The book was called Cannibal Coast. It was written by Ed Kilman and published in 1959 by the Naylor Company, in San Antonio, which specialized in books about Texas and the Southwest. For kids like me living along the Gulf and just discovering its gruesome historical secrets, the book’s title alone was titillating. So was its cover, which depicted a trio of stereotypical russet-skinned Indians crouching in the dune grass with their lances and bows, eyeing the approach of a Spanish sailing ship.
Kilman’s book presented itself as a history of the Karankawa, the people who inhabited the coastal plains and barrier islands of Texas, from Corpus Christi to Galveston, long before Europeans first arrived. But the book was more an indictment than a history. “They were undoubtedly the meanest, greediest, laziest, most treacherous, lecherous, vicious, cowardly, insolent aborigines of the Southwest,” Kilman, a fiery anti-communist voice on the editorial pages of the Houston Post, decreed in his introduction. The Karankawa were “towering ogres” who would hold “cannibalistic orgies in which they would slash flesh from living victims and roast it blood-red and devour it in their sight while dancing and shrieking.”
This was outrageously prejudicial stuff even for the time, but it tracked closely with the contempt with which the Karankawa had been depicted for hundreds of years by those—Spanish, French, Mexican, Anglo-American—who had fought against and displaced them. For generations, children had emerged from Texas history classes knowing only three facts about the Karankawa: they were cannibals, they were giants, and they were extinct.
“People said we were extinct,” the Karankawa woman who sat across the table told me, her fork hovering above her Mediterranean salad. “We were not. The joke’s on you. Here we are.”
Here they were indeed, having lunch one August day at a South Austin restaurant: an aerospace engineer who preferred that I use her tribal name, Nání Tūūk Hōhk (“She Brings Together”), and her daughter, Sunshine Beaumont, who works at a luxury resort north of the city educating guests about Indigenous culture. “It’s just a lot,” Nání Tūūk Hōhk continued, her manner warm but her convictions steely. “This whole ‘lost’ notion. For so long we’ve known who we are. We’ve connected with each other, and we’ve been hiding in plain sight. And it’s time for us to come out from the freaking hiding scenario. I mean, it’s disrespectful for people to think they know more about our people than we do. And we’ve been quiet for so long.”
That the Karankawa still existed was not exactly news to me. I had been thinking about them ever since I was a Boy Scout at Camp Karankawa, read Cannibal Coast, and encountered various other sensational or spurious depictions of the tribe (including the casting of the Rat Pack comedian Joey Bishop as “Kronk” in the 1966 Dean Martin screwball western movie Texas Across the River). As an adult, I had written about the Karankawa on multiple occasions—sometimes inaccurately, though never as malevolently as Kilman—and had more or less kept up with the evolving scholarship that pointed not toward their outright extinction but toward a survival strategy of intermarriage with other tribes or with Mexican or Tejano people on both sides of the border.
In absorbing themselves into other societies, the Karankawa lost much of their history and their cultural cohesion. They weren’t alone. The foundational identities of dozens of Native groups in Texas were atomized by the wars and epidemics and refugee crises that began with the arrival of the Spanish in the sixteenth century. But because the Karankawa resistance was so fierce, and because the estuaries, seacoasts, and lush prairie grasslands they inhabited were so coveted, they were designated as demonic seven-foot-tall savages ravenous for human flesh. “Karanquas,” wrote Stephen F. Austin in 1821, “may be called universal enemies to man. . . . There will be no way of subduing them but extermination.”
Nání Tūūk Hōhk and Beaumont were the first Karankawa I had met, and I was a little embarrassed by the keen anticipation I felt at the prospect of encountering in real life people that I had read about and written about and wondered about for so long. My lunch companions were welcoming but suitably private—wary of being on display, tired of being hidden. They represented a group of perhaps two hundred who have, in the past fifteen years or so, begun discovering one another and fighting back, using twenty-first century methods, against the mistaken belief that they no longer exist. Over the next several months, I would meet more Karankawa and train my mind not to think about them in exotic terms. I would also come to understand their anger that their culture had been taken from them, the poignancy of their missing it, and the joy they were finding in attempts to restore at least some of it.
