechuh (also spelled Saltketchers or Salkehatchie) on the Combahee River . Eventually, Craven was able to drive the Yamasees across the Savannah River back into Spanish Florida . After the war, the Yamasees migrated southwards to the region around St. Augustine and Pensacola , where they formed an alliance with the Spanish colonial administration. These Yamasees continued to inhabit Florida until 1727, when
175-739: A result of duplicitous colonial mercantile practices. Infuriated by the practices of the colonists, the Yamasees resolved to go to war against them, forming a pan-tribal coalition and initiating a two-year long war by attacking the colonial settlement of Charles Town on April 15, 1715. Bolstered by the large number of Indian tribes they had managed to enlist into their coalition, the Yamasees staged large-scale raids against other colonial settlements in Carolina as well, leading to most colonists abandoning frontier settlements and seeking refuge in Charles Town. South Carolina Governor Charles Craven led
210-637: Is also common in Muskogee. After the Yamasees migrated to the Carolinas , they began participating in the Indian slave trade in the American Southeast . They raided other tribes to take captives for sale to European colonists . Captives from other Native American tribes were sold into slavery, with some being transported to West Indian plantations. Their enemies fought back, and slave trading
245-502: Is different from Wikidata All article disambiguation pages All disambiguation pages Waccamaw people The meaning of the name Waccamaw is unknown. Francisco of Chicora , a 16th-century Indian man kidnapped by Spanish colonists, wrote it as Guacaya . The Waccamaw language was not recorded and remains unattested . The language likely belonged to the Siouan language family . English explorer John Lawson published
280-523: Is partially preserved in works by missionary Domingo Báez. Diego Peña was told in 1716-1717 that the Cherokee of Tuskegee Town also spoke Yamasee. Hann (1992) asserted that Yamasee is related to the Muskogean languages. This was based upon a colonial report that a Yamasee spy within a Hitchiti town could understand Hitichiti and was not detected as a Yamasee. Francis Le Jau stated in 1711 that
315-504: Is probably a loanword , as it seems also to have been absorbed into the Timucua language . Thus, the connection of Yamasee with Muskogean is unsupported. A document in a British colonial archive suggests that the Yamasees originally spoke Cherokee, an Iroquoian language, but had learned another language. For a time they were allied with the Cherokee but are believed to have been a distinct people. In 1715 Col. George Chicken stated that he
350-649: The English colony of the Carolina (present day South Carolina ). They established several villages, including Pocotaligo, Tolemato, and Topiqui, in Beaufort County . A 1715 census conducted by Irish colonist John Barnwell counted 1,220 Yamasees living in ten villages near Port Royal . Migration by the Yamasees to Charles Town (in the colony of Carolina ) beginning in 1686 was likely in pursuit of trading opportunities with English colonists, or to escape
385-637: The Savannah River and later in northeastern Florida . The Yamasees engaged in revolts and wars with other native groups and Europeans living in North America, specifically from Florida to North Carolina. The Yamasees, along with the Guale, are considered from linguistic evidence by many scholars to have been a Muskogean language people. For instance, the Yamasee term "Mico", meaning chief,
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#1732787958312420-412: The American Southeast. The Yamasees also conducted raids on the Spanish colonial settlement of St. Augustine . Indian captives of the Yamasees were transported to colonial settlements throughout Carolina, where they were sold to white colonists; frequently, many of these captives were then resold to West Indian slave plantations. Many Yamasees soon became indebted to the colonists they traded with, as
455-636: The Catholic Christian Indians of Spanish Florida . Pirate attacks on the Spanish missions in 1680 forced the Yamasees to migrate again. Some moved to Florida. Others returned to the Savannah River lands, which were safer after the Westo had been destroyed. In 1687, some Spaniards attempted to send captive Yamasees to the West Indies as slaves. The tribe revolted against the Spanish missions and their Native allies, and moved into
490-706: The NC Commission of Indian Affairs as per NCGS 143B-407, and incorporated as a 501(c)(3) organization in 1977. Lumbee Legal Services, Inc., represents the Waccamaw Siouan Tribe in its administrative process for seeking federal recognition. In 2005 South Carolina recognized the Waccamaw Indian People , a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization in Conway, South Carolina . with an office in Aynor, South Carolina . Both organizations claim to descend from
