A COMMUNITY 

 REACHES BACK TO 

 ITS ANCESTORS 



By Sarah Friday Peters 



The Wind speaks to those who will 

 listen. 



It whispers through the pines and 

 dances on the water at Lake 

 Waccamaw. It blows over scrubby 

 flatlands and through the forests. 



And it breathes cool comfort for a 

 people struggling to find their past. 



Chief Priscilla Jacobs of North 

 Carolina's Waccamaw tribe first heard 

 the Wind long ago. At 6, it beckoned 

 her to Columbus County's ditches to 

 dig clay for pots. No one had told her 

 that hundreds of years ago, her ances- 

 tors had done the same. 



"It's like there was always an 

 instinct to do these things," she says. 



Young Waccamaw drummers, too, 

 hear the sounds that speak. "We don't 

 teach them," the chief says. "There's 

 just something in them that's able to 

 come out." 



Not everyone hears. But a time is 

 coming when many will in North 

 Carolina's surviving coastal Indian 

 tribes — through renewed efforts to 

 reclaim and recover a lost heritage. 



Eastern North Carolina Indians such 

 as the Haliwa-Saponis, the Coharies 

 and the Lumbees have renewed the 

 search by recording oral histories of 

 elder members. Many have mastered 

 traditions like beadwork and arrow- 

 making to teach to the young. 



"Each group has taken a different, 

 in some cases overlapping, route," says 

 Stanley Knick, director of the Native 

 American Resource Center at Pem- 

 broke State University. "Each has its 

 own qualities, its own flavor, its own 

 local history." 



"The people that have gone farthest 

 along that route are the Waccamaws," 

 he adds. "In that sense, they've gone a 

 long way ahead of most of the other 

 groups in terms of really trying to get in 

 touch, through a scientific, systematic 

 means, with their ancestry." 



16 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1992 