“You are not alone. You are no longer the only one. We no longer have to live in secret. Our lives are no longer in danger as long as we have each other.” Those plaintive words call out from the home page of Karankawas.com, the main nexus through which those who know or suspect they have Karankawa heritage reach out to one another.
Instagram is another portal, where Beaumont is an energetic and often fiercely political presence. As a self-described “Indigenous resistance artist,” she works mainly in collage, posting images and messages (“Native Texan My Ass,” “Dont Fockin Touch My Braids”) that strike an intentionally uneasy balance between humor and outrage.
Beaumont is a slim young woman with a beaming smile whose chin is discreetly tattooed with three thin vertical blue lines, marks that fit with contemporary historical descriptions of traditional Karankawa tattoos. Her birth name is Chiara, but her family called her Sunshine when she was growing up. As an adult, she told me, she was given “a medicine” by a tribal elder and embarked on a spirit walk, where she encountered ancestors who told her that Sunshine—Do’wal Sehi in Karankawa—was more than a nickname. “That was my name and always had been.”
Beaumont spoke of the state we were currently inhabiting as “the lands we now call Texas” and of the coastal city where her parents grew up as “so-called Corpus Christi.” That coast, she said, was the “geographical front line of colonization. We were the first people to receive the French and the Spanish. It doesn’t matter who Cabeza de Vaca met first. We met him.”
She was referring to the explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and to the racial hierarchy implied by the notion that Europeans “discovered” Indigenous Americans rather than the other way around. Cabeza de Vaca was one of four survivors of a Spanish expedition that had made landfall in Florida and met disaster all along the Gulf Coast, until its starving remnants washed up near Galveston in 1528. “The people we found there,” he wrote in his famous narrative of his adventures, “are large and well proportioned.” He makes clear that—at least at first, until half of them died from the diseases the Spanish carried—the Karankawa were extraordinarily hospitable, bringing the desperate voyagers food and expressing “great grief and pity” on their behalf.
“Because we were the first people receiving these strangers,” Beaumont said, “the colonizers, the Anglo Europeans—they had the opportunity to experiment, to see what they could do and couldn’t do, and when they figured out that our defenses on the Gulf Coast were strong, they realized, ‘Okay, we have to kill them. And how are we going to justify killing these people who have lived here peacefully for the last tens of thousands of years? We’re going to say that they’re cannibals; we’re going to say that they’re giant monsters.’ ”
Both mother and daughter had grown up knowing something about their native heritage. Nání Tūūk Hōhk was born in Corpus Christi. Her father was Hispanic, but she learned as a child that the maternal side of the family was Karankawa. There was a Carancahua Street in Corpus, and when they drove along it, she says, “my mom would say, ‘That’s our people.’ ”
“I remember studying Texas history in seventh grade, and we were in the section about Texas Indians, and here came the stuff about cannibals and giant people. I told the teacher that we weren’t giants, that we weren’t extinct. I don’t think she believed me. So fast-forward. I’ve told my kids ever since they were born who they were, where they come from. I took them to powwows.”
But there was a limit to what had survived of the Karankawa culture that she could share with her children. The powwows were important Native American bonding experiences, but the singing, dancing, and drumming tended to come from native societies in Mexico or on the northern plains whose traditions might have only a tenuous connection to those of the Karankawa. All that’s left of the Karankawa language are 450 or so words set down in journals by French captives or Spanish explorers or compiled in the late nineteenth century by a Swiss ethnologist named Albert Samuel Gatschet. Also lost are most of the original names of those rechristened by the Spanish friars at missions in coastal communities such as Goliad and Refugio. Even the Karankawa’s most feared and defiant resistance leader entered history under the Christianized name of Joseph María.