525-544: The Spanish, choosing to maintain stronger contacts with British colonists instead. The "prince" returned to Charles Town in 1715, right around the period when the Yamasee War broke out, and shortly after his family had been taken captive by Carolinian raiders and sold into slavery. The Yamasee Archeological Project was launched in 1989 to study Yamasee village sites in South Carolina. The project hoped to trace
560-584: The Spanish. In Charles Town, some Yamasee families looked toward Christian missionaries to educate their children in reading and writing as well as converting them to Christianity. Christian missionaries in Carolina may have had some success in converting the Yamasees and Guale because they had both become familiar with Spanish missionaries and were more open to conversion than other tribes. For decades, Yamasee raiders (frequently equipped with European firearms and working in concert with Carolinian settlers) conducted slave raids against Spanish-allied Indian tribes in
595-412: The Waccamaw may have been one of the first mainland groups of Natives visited by the Spanish explorers in the 16th century. Within the second decade of the 16th century, Francisco Gordillo and Pedro de Quexos captured and enslaved several Native Americans, and transported them to the island of Hispaniola where they had a base. Most died within two years, although they were supposed to have been returned to
630-617: The Yamasee understood Creek . He also noted that many Indians throughout the region used Creek and Shawnee as lingua francas , or common trading languages. In 1716-1717, Diego Peña obtained information that showed that Yamasee and Hitchiti-Mikasuki were considered separate languages. The Yamasee language, while similar to many Muskogean languages, is especially similar to Creek , for they share many words. Many Spanish missionaries in La Florida were dedicated to learning native languages, such as Yamasee, in an effort to communicate for
665-450: The Yamasees as a multi-ethnic amalgamation of several remnant Indian groups, including the Guale , La Tama , Apalachee , Coweta , and Cussita Creek. Historian Chester B. DePratter describes the Yamasee towns of early South Carolina as consisting of lower towns, consisting mainly of Hitchiti-speaking Indians, and upper towns, consisting mainly of Guale Indians. The Yamasees were one of
700-448: The Yamasees soon began to transport their captives to Carolina to sell in Charles Town's slave markets. They soon began to conduct raids specifically to take captives and sell them in Carolina. In 1713, Anglican missionaries in South Carolina sponsored the journey of a Yamasees man (whose actual name is unknown, as he was generally referred to as the "prince" or "Prince George") from Charles Town to London . Historians have noted that
735-604: The arrival of settlers and their diseases in the 16th century resulted in devastating population loss and dispersal. Anthropologist James Mooney estimated the 1600 population of the "Waccamaw, Winyaw, Hook, &c" at 900 people, while the 1715 census records only one remaining Waccamaw village with a total population of 106 people, 36 of them men. In 1910, the Waccamaw Siouan Indians , one of eight state-recognized groups in North Carolina , organized
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#1732787958312770-459: The colonists as a result. In 1755, John Evans noted in his journal that Cherokee and Natchez warriors killed some Waccamaw and Pedee "in the white people’s settlements." The surviving Waccamaw grew corn for their own use. In the later 19th century, they cultivated tobacco and cotton as commodity crops, on a small scale, as did yeomen among the neighboring African-American freedmen and European-Americans . Waccamaw Siouan people in
805-566: The combination of a smallpox epidemic and raids by Col. John Palmer (leading fifty Carolinian militiamen and one hundred Indians) eventually led many of the remaining Yamasees to disperse, with some joining the Seminole or Creek . Still others remained near St. Augustine until the Spanish relinquished control of the city to the British. At that time, they took with them around 90 Yamasees to Havana. Steven J. Oatis and other historians describe
840-856: The early 18th century, the Cheraw , a related Siouan people of the Southeastern Piedmont, tried to recruit the Waccamaw to support the Yamasee and other tribes against English colonists during the Yamasee War in 1715. The Cheraw made peace with the English. The English colonists founded a trading post in Euaunee, "the Great Bluff," in 1716. The Waccamaw engaged in a brief war against the South Carolina colony in 1720, and 60 Waccamaw men, women, and children were either killed or captured by
875-480: The historic Waccamaw people. The Waccamaw Sioux Indian Tribe of Farmers Union is an unrecognized tribe based in Clarkton, North Carolina, that incorporated as a nonprofit organization in 2001. Yamasee The Yamasees (also spelled Yamassees , Yemasees or Yemassees ) were a multiethnic confederation of Native Americans who lived in the coastal region of present-day northern coastal Georgia near
