SHAKORI

An individual named Francisco de Chicora is considered the first Native American informant, that is, the first to be interviewed as a historical source. There is no way to identify his tribe conclusively. He was among a group of some 70 Native Americans kidnapped near the mouth of the Santee River in present-day South

Carolina by a Spanish expedition under the command of Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon in the early 1520s. Those captured may have included members of various tribes, possibly Muskogean-speaking Cusabo and YAMASEE, as well as Siouan-speaking Santee, Sewee, Shakori, Wacca-maw, and Winyaw. Since his name was recorded as “of

Chicora,” an alternate spelling of Shakori, he may very well have been from the homeland of the Shakori (Shoccoree), one of the various groups of Siouan SOUTHEAST INDIANS, most of them now extinct. The name Shakori, pronounced SHAK-uh-ree, possibly means “stingy people” or “people of the poisonous river,” and if so, it would have been bestowed upon them by another tribe.

In 1522—23, Francisco de Chicora was taken across the Atlantic and presented to the court of King Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. The historian Peter Martyr interviewed him. In addition to providing information about geography and tribal locations, Chicora claimed that his Native land contained a great wealth of precious stones and gold, that the kings and queens there were giants, and that the people had long rigid tails, forcing them to dig holes in the ground in order to sit down. Chicora’s captor and sponsor, Ayllon, was later granted a royal patent to colonize the southeastern United States and sailed from Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and Dominican Republic) in 1526, with a fleet of six ships carrying colonists and slaves. Chicora, who was part of this expedition, disappeared soon after arrival in the same vicinity as the earlier expedition. It is thought that his exaggerated descriptions had been motivated by a desire to return to his people. The Ayllon colony, founded at a different site—probably at the mouth of the Savannah River in present-day Georgia—soon failed, with Ayllon himself succumbing to an illness in the winter of 1526—27 and survivors returning to Hispaniola.

The Shakori moved often in their history and are assumed to have lived in both present-day South Carolina and North Carolina, as well as in Virginia. If they were original inhabitants of a province named Chicora visited by Ayllon’s expedition, they lived near the Santee River in South Carolina in the early 16th century. They were, however, by the mid-17th century, associated with villages along the Shocco and Big Shocco Creeks in North Carolina, near those of the Eno, fellow Siouans. The spelling Cacores has been applied to them. In the early 18th century, the Shakori and Eno most likely merged with the Siouan CATAWBA living along the Catawba River in northern South Carolina as an agricultural people with a sociopolitical structure based around village life.

Two contemporary South Carolina groups, possibly with ancestry of several Siouan tribes, use the Chicora name: the Chicora Indian Tribe, with headquarters at Andrews, and the Chicora-Waccamaw Indian People, with headquarters at Conway. In 1995, Chief Gene Martin (Igmu Tanka Sutanaji) of the Chicora Indian Tribe was invited to the White House by President Bill Clinton and spoke before an executive committee of the federal government and 357 chiefs of other Indian nations. Three years later, he spoke before the Great Sioux Nation Summit Meeting in Granite Falls, Minnesota, at which time it was proclaimed that the Chicora people, based on their language, were one of the lost tribes of the Dakota Sioux, and that they were recognized and accepted into the Great Sioux Nation.