“But it’s not missing,” Nání Tūūk Hōhk insisted about Karankawa identity. “I mean, we feel it. We were told it. We understand it. We believe it. There’s no questioning it.”
Even so, Beaumont was aware, she told me, that the Karankawa were “a tribe of pieces,” that the sacred things she had learned from her mother and her mother’s family would still need to be matched with the memories and lore of other scattered Karankawa to begin to complete the larger identity puzzle of her people.
She told me about her freshman orientation at Longwood University, in Farmville, Virginia, when students were asked to stand up when prompted with questions about their backgrounds and ethnic identities. Out of eight or nine hundred in the room, Beaumont and two others were the only Native Americans, and she—unsurprisingly, but wrenchingly—was the only Karankawa. “It was an absolutely pivotal moment for me as an Indigenous woman at a time when I was being raised as a Karankawa and didn’t know where or how to find my people. Like, ‘Wow, where is everybody?’ ”
It was partly to remedy that sort of isolation, to help fit together the puzzle pieces, that a tribal organization called the Karankawa Kadla came into being about a decade ago, after individuals had been informally finding each other via various social media sites. The word “kadla” was contributed by Alexander Joseph Perez, the group’s “language keeper,” who has compiled a new Karankawa dictionary using historical references such as Gatschet’s glossary, “loanwords” Perez has taken from other tribes, and a few words that he said “come to me in dreams.”
“Kadla,” writes Perez, “translates to calico, multi-colored, or in this context, ‘mixed’ ”—a reference to the reality that present-day Karankawa are, to various degrees, likely also descended from Mexicans, Europeans, and various Texas tribes.
At the time we were speaking, the Karankawa Kadla had a leadership body, the Five Rivers Council (of which Nání Tūūk Hōhk was a member), and was divided into two groups: the Hawk Clan, from the Corpus Christi area, and the Coyote Clan, whose ancestors’ home ground encompassed Houston as well as the coastal lagoons and barrier islands around Galveston.
The Karankawa, who are just beginning to pull themselves back together as a cohesive people, are not recognized as a tribe by the federal government. (In Texas, only the Alabama-Coushatta, the Kickapoo, and the Tigua are federally recognized; other familiar tribes, such as the Jumano and Lipan Apache, are not.) “I personally am completely opposed to the idea” of formal acknowledgment by the U.S. government, Beaumont said, “because neither I, nor anyone else, needs outside validation of my existence. Especially if that outside validation comes from people who historically and indisputably wanted my people exterminated.”
But other Karankawa feel differently about recognition, because it would bring federal benefits and protections, including the right to self-government. Tribe members are engaged in a discussion about the value of trying to meet the daunting requirements set by the U.S. Department of the Interior. For instance, one of the mandatory criteria—that tribes have maintained “political influence . . . from 1900 until the present”—is especially steep for a people that was forced into a diaspora centuries ago.
Determining who exactly should belong in the Karankawa Kadla is an imprecise art. “Blood quantum,” a means of establishing tribal membership by tracing an individual’s percentage relationship to a supposedly “full-blood” ancestor, was a standard introduced by the federal government in the 1930s and is still used by some tribes. But blood quantum is controversial for a host of reasons, including that Native Americans have such a high rate of marriage with other ethnic groups that over time the diminishing blood quantum could function as a way of officially putting an end to a tribe’s existence—and with it the government’s treaty obligations.
“Dogs, horses, and Indigenous people,” Nání Tūūk Hōhk added, “are the only three species of being that require blood quantum to convince others of who they are.”
In any case, the Karankawa’s long history of exile, erasure, and intermarriage would make it almost impossible to find “full-blood” progenitors to whom modern descendants can claim ancestry. Family origin stories, which can be vague or explicit, tend to be the avenue by which most begin their journey to discover their Karankawa heritage. There are also scholarly tools such as the mission records kept by the friars who attempted to convert Karankawa and other natives to Christianity.
