Indigenous experiences in the area known as South Carolina, from the pre-colonial period through the present.
This page is broken into the following categories:
Indians of the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1562-1751 by
This work draws upon published accounts by Europeans who encountered Native peoples from the late 1500s to the mid 1700s. Cited by Nic Butler in his podcast, this source is also available in hard copy in Special Collections.
Produced by the South Carolina Native American Affairs Division of the SC Commission on Minority Affairs and the South Carolina State Legislature. Contact the Native American Affairs Program Manager, Jerry Francis, by email at jfrancis@cma.sc.gov, by phone at 803.832.8160 or 803.260.1768, or by mail at the SC Commission for Minority Affairs, 293 Greystone Boulevard, Columbia, SC 29210.
Those Who Remain: A Photographer’s Memoir of South Carolina Indians by
An important source documenting experiences of Native SC residents from the 1980s through the early 2000s. Crediford photographed and interviewed many SC residents who are Native. His approach foregrounds the lived experience of Native people, inasmuch as he has been able to witness, understand, and record it. Each chapter focuses on a different tribal group and their attempts to gain federal and/or state recognition. Many elder interviewees had vivid memories of the schools they went to–including some schools exclusively for Indians. The interviews contain many candid exchanges between Crediford and his subjects, who are sometimes reluctant to share their stories with a white man and who believe that their histories have often been misrepresented. Overall, Crediford seems to be well regarded by the Native communities he has documented, yet he is always conscious of his own limitations and the potential for misunderstanding. Crediford’s approach and the perspectives he documents demonstrate both the rewards and the unintended alienation that could occur when outsiders study Native histories and don’t realize what they are misunderstanding or misrepresenting.
Crediford begins the book with a map of the “Estimated Footprint of the Cofitachequi Chiefdom” in South Carolina and parts of NC. This is the area in which contemporary Tribes live who are descendants of the Cofitachequi chiefdom. He explains this more in his introduction. “Centuries after de Soto, this story is told with the photographs and words of those who remain, a book written to bear witness to those who have survived five hundred years of foreign diseases, colonization, enslavement, and a variable purgatory of prejudices and neglect.”
