The Edisto-Natchez Kusso Tribe of South Carolina said it will soon tell the federal government it intends to seek recognition as the second sovereign Native American community in the Palmetto State.
It could take a year before the tribe submits a formal application to the U.S. Indian Affairs for the highly coveted status that was granted in 1941 to the Catawba Indian Nation near Rock Hill, said Chief John Glenn Creel.
The designation would give the local tribe the long sought-after acknowledgement that it exists, he said. It would also create the “opportunity to improve health care and housing.
“This would make resources available to acquire land in and around our communities for conservation and to use for teaching our next generations how to be good stewards of the land while farming, hunting and fishing,” the chief said.
As part of the process for federal recognition, the Edisto-Natchez Kusso people in Dorchester and Colleton counties have recovered a nearly forgotten part of their history.
“We acknowledge and are proud of our kinship ties to the Natchez-Kusso Edisto Tribe,” said Lisa Collins, chief of the Wassamasaw Tribe. “Our progenitor Indian Mary’s descendants that lived in the Wassamasaw Community some of those descendants married into the Edisto Tribe as well as the Santee Tribe.” The Wassamasaw of Varnertown Indians is located near Moncks Corner in Berkeley County.
With the help of College of Charleston assistant professor Brennan Keegan, the tribe is doing a comprehensive genealogy study that shows “in our genealogy we have the blood of Indian Mary [of Edisto Island] in our tribe,” Creel said.
Historians consider Indian Mary’s descendants as living links to the Edisto Indians, who are considered to be extinct as a tribal group.
When Europeans arrived in what would become South Carolina, the Edisto lived between today’s Savannah and Edisto rivers. St. Helena Island was the tribe’s original home. By the late 1500s, the Edisto settled on Edisto Island.
The Edisto-Natchez Kusso’s kinship ties with indigenous people will be displayed at the tribe’s community center that is expected to be completed in October in time for the tribe’s homecoming, Creel said. The community center is near the tribe’s Edisto Indian Free Clinic in the Four Holes Indian Community southwest of Ridgeville where Creel is a family physician.
The tribe recently broke ground for the center named for Robert Davidson, who served as chief from 1969 until 1982 and led the tribe’s efforts to gain recognition in 1972 from South Carolina as an indigenous Native American community.
About 800 tribal members live along the Edisto River in the Creel Town Indian Community in Colleton County and the Four Holes community in Dorchester County.
Two tribes become one
The story of how this amalgamated tribe was created and settled in Lowcountry South Carolina begins in 1729 during the French and Indians Wars 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 Charleston area.
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 Keegan and her 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 off of land reserved for them to form Creel Town and Four Holes communities.
Civil rights history
During the period of school desegregation, tribal members joined with Black civil rights activists to integrate schools in Dorchester County.
The tribal communities had schools for their children during the period of racial segregation.
“They were trying to get our children in the public schools,” Creel said. “And the African American parents held out registering their children to allow the native children to register so [the state government] could not say there was no room for the native children,” he said.
Dorchester County advocate Victoria DeLee and John Reynolds, an activist with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), were part of the effort to desegregate the county schools, he said.
“When we [were] integrating the school and we [were] picketing … the sheriff went to arrest me … said I didn’t have no Indians in Dorchester County,” DeLee said in a 2006 interview with University of South Carolina professor Cleveland Sellers. “The news media was going to [interview] us … to find out from me … did I have any Indians.” To prepare for the interview, DeLee said she and others plucked turkey feathers for headbands.
“It’s bad, but we pulled them feathers out of them turkeys so we could get feathers.” she said. “The news media showed up to the school that morning because we [were] picketing the school, and the sheriff … and all was there, so when we [came] out there … we had real Indians with feathers and their [head] bands. And then the news media went and [said], ‘Sure enough. There [are] Indians in Dorchester County.’ We laughed about it.”
“It is sad sometimes when we read that the Kusso are extinct and the Natchez are extinct,” Creel said. “It is [like a] knife in the chest because we are still here.”
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