DNA tests offered by companies such as Ancestry and 23andMe aren’t as freighted with historical controversy as blood quantum is. They can’t prove tribal identity but can at least trace parts of someone’s ethnic makeup and geographical heritage to certain time frames and locations, which in the case of the Karankawa would be a roughly 230-mile coastal swath of Texas.
A first step for someone who knows or suspects they are Karankawa and wants to get in touch with others in the Kadla is to join one of the periodic “reconnect meetings” on Zoom that are announced on Karankawas.com. I asked Nání Tūūk Hōhk and Beaumont if I could log on to one of these meetings as an observer, and they silently checked in with each other for a moment before politely indicating it would be better if I didn’t. The reconnect meetings, they said, were too private and often too raw.
“When I took my kids to powwows on the East Coast when they were young,” Nání Tūūk Hōhk said, “they felt the drum. They felt the songs. They felt the connection. But a lot of these people who are interested in potentially reconnecting, they didn’t have that. They thought they were Hispanic, and that was it. So these meetings are sacred for people struggling with what they’re feeling and what they’ve been told. There’s tears, there’s happiness, there’s sadness.”
I got the impression that the moderators at these meetings proceeded by feel, that there was no immutable metric by which someone could be welcomed into the Kadla or not. From what I could tell, many of those who signed up for the reconnect meetings tended to be restless identity pilgrims, and they found some kind of connection even when they were told they were probably not Karankawa. “I don’t think disappointment has ever come up,” Beaumont said. “It’s mostly been like reprieve, rest, shelter, happiness, peace.”
Nání Tūūk Hōhk and Beaumont were both aware that meetings like this might attract some who, for reasons of personal insecurity or career advancement, could find it irresistible to claim an identity that isn’t theirs. It’s a common enough phenomenon, surfacing in recent news stories about the suspect native heritage of folk singer Buffy Sainte-Marie and the unmasking of Roxy Gordon, a longtime fixture on the Dallas music and literary scene who falsely claimed to be Choctaw.
“Sunshine kind of vets them,” her mother said of those who express interest in joining a reconnect meeting, which typically includes about ten or twelve participants.
“I would never describe the people who took the time to sign up, give me their email, follow our news as a tourist or wannabe,” Beaumont emphasized. “If anything, there are people who discover at a reconnect meeting that they are not Karankawa, and we have always expressed in our reconnect meetings that even if that is the case we support them on their journey.”
My journey, when it came to the Karankawa, was that of an outsider interested in pondering centuries of misguided lore and deliberate distortion. Maybe there was even a part of me that wanted to atone for the pleasure I had taken as a boy in imagining that the bland contemporary world I lived in had once been the province of seven-foot-tall cannibals who had mysteriously vanished from the earth. Though I would have been an intrusive presence in the Zoom squares of a reconnect meeting, the in-person gatherings such as cleansing ceremonies and powwows I attended in the weeks after my lunch with Nání Tūūk Hōhk and Beaumont were open to anyone who happened to learn about them through word of mouth or social media, or through the exemplary website maintained by Tim Seiter, an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at Tyler.
Karankawas.com is more than just an online meeting place; it’s a bountiful clearinghouse for information on the tribe’s history, mythology, and present-day activism. Seiter first got interested in the Karankawa as an undergraduate at the University of Houston, where he received a $3,000 grant to help him write his thesis. “My topic was cannibalism,” he told me. He had grown up in Friendswood, south of Houston, only ten miles or so from Galveston Bay, which had once been the historical power base of the easternmost Karankawa clans. “I had heard all these stories of the Karankawa eating little babies, and I was like, ‘This must be a myth. I better examine this a lot closer.’ But my findings were a lot more complicated than I expected.”
