When Water Speaks

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By Professor Victoria Sutton

August 18, 2024

Guest Opinion. This week, I want to share with you a story about the resurfacing of ancient canoes in North Carolina and the difficulties tribal descendants face in recovering ownership of their past material culture. This article is written in the style of my documentary “When Water Speaks” which has been selected for film festivals around the United States. You can find a link to the documentary at the end of this article.

Long before the Carolina Colony existed, Native Americans of Turtle Island lived in villages throughout the Eastern Woodlands. They used technology of the day to build canoes and to fish.

The word canoe is from the Spanish word, canoa, which was derived from canaoua, the word for these boats used by the Arawakan Indigenous people from the Caribbean, masters of canoing. There was a good deal of influence, trade and movement between the Caribbean and the Indigenous people of continental America and may have included this sharing of canoe-building technology.

John White, the leader of the Roanoke Colony in what was Algonquin traditional lands in today’s North Carolina, made notes on the people of Roanoke Island and their manner of fishing and their construction techniques for canoes. This is how he described the fishing technique using weirs:

They also have a special way of catching fish in their rivers.

They also make weirs, by placing reeds or twigs in the water, which they arrange in such a way that the construction grows narrower and narrower.

Never before had we seen such a cunning way of catching fish.

John White was fascinated with the canoe making process of the Algonquins. White was also an artist (some say he was a better artist and journalist than he was a leader of the Roanoke Colony) and made some of the earliest drawings around 1585 of canoe making and took notes these notes:

The Manner of making their boats in Virginia is most wonderful. For even though they do not have any iron tools, or yet others like we do, they know how to make boats just as well so that they can sail with them where they like on their rivers, and fish as we do.

First they chose a tall, thick tree, according to the size of the boar they want to make, and start a fire on the ground, kindling it little by little with dry moss from the trees and chips of wood in such a way that the flames should not rise too high, and burn too much of the height of the tree. When it is almost burnt through and ready to fall they make a new fire which they allow to burn until the tree falls of its own accord.

Then with the new fire they burn off the top of the tree and the branches in such a way that the trunk is reduced to the right length and then raise it up on poles resting on forked posts. Then they remove the bark using certain shells and continue in this way such that the innermost part of the trunk will become the lowest part of the boat.

On the other side they make a fire as long as the length of this main part of the tree. Where they think it has been burned enough they put out the fire and scrape away at the wood with shells, then making a anew fire they burn it again, and so continue enough they put out the fire and scrape away at the wood with shells, then making a new fire, they burn it again and continue sometimes burning and sometimes scraping until the boats have the desired depth.

God endows these savage people with sufficient reason to carry out this work to serve their needs.

Russell Reed, an interpreter at the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, has mastered these ancient techniques and has built canoes using this technology as part of the historical demonstration program at the Foundation. 

There were many canoes built, many left at strategic locations for use of their owners when they needed to cross or travel a particular body of water. These canoes may have been damaged, forgotten or flooded over the centuries. In recent years, some of these canoes have revealed themselves particularly after a hard rain or flooding. The descendants of the makers of these canoes still there there. The Coharie and Waccamaw Siouan people are still here living on the same waters where these ancient Native American made canoes were discovered.

The waters of these rivers hold the secrets of centuries until the time is right to reveal these secrets. The water speaks when it is ready to speak.

Legal ownership

North Carolina has a Native American Commission on Indian Affairs made up of leadership from the North Carolina’s tribal nations, and led by Greg Richardson, executive director. As the first canoe began to emerge from its watery resting place, the Commission began discussing how to bring the canoes home to the descendants of those who made them.    

However, under North Carolina law, the state owns the canoes, and the state’s Native American Tribes have no legal claim or right to them. So upon recovery by the canoe by the Underwater Archaeology division of the state Archaeology Office, the canoes went out of the ancestral lands of the Tribes and into the possession of the state of North Carolina.

North Carolina’s statute, North Carolina General Statute Section 121-22 (2023), reads as follows:

 . . .the title to all bottoms of navigable waters . . .[including] underwater archaeological artifacts which have remained unclaimed for more than 10 years lying on the said bottoms, or on the bottoms of any other navigable waters of the State, is hereby declared to be in the State of North Carolina, and such. . . .underwater archaeological artifacts shall be subject to the exclusive dominion and control of the State.

The term “navigable waters” in its legal meaning is very broad:

“[I]f a body of water in its natural condition can be navigated by watercraft, it is navigable in fact and, therefore, navigable in law, even if it has not been used for such purposes.”

 G.S. 146-64. Gwathmey v. State of North Carolina, 342 N.C. 287, 300, 464 S.E .2d 674, 682 (1995)

These laws are not unlike other states laws governing ownership in riverbeds. The Native American descendants of the makers of these canoes have no laws to claim or that give them any rights to reclaim this spiritual and cultural connection to their past.

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) is restricted to apply only to Native American tribes that have been politically selected by the United States to receive this special protection, leaving hundreds of state tribes with no protections due only to the whims of federal politics.

So the North Carolina state tribes depend on the benevolence of the state agencies as to whether they will allow them to have their artifacts that are found in the river beds. In a series of negotiations and building of better relationships between the State and the State-recognized tribes, agreement was reached to return this canoe, found in a branch of the Coharie River, to the Coharie Tribe. Never before had the State of North Carolina agreed to return items to one of its Native American Tribes. But in an unprecedented decision, the State of North Carolina through its Department of Archaeology, agreed to return the canoe. After safely preserving it, the state returned the canoe to the Coharie Indian Tribe of North Carolina five years after its discovery in 2023.

Meanwhile, another canoe that is 1,000 years old was discovered on the traditional lands of the Waccamaw Siouan Tribe in North Carolina in the summer of 2021. They will have to pursue the same process with North Carolina and they are hoping that the state will agree to return the canoe as they did with the Coharie Tribe canoe.

The expressions of connectedness to the past in the form of this material culture is highly rare for coastal tribes along the East Coast of the United States because they are old and so much has been destroyed by development, agriculture and pillaging of artifacts. The return of the canoe to the descendants of its makers was a significant milestone in Tribal relations with the state despite the lack or oversight of federal laws.

Whatever politics, jurisdictions and laws may be called on to try to control the artifacts of the past. . . in the end, the water speaks when it wants to.

To read more articles by Professor Sutton go to:  https://profvictoria.substack.com/ 

Professor Victoria Sutton (Lumbee) is a law professor on the faculty of Texas Tech University. In 2005, Sutton became a founding member of the National Congress of American Indians, Policy Advisory Board to the NCAI Policy Center, positioning the Native American community to act and lead on policy issues affecting Indigenous communities in the United States.