What I Was Never Taught About Indigenous North Carolina

Hello, Friends!

Welcome back to The Human Leader Project. Monday is Indigenous Peoples' Day, and this one is shorter than usual, because I'm writing from the middle of something I haven't finished learning.

We start here.

In the spring of 2022, One Voice Chorus sang the world premiere of Songs of the Phoenix, a song cycle we had co-commissioned with choruses across the country, written by thirteen composers and lyricists. On both nights, before one song in particular, someone stepped forward and read a land acknowledgment. It named the Catawba, the people who lived on the ground beneath Providence United Methodist Church long before there was a church, or a Providence Road, or a city called Charlotte.

The song was "We Are the Trees," by Ty Defoe. He wrote it for Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer people, Native people who are also queer, so an LGBTQ chorus in Charlotte was singing about people like us, with roots far older than ours. A soloist opened it alone. Jonathan and I were both on the risers.

Circle of trees we are gathered together, claiming our space, knowing we are of this place. Remember how we lived, singing our stories, ancient secrets on ancient land. Listen to understand.

I remember the hair standing up on my arms. Only a minute before, someone had read a few sentences acknowledging the Catawba. Those words were about Native people. These were written by one.

Later the chorus built to its loudest moment, a defiant claim that this was home, with a warning to anyone who tried to cut them down. Then the music dropped into something lower and more ominous, urgent in a way that made it impossible to hear as poetry. You had to hear what it meant.

Burning embers, timber and coal, taking from our stories. We are running out of breath, we are facing the fear of our own death.

And then the full chorus came back in, steady, singing that they were still here, still rooted.

When the last chord faded, I turned the page to the next song, and the acknowledgment went back to being something we said before the music. I can't tell you now who read it. I believed it every time I heard it, and within a week I knew no more about the Catawba than their name.

I grew up in Rowan County, and if anyone taught me about the people who lived there before the German and Scots-Irish families came down the Great Wagon Road, I don't remember it. What I remember is a friend, one of my closest, telling me her grandfather was Native American.

I don't remember what I said back. I remember what I didn't say. I didn't ask which nation her grandfather was from, or where he grew up, or whether he talked about any of it with her. I took the fact and kept it like something I'd been handed to look after, and I never once opened it.

This week, at forty-six, I learned that about seven miles from Salisbury there is a crossing on the Yadkin River called Trading Ford, and that in 1701 an English explorer named John Lawson stayed there with Saponi people camped beside the water. I drove over that river more times than I can count. The dam went in a century ago, and the ford has been underwater ever since.

I also read about the Lumbee, whose homeland sits about two hours east of where I grew up. They first asked Congress to recognize them in 1888. In 1956, Congress gave them a partial recognition that withheld the federal services that are supposed to come with it. Last December, 137 years after that first request, full recognition finally passed, folded into a defense spending bill. Not everyone celebrated. The Eastern Band of Cherokee opposed it, arguing the Lumbee had gone around a process other tribes are made to follow, and I'm not the person to settle that.

What stayed with me was simpler than the politics. A people spent 137 years having to prove to someone else that they were a people. I keep turning that over and can't find anything in it that makes sense. It feels like one of the oldest errors we make: asking for evidence that someone exists before we agree to see them.

I think that's what Ty Defoe's song was about, though I didn't understand it while I was singing it. The chorus sang about everything being taken, and then came back insisting they were still here. Nobody had asked them to prove it.

I don't have a tidy ending, and I'm not sure I'm owed one. I've started reading more of Ty Defoe's work, and I've started learning about the tribes of this state, and until this week I couldn't have named most of them.

I keep thinking about my friend's family, and about whether her grandfather ever sat at a table and talked about where he came from, and whether anyone asked him. I'll never know. I was at a lot of tables in Rowan County, and nobody at mine thought to ask.

If you hear a land acknowledgment this year, or say one, or sing right after one, stay with the name a little longer than the sentence asks you to. Find out who they are now, and where they are, and what they're still being asked to prove.

"I am a man. God made us both." — Standing Bear, Ponca, to a federal court in 1879

"The story your people tell when you're not in the room is your truest legacy." —MB

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