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The Croatan were a Native American tribe living in the coastal areas of what is now North Carolina. They lived in current Dare County, an area encompassing the Alligator River, Croatan Sound, Roanoke Island, and parts of the Outer Banks, including Hatteras Island. Now extinct, they were one of the Algonquian peoples.
They were believed to have been on good terms with English settlers of the Roanoke Colony. There has been a persistent myth, not supported by any substantive documentation, that there were survivors of that abandoned colony who joined the Croatan. The Lost Colony Center for Science and Research has excavated English artifacts within the territory of the former Croatan tribe. These might also have been the result of trade or of Indians finding them at the former colony site. The Center is conducting a DNA study to try to identify any surviving lines.
Based on legend, people said that the modern Lumbee tribe, based in North Carolina, were descendants of the Croatan and survivors of the Lost Colony of Roanoke Island. There is no historical evidence for this.
More recently the Lumbee have claimed descent from the Cheraw, a Siouan-speaking people. There is no direct historical evidence of this connection. The evidence available seems to indicate that the Lumbee may have some ancestors among certain Siouan tribes[citation needed].
More painstaking late twentieth-century research has demonstrated that the Lumbee definitely had numerous ancestors among mixed-race African Americans free in Virginia before the American Revolution, and their descendants who migrated to the Virginia and North Carolina frontiers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These "free people of color" were mostly descendants of white women and African men, who worked and lived together in colonial Virginia. These connections have been traced for numerous individuals and families through court records, land deeds and other existing historical documents.[1][2]
Notes
- ^ Paul Heinegg, Free African Americans of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland and Delaware, 2005, accessed 15 Feb 2009
- ^ J. Cedric Woods, "Lumbee origins: The Weyanoke-Kearsey connection", Southern Anthropologist, 2004, accessed 30 Jul 2008
References
- K.I. Blu: "Lumbee", Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 14: 278-295, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2004
- A.S. Eterovich: Croatia and Croatians, and the Lost Colony, San Carlos, CA: Ragusan Press, 2003
- T. Hariot, J. White, J. Lawson: A vocabulary of Roanoke, Merchantville: Evolution Publishing, 1999
- Th. Ross: American Indians in North Carolina, South Pines, NC: Karo Hollow Press, 1999
- G.M. Sider: Lumbee Indian histories, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993
- S.B. Weeks: The lost colony of Roanoke, its fate and survival, New York: Knickbocker Press, 1891
- J.R. Swanton: "Probable Identity of the Croatan Indians." U.S. Dept. of the Interior, Office of Indian Affairs, 1933
- J. Henderson: "The Croatan Indians of Robeson County, North Carolina." U.S. Dept. of the Interior, Office of Indian Affairs, 1923
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