Casual observers might not automatically think of a relationship between conservation and colonization, but 500 years ago, the coast of South Carolina looked a lot different than it does today. The now-extinct Carolina parakeet gathered in flocks the size of small villages, and their feathers adorned Indigenous peoples’ clothing and regalia throughout the Southeast. Longleaf-dominated coastal plain ecosystems were managed by fire, and early colonial descriptions mention that when they came across large-scale low-intensity burns, they knew “Indians” were nearby.
It was exactly five centuries ago this year that Europe’s first mainland North American colony was established on the South Carolina coast. The fleet of carracks and caravels was complete with Spanish-Caribbean settlers, livestock, and enslaved Native Americans and Africans.1
The colony’s fate was practically sealed with the wreck of Chorruca, the flagship, in Winyah Bay in late summer of 1526. Some Native Americans who had been enslaved on voyages in 1521 and 1525 escaped to their homelands in the Winyah Watershed when the flagship foundered. A new ship was built in Winyah Bay, likely incorporating salvaged materials and New World timbers, to take the crew and remaining passengers south to a large river delta, where San Miguel de Gualdape was founded. The colony lasted only a few months, during which time the expedition’s leader and many others perished from cold and disease, warring factions broke out among survivors, surrounding Indigenous peoples raided the village, and the colony’s enslaved people revolted. The remnants sailed in flight back to Hispaniola that same fall.
To commemorate 500 years of Black and Indigenous resistance against oppression and to remember and honor the countless numbers of ancestors who were lost to the slave trade and its brutalities, a Middle Passage Monument was unveiled in Georgetown on October 24, 2026.2 As part of the UNESCO Middle Passage Historic Port Marker Project, this monument is the third on the SC Coast and joins fellow memorials in Beaufort and Charleston—incidentally, locales where CCL maintains its own centers of resistance to the wanton destruction of lands and communities.
The unveiling of the Georgetown Middle Passage Port Marker was enfolded in a ceremony organized by the Gullah Geechee Chamber of Commerce. Held at Maritime Park on Front Street, the Vice Chief and Firekeeper of the Waccamaw Indian People began the ceremony with a traditional smoke cleansing of the space, before the procession led by African drummers entered the park. Along with our Chief and Tribal Judge, I was honored to be one of four representatives of the Waccamaw Indian People who followed behind the drummers in the procession.
We walked with our Gullah Geechee brothers and sisters, prayed and sang with them, stood with them, and commemorated our shared histories in this land and water. The ceremony concluded with an offering of fresh-cut flowers dropped by each participant into the Sampit River, that living water body that would wash our offerings out to Winyah Bay and the Atlantic Ocean.
While the Spanish impact on the coast of South Carolina was short-lived, it was a harbinger of the plantation economy that would be imported to the coast in the late seventeenth century. This new economy brought large-scale land-use changes that could only be profitable through the labor of enslaved people. Innumerable forests were clear-cut to make way for cash crops, like rice, indigo, and cotton. The more profitable the agriculture, the more Indigenous land was needed for crops, and the more enslaved laborers were needed to work that land. Land was at the center of this cycle of exploitation and extraction.
As the plantation economy and other settler lifeways were normalized, ecosystems that have evolved for fire-dependency over thousands of years were fundamentally altered in about a century with the suppression of Indigenous fire. Prescribed burning as a method of landscape design, forest management, and pest control had to be curtailed due to the risk—real or perceived—fire posed to new urban areas and agricultural fields. During the peak demand for naval stores (turpentine, rosin, pitch, and tar) and the lumber boom, fire-dependent longleaf pines were decimated and replanted with faster-growing pine species, like loblolly and slash.3 These species still dominate pine savannas today, although foresters and private landowners alike are re-implementing fire onto the landscape as a tried-and-true conservation method.
As Indigenous peoples all over the country fight for Land Back and pursue a variety of land rematriation projects, the Waccamaw Indian People’s Tribal Council passed a Rights of Nature Resolution that affirms the enduring, sacred relationship we have with the Yadkin-Pee Dee Watershed.4 Processing, singing, and praying with our Gullah Geechee neighbors and other allies on October 24 made it clear that many others view this coast as sacred too, and that, even so, it still is at the center of a 500-year-old pattern of exploitation and extraction.
November is Native American Heritage Month, and this year, let’s remember and hold dear the things that bring our diverse communities together, and all the things – land, water, wildlife, historic places, ancestors, and future generations – that will always be worth fighting for, together.