Colleton County resident John Glenn Creel, chief of the Edisto Natchez-Kusso tribe of South Carolina, points to his father’s enlistment in the U.S. Navy as an example of how society tries to erase the presence of Native American people.
Creel’s father, Johnnie N. Creel, was a 19-year-old U.S. Navy recruit in 1954 when he was faced with the dilemma of deciding whether he was White or Black.
“My dad was forced to make a decision of a race he knew he was not,” the younger Creel told the Charleston City Paper. Creel said his father chose White when Native American was not an option on the enlistment form.
Many Native American people have experienced similar frustration when completing government, medical and employment forms, said Creel, the author of a 78-page anthology of his experiences of growing up in a tribal community that covers portions of Colleton and Dorchester counties.
“Historically, Native Americans were often excluded from census records or categorized misleadingly based on skin color, with light-skinned individuals identified as white, dark-skinned as colored or negro, and tan individuals labeled as mulatto or mestizo,” Creel writes in The Plight of Southeastern Native American Indian Tribes. Palmetto Publishing is scheduled to release the book July 22.
Tribal elders, aware of previous attempts in U.S. history to minimize or eliminate Indian ethnic identity, tried to shield the community from the outside world, Creel explained.
White religious leaders attempted to strip Indian communities of their culture and replace it with Christian orthodoxy, said Creel, pastor of Little Rock Holiness Church in Cottageville. Creel said he embraces his Christian heritage because “it was the church in our community that helped us preserve our culture.”
Church leaders also served as tribal leaders and in those positions they could block attempts to assimilate native people into the broader culture, he explained.
Tribal history
According to the 2020 U.S. Census, 2,300 Edisto Natchez-Kusso tribal members live along the Edisto River in the Creel Town Indian Community in Colleton County and the Four Holes community in Dorchester County.
The Edisto Natchez-Kusso is a blended tribe whose history begins in 1729 during the French and Indians War in Mississippi.
During the war, a band of the Natchez people left its Mississippi land near present-day Natchez to live among the Cherokee in North Carolina. By 1747, the Natchez left the Cherokee and settled in the Four Holes area.
Earlier in 1675, a group of Kusso people sold about 12,000 acres to the colonial government at today’s Charlestowne Landing, according to a story map prepared by College of Charleston assistant professor Brennan Keegan and post-graduate student Kit Kelly of Summerville.
Eventually, the Natchez and Kusso were pushed to the interior where they were granted land near the Edisto River and later joined to form its communities.
Beginning in the 1840s, they began to move from the land reserved for them to form Creel Town in Colleton County and Four Holes communities in Dorchester County.
Creel is a descendant of William Bartholomew Creel, who founded the Creel Town Indian Community. Creel’s father, Johnnie N. Creel, also once led the tribe.
The erasure continues
Creel earned a medical degree in 1999 from the Medical University of South Carolina. He is the director of the tribe’s Edisto Indian Free Clinic in the Four Holes Indian Community southwest of Ridgeville.
In his book, he recalled that during his tenure on a local cancer board, he suggested adding Native-American as an option on a patient’s intake form. The recommendation received praise, but Creel resigned from the board when it didn’t act on his suggestion.
Earlier this year, the Edisto Natchez-Kusso and eight other South Carolina tribes formed an alliance to secure cultural preservation, historical and physical conservation, economic development and sovereignty.
The alliance includes the Catawba Nation, the only tribe in the state that’s recognized by the federal government. The Edisto Natchez-Kusso are among four tribes that are also seeking federal recognition.
Creel said through the alliance “our goal is to become more public to get people to know we are here.”
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