The cannibal charge, Seiter explained, was misleading, if not exactly without foundation. Like many Indigenous cultures, Karankawa practiced a ritualistic form of “exocannibalism,” devouring parts of the bodies of enemies they had killed as a way to symbolically seal a victory or take on the power of the vanquished. But they didn’t eat other humans for food and didn’t need to: their coastal world was full of fish and mollusks and other sources of protein. In fact, according to Cabeza de Vaca, the Karankawa were horrified when they witnessed some of the starving survivors of his expedition consuming their own dead. Nor, as a sensational account by a Spanish priest had it, did the Karankawa roast and consume the flesh of living victims in front of their eyes. The cannibalism that did occur was most likely directed toward other Indigenous enemies and not European newcomers.
And forget about the myth of seven-foot-tall Karankawa, Seiter insists. Their real-life height was probably closer to five seven or eight, maybe an inch or two taller than the standard European male of the eighteenth or nineteenth century. But they were such well-nourished masters of their coastal environment that they tended to make an impression of being, in the words of one seventeenth-century Spanish sailor, “of great stature and very robust of limb.”
At least that was the case while they were still around to be seen. “Absolutely everything I had read as an undergraduate,” Seiter told me, “said they were extinct. I had come across articles over the years about individuals coming forward and claiming to be Karankawa people, but none of the academic literature said they existed. It said they were extinct. And that’s a big keyword because it neglects the fact that Anglo Americans committed genocide against them. A big part of my research is to link that extinction point to the present—to find family lineages that have survived.”
Although there was never a specific moment when the Karankawa ceased to exist as a people, they were fighting for their survival, barely holding out, by the time Texas seized its independence from Mexico, in 1836. By the 1840s, only one or two of the tribe’s five bands were still standing, and in 1852 an attack by Anglo settlers on a bayside Karankawa camp near Refugio ended any chance they had of maintaining their ancestral hold on the Texas coast.
From there the survivors drifted south, seeking refuge on Padre Island and then along both sides of the border in the Rio Grande delta, where they continued a legacy of violent resistance, at one point boldly opening fire on a steamboat. Juan Cortina, the legendary border strongman, launched an attack on the tribe on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande in 1858. It appears to have been a massacre, the concluding act of an ongoing war of eradication prophesied by Stephen Austin thirty years earlier. It was after that fight, as a Mexican commission reported, that “the history of these Indians terminates.”
Even so, the Texas coast remained haunted by their absence. As a seminomadic people who subsisted on the seasonal offerings of the Gulf shore and the mainland, they left behind no lasting structures. What we know of their aesthetic values or religious beliefs before the imposition of Catholicism comes from the outsider perspective of those determined to drive them off their lands or save their souls. Their expressive tattoos disappeared with their mortal bodies, and the black-and-gray cooking vessels they produced in abundance survive mostly as potsherds that can still be found along shorelines and amid dune grasses.
When I was a kid, I knew a place named Oso Bay as a shallow, mucky extension of Corpus Christi Bay near the city’s southeastern margins. A bridge across a narrow inlet led to the site of an old Navy radar station that is now the home of Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi. Whenever I’m back in Corpus, I do my best to expunge my unfavorable childhood impression of a smelly mudflat (“Oh so how it stinks!” we used to say) and consider what an Eden it must have been to the Karankawa and earlier peoples who lived along its shores (and about whom even less is known). There would have been no sewage discharge, no wastewater treatment plants, no surface muck, just a naturally calibrated mix of salt water from the bay and fresh water from a nearby creek that would ensure an abundance of crabs, shrimp, and oysters. The environment would have been a home to other food sources such as deer and turtles as well as the redfish and black drum whose fins stippled the surface of the shallow water.
Along the western shore of this little bay, where Ennis Joslin Road now veers south from Ocean Drive, a prominent clay dune once served as a cemetery for the first peoples who had arrived on this coast around three thousand years ago, well before the Karankawa. Over the millennia, hurricanes and shifting shorelines had repeatedly exposed and then reburied the remains that had once been ceremoniously interred here. During much of the twentieth century, the burial ground was scavenged by waves of bone collectors and artifact hunters and meticulously examined by archaeologists in a series of excavations.
