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Concept
Waccamaw
Summary
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.
Very little remains of the Waccamaw's ancestral Woccon language today, it was one of the two Catawban branches of the Siouan language family. The language was lost due to devastating population losses and social disruptions during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is attested today in a vocabulary of 143 words, printed in 1709.
While the Waccamaw were never populous, the arrival of settlers and their diseases in the 16th century resulted in devastating population loss and dispersal. In 1600, anthropologist James Mooney estimated the population of the "Waccamaw, Winyaw, Hook, &c" at 900 people, while the 1715 census registers only one remaining Waccamaw village with a total population of 106 people, 36 of them men.
According to the early 20th century ethnographer John R. Swanton, 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 the mainland. One of the men whom the Spanish captured was baptized and learned Spanish.
Called Francisco de Chicora by the Spanish, he worked for Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón. The explorer took him to Spain on a trip. Chicora told the court chronicler Peter Martyr about more than twenty Indigenous peoples who lived in present-day South Carolina, among which he mentioned the "Chicora" and the "Duhare". Their tribal territories comprised 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.
Official source
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