910-496: The largest slave raiding tribes in the American Southeast during the late 17th century, and have been described as a "militaristic slaving society", having acquired firearms from European colonists. Their use of slave raids to exert dominance over other tribes is partially attributed to the Yamasee aligning with European colonists in order to maintain their own independence. It was typical of Native Americans to take captives during warfare, particularly young women and children, though
945-466: The late 19th century in North Carolina farmed diverse crops on inherited lands, but agriculture was depressed. They increasingly turned to wage labor by the end of the century. Men collected turpentine from pine trees to supplement their income, while women grew cash crops, including tobacco and cotton, and /or worked as domestic laborers and farm hands. While the Waccamaw were never populous,
980-479: The mainland. One of the Native men kidnapped by the Spanish in 1521, Francisco de Chicora was baptized and learned Spanish. He worked for Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón . The explorer took him to Spain. Chicora told the court chronicler Peter Martyr about more than 20 Indigenous peoples who lived in present-day South Carolina, among which he mentioned the " Chicora " and the "Duhare". Their tribal territories comprised
1015-520: The motivation of the "prince" to visit London was a form of "religious diplomacy" on the part of the missionaries to further ties between the Yamasee and British colonists. The missionaries hoped that if the "prince" converted to Christianity while in London, it would ensure the Yamasee would become firm allies of the British colonists. Around the period that the "prince" travelled to London, the Yamasees were largely unwilling to be culturally assimilated by
1050-626: The northernmost regions. Swanton believed that Chicora was referring to the peoples who became known as the Waccamaw and the Cape Fear Indians , respectively. European contact decimated the Waccamaw. Having no natural immunity to endemic Eurasian infectious diseases, such as smallpox and measles , the Waccamaw, like many southeastern Native peoples, had high mortality rates from the new diseases. The 1715 Carolina colonial census listed their population as 610 total, with 210 men. The 1720 census recorded that they had 100 warriors. By
1085-475: The people's origins and inventory their artifacts. The project located a dozen sites. Pocosabo and Altamaha have since been listed as archeological sites on the National Register of Historic Places . The name "Yamasee" perhaps comes from Muskogee yvmvsē , meaning "tame, quiet"; or perhaps from Catawban yį musí: , literally "people-ancient". Little record remains of the Yamasee language. It
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1120-419: The purpose of conversion. It also allowed the missionaries to learn about the people's own religion and to find ways to convey Christian ideas to them. There is limited, inconclusive evidence suggesting the Yamasee language was similar to Guale . It is based on three pieces of information: Linguists note that the Spanish documents are not originals and may have been edited at a later date. The name Chiluque
1155-492: The village of Altamaha . In 1570, Spanish explorers established missions in Yamasee territory. The Yamasees were later included in the missions of the Guale province. Starting in 1675, the Yamasees were mentioned regularly on Spanish mission census records of the missionary provinces of Guale (central Georgia coast) and Mocama (present-day southeastern Georgia and northeastern Florida). The Yamasees usually did not convert to Christianity and remained somewhat separated from
1190-482: Was a large cause of the Yamasee War . The Yamasees lived in coastal towns in what are now southeast Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina. The Yamasees migrated from Florida to South Carolina in the late 16th century, where they became friendly with European colonists. The Yamasees were joined by members of the Guale , a Mississippian culture chiefdom, and their cultures intertwined. The Hernando de Soto expedition of 1540 traveled into Yamasee territory, including
1225-809: Was told that the Yammasses were the ancient people of the Cherokee. The name of the Yamasees survives in the town of Yemassee, South Carolina , in the Lowcountry close to where the Yamasee War began. It is also used for the title of William Gilmore Simms ' 1835 historical novel The Yemassee: A Romance of Carolina , and by extension, Yemassee , the official literary journal of the University of South Carolina . There are currently self-identified Yamasee descendants in Florida and elsewhere, and
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