Humans first began living here, at the site known as Cayo del Oso, at a time when the sea level was rising, forming the barrier islands and estuaries that became a rich source of sustenance for the pioneering hunter-gatherers who first occupied this new coastal environment. “About three thousand years ago was when the food showed up,” Peter Moore, a historian from A&M–Corpus Christi, told me one October afternoon as we sat in a coffee shop across Oso Bay from the campus. “And then the people showed up and started gathering year after year after year.”
Nobody seems to know for sure when the Karankawa arrived, but there’s enough archaeological evidence to place them on this part of the coast as early as a thousand years ago, long before the arrival on the Texas plains of tribes such as the Apache and Comanche. “Karankawas,” Moore said, “come along at about the same time as other Indigenous peoples in Texas who use bows and arrows and are making pottery and farming a little bit. Though the Karankawa never farm. They remain hunter-gatherers. They choose that lifestyle because it provides everything they need. They have the coast, with all that abundance of food. They don’t need to live in settled villages.”
Where exactly the Karankawa came from in the first place is unknown. They may have descended from the first people to settle the newly formed coastline. Or they might have come from somewhere else and turned themselves into the hegemons of the middle Texas coast by conquest—in which case many of the bones buried in the Cayo del Oso might have belonged to those who stood in their way.
Moore and I were hanging out in the coffee shop that afternoon before the start of a celebration sponsored by the Indigenous Peoples of the Coastal Bend, an intertribal community group in Corpus Christi made up of people from the Karankawa Kadla as well as the Lipan Apache, Coahuiltecan, Comanche, and Mexica, a Central American culture whose ancestral roots reached deep into pre-Columbian times. The group was meeting on a Sunday to celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day, the annual observance that is increasingly nosing out the official holiday known as Columbus Day. The event took place at a city park tucked into the shore of Oso Bay, less than a mile from the much-pillaged prehistoric graveyard that was now mostly buried beneath urban streets and housing.
Just off the parking lot of the Hans and Pat Suter Wildlife Refuge, across Ennis Joslin Road from a powder-blue apartment complex, a concrete circle forty feet in diameter sits in the middle of a grassy field. This medicine wheel, as a nearby plaque explained, was the inspiration of an Indigenous activist named Larry Running Turtle Salazar, who had grown up in Corpus, born to a Cherokee mother and a Mescalero Apache father. It’s a permanent installation, a place for Native people to give blessings and ask permissions from the four cardinal directions, as well as from the earth and sky.
Sandra Love Sanchez, a cofounder of the Indigenous Peoples of the Coastal Bend who has traced her family’s ancestry to the Texas coast, spoke through a loudspeaker as she read a proclamation from the city, a series of “whereases” honoring the “Karankawa, the Lipan Apache, the Tonkawa, and extinct tribes, any tribe absorbed by any other tribes, and tribes that are acknowledged by the United Nations.”
Other speakers then referenced the ancestors who were discovered in this place and whose bones, residing now in cold archaeological research laboratories, demanded to be reclaimed and reburied. They spoke about the need to have “a reciprocal relationship with the planet,” with all of its “winged ones, the four-legged ones, and creepy-crawlers.”
The performance that followed was conducted by Kalpulli Ehekatl Papalotzin, a group that practices traditions from Central Mexico. For an hour and a half, five dancers moved in and around the concrete circle, in time to the relentless but oddly soothing percussion of a deeply resonant cylindrical drum. Several dozen spectators—some in close observance, others just curious onlookers lured by the powerful rhythms—sat in lawn chairs or stood about. The smell of burning copal incense wafted from a brazier in the center of the circle, and there was a strange harmony in the way the sound of the drum blended with the whir of a video drone overhead and the clacking of the oleander seedpods that covered the calves of the dancers.
The event was especially vital, perhaps, for Sanchez and other Karankawa gathered here on the land of their ancestors, with whom they shared so few connection points—often just a personal discovery based on fragments of family lore or an internal, inchoate conviction that they came from a people who were said to have vanished long before they themselves were born.
