Thank you for this fascinating talk on the native peoples of your region & their connections with other native cultures before & after European arrival. Dr. Smallwood brought up a number of things not usually mentioned in these histories. My own ancestors in the 1600s were both English & French as well as Cherokee, with a family member in each generation passing down our history since before European arrival & after. My English & French ancestors both fled via Britain in the 1650s to the English colonies in Virginia, but these Eur. ancestors almost immediately fled the Va. colony to join the Cherokee Nation in what is now Cherokee County, N.C. Our family is not legally recognized by US law as Cherokee, sincr our ancestors fled their homeland when the US troops were sent by Pres. Jackson to force all Cherokees from their homeland. The legal requirements for each Indian nation today are very complicated as well as very different. But with the Cherokee, you cannot legally qualify as Cherokee unless an ancestor signed one of the rolls with the US, & none of our ancestors did so because we fled the homeland in order to avoid being taken captive by the US militaey & forced to relocate to Indian Territory. Quite a few Cherokees escaped the US military roundup, with some living secretly in caves in the homeland for years & with some escaping by fleeing to other regions. Well into the 20th c, there were hundreds of Cherokee communities across the southeast (& elsewhere) that were Cherokee communities in diaspora, forced by the US to declare themselves as either Black or white by the later 19th c. These communities in diaspora were usually very small & scattered out through the forests of the southeast, mostly in areas the Euro. settlers had not yet overrrun. I wish i could find more information on these communities in diaspora like ours, but very little has been written. Our community was called Cooterneck, which means turtle neck, because its center was at a fork in the road. When my ancestors & other fleeing Cherokees founded the community there were no "white" towns nearby, so until later in the 19th c we had many miles of old forest to live in. The thing is, if u were a Cherokee (or other Indian from the southeastern nations), u could not live freely on US territories; rather, you'd be forcibly removed to Indian Territory. It's a long & complex history. My family had kept our family history since long before Eur. arrival, with someone in each generation becoming the family historian & passing it down through each generation for centuries. But my family's history, which had been written down by the 1700s, became partially lost when the US along with gangs of white settlers invaded the homeland nation, often burning down the people's homes & killing the occupants or forcing them to flee. These invaders were given legal title to any Cherokee lands/homes they seized, thanks to Pres. Jackson. Our family historian's home in the Forced Removal period (1838...) was burned down by invading white settlers, with our written family history destroyed. Thus we lost most of our knowledge of our family history before the late 1700-early 1800s. This or similar things happened to many Cherokees during that period, resulting in the widespread dispersion of Cherokees who did not walk the forced death march to Indian Territory in 1838. But again, thank you for this fascinating talk by Dr. Smallwood. It helped me better understand what happened to our ancestors during the invasion by the British & then the seizure of our homeland by the US.
I Really like this guy- But now I have to edit it because I finished watching the video and I realize just how much of a tool this guy actually is. Started strong, but now he’s become a mouthpiece to cover up the genocide and try to pass the blame onto other people. Thank God, we came here and saved all the Indians!
I’ve been sharing and researching the stone Art of North Carolina for almost 3 years now. Academia knows nothing of the people who inhabited this land before them. I’d like to remind everybody, only been here for a little more than three people ago. Just over 200 years. We’re still actively covering up a genocide. ❤
I haven’t finished the lecture yet, but I hope our host mentions that many of these tribes are not federally protected, citizens gather evidence of the destruction of pyramid mounds with housing developments which are discovered and ignored by our politicians and state funded archaeologists
35:00 it’s not just the seashells that they put images on; the library that was found in Alamance county has painted crystals with faces on it just like what you see in my avatar. I found several photo realistic examples that are undeniable unless you are a politician or a land developer.
46:00 the Spanish did not come first if you know history, you will know that there were several different cultures and languages spoken here in the United States, including French and Gaelic, which is Irish. There were all different types of people here, if you know history.
46:20 oh yeah, those evil Spanish. It’s not like we’re still covering up a genocide. See this is a problem with state and government funded archaeological professionals that they are complicit. Archaeology in the United States does not transcend the government, the government runs archaeology. Like I said, we’re still covering up a genocide. Perhaps try not to be part of the problem.
You left out the peoples here before the Algonquian, Iroquoian, and Muskogean speakers… The Chicora and Duhare were the people of this land before being lost to waves of European diseases and replaced by these waves of the ones you mentioned. Why cover newcomers and not those who were here for thousands of years? Lawson and Woodward both document the changing of Native Languages in the early 1700s
Pilahuk for this point! From a Monacan, with family ties to the Mattamuskeet, Tuscarora, Saponi, Nansemond, Nanticoke, Lenape, Wamponoag and various Powhatan. Granted, our tribal history in the ol' 13 is very intermixed.