Whether the trappings of this Mexica ceremony would have seemed foreign or familiar to a Karankawa living in this place hundreds of years ago is impossible to know. Karankawa didn’t wear the white tunics and robes or the elaborate pheasant- or macaw-feather headdresses of the Papalotzin dancers. “They danced and sang,” according to testimony taken from a French child who had been captured by the tribe, “but very rudely, for their only instruments are a certain stick full of notches, which they scrape with another stick, and gourds, which they fill with small pebbles or grains of Indian corn.”
When it came to religion, the Karankawa were initially dismissive of Christianity and mocked the French and their prayer books, and the French returned the favor, allowing only that the Karankawa “have some confused impression of the immortality of their souls.” But it was not just the sacred, summoning vibe of this event that made it impossible to accept such a one-dimensional portrait; it was the landscape itself, or what was left of it. Oso Bay might be a degraded place, but it still carries a memory of natural splendor and of a people who must in some way or another have given thanks for its sustenance.
Two months later, in early December, I was back in Corpus Christi for the first-ever Turtle Bay powwow, an intertribal gathering that aspires to become an annual occurrence. This event was across the bay from the wildlife refuge, at the University Center on A&M–Corpus Christi’s campus. The classrooms and student areas of the building were arrayed around a towering three-story atrium, and when I arrived the space was already echoing with the sound of drumming and chanting as a dozen men performed a gourd dance.
The Israeli invasion of Gaza was in full force by then, and the civilians of Gaza were suffering in ways that struck many of the people at the powwow as achingly resonant. At the panel discussions that were part of the gathering, there were shouts of “Free Palestine!” and recurring references to a present-day genocide.
It was no surprise that Indigenous people, particularly a people like the Karankawa who had been intentionally marked for extermination, would find parallels in what was happening in Gaza. But history is a rat’s nest of grievances, its lessons more tangled than parallel. So I was curious what Sunshine Beaumont, who was at the powwow selling her provocative political collages in the vendors area and appearing on a panel, thought about the pogroms of Eastern Europe and the genocide that underlay the creation of the Jewish state in the first place. “I oppose genocide, even if those that are imposing the genocide at one point in time were victims,” she told me. “I can relate to Palestinians because I’m living the future their oppressors are making for them.”
In her panel that afternoon in one of the building’s upper-floor classrooms, she made plain her grief over the injustices that the Karankawa had suffered and that the Israel–Hamas war had suddenly thrown into such sharp relief. “In full transparency, I feel hopeless,” she told the audience. “Knowing that I’m Karankawa, knowing especially the decimation that befell my ancestors, directly impacts my mental health.”
She was not the only speaker from the Karankawa Kadla that day to wrestle so publicly with the problems that face the members of a culture whose ancestral foundations have been jackhammered. At an afternoon panel titled “Elders Share Wisdom,” a tribal member from the Houston-area Coyote clan named Absolem Yetzirah spoke about the crucial importance of artifacts and how they were under threat by projects such as the proposed deepwater port near a major Karankawa site on the north side of Corpus Christi Bay.
“Returning artifacts and remains is a very big thing for our tribe,” he said, as the drumming and singing that rose up from the rotunda threatened to drown out his voice. “Because Karankawa people are not like other tribes. We don’t have chiefs; we don’t have governors or anyone to tell us what to do. Karankawa people are all sovereign and independent people. When the museums return our pottery and jewelry, we give them back to the people. That little piece of broken pottery that was someone’s trash a thousand years ago is the only thing we have now to hold on to that history.”
Patrick Nye, a geologist who lives in the little community of Ingleside on the Bay, on the northeast shore of Corpus Christi Bay, once had a collection of the sort of Karankawa artifacts that the elder was talking about: a thousand or so fragments of mostly broken pottery that he had amassed over a half century of probing the coastal terrain near his house at the base of an ancient sand dune called McGloin’s Bluff. The bluff is imposing enough, as it rears up from the flat bayside into a tight bramble of oak and brush, to serve as a geographical landmark.
McGloin’s Bluff is also the site of the deepwater port expansion that the Karankawa and various Indigenous and environmental groups have been trying to stop for four years. Nye got to know the members of the Karankawa Kadla during his tenure as president of the Ingleside on the Bay Coastal Watch Association, which is fighting not just the port project that the Canadian oil company Enbridge plans to build on the east side of McGloin’s Bluff but also a proposed plant to produce the low-emission fertilizer known as blue ammonia.
A couple of years ago Nye began to feel that the history represented by the artifacts he had collected didn’t belong to him and decided to turn over his collection to the Karankawa Kadla. “It was a really unique moment,” he recalled of the ceremony that took place in his dining room. He had consulted with Alex Perez, the Karankawa language keeper, about what words to say and how to pronounce them. “I pieced together a little phrase in Karankawa like, ‘This is something that’s very important and belongs to you. This isn’t mine. This is yours.’ ”
Perez and Sunshine Beaumont were there, along with Sandra Love Sanchez and several other members of the Kadla. They had prepared special wooden boxes that had been cleansed for use for such an occasion and into which the artifacts were placed. When I later asked Beaumont where the artifacts went after that, she would say only that they “have been returned to wherever they were meant to be.” When I asked her to describe the ceremony in more detail, she smiled and said no.
“It was emotional,” Nye told me on his boat dock the day after the powwow at A&M. “I remember several of them crying. They felt that presence of their ancestors.”
We were setting out with Sanchez on a brief cruise so that I could get a sense of the McGloin’s Bluff area. The Karankawa occupied this vicinity off and on, historians believe, for about five hundred years, from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries. A 2008 archaeological survey led by Robert A. Ricklis, the late author of an important book on the Karankawa, turned up almost 40,000 ceramic artifacts. This was evidence that the area, which spans hundreds of yards, represents not just an occasional campsite but a home base to the people who returned to it again and again on their seasonal journeys.
A southeast wind laid the water flat, and Nye’s 25-foot NauticStar fishing boat cruised along the coastline at a velvety pace. Ricklis’s excavation had focused mostly on the western end of the bluff, which was still dense with twisted live oaks and thick grasses and cattails that hid freshwater potholes. Far fewer artifacts had been discovered on the eastern end, starting at the Enbridge property line. At that point the vegetation gives way to white oil-storage tanks and three deepwater vessel berths where that oil is loaded into supertankers.
In an effort to prevent any further encroachment on the site, the Karankawa Kadla, along with Nye’s Coastal Watch group and the Indigenous Peoples of the Coastal Bend, filed a lawsuit, in 2021, against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to prevent the expansion of the port’s vessel capacities, which the plaintiffs argued would require dredging up more of the seagrasses and estuarine nurseries whose fish and shellfish sustained the people who once lived here. “She worries,” the lawsuit stated about an unnamed Indigenous woman, “that the . . . expansion and the increased ship traffic and noise will threaten the natural beauty of the area and diminish her ability to use the area for spiritual ceremonies and drumming and harm her ability to find spiritual joy and meaning at the site of her ancestors’ land.”
That paragraph referred to Sanchez, who sat in the bow of Nye’s boat, wearing cat-eye glasses and a sweater woven with Native American patterns. She stared wistfully at the shoreline beyond the fence that marked the Enbridge property. A district judge in Corpus Christi had ruled against the plaintiffs in July, and unless his decision is overturned by the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, this part of the Karankawa site will continue to be lost to development. (The Corps of Engineers, in its response to the lawsuit, dismissed the plaintiffs’ concerns and contended that the project “would have no effect on historic properties.”)
“We need to touch that land,” Sanchez was saying. “I know it sounds a little loony tunes, but that’s how much faith we have in unseen spirits and whatever.”
It didn’t help that the day was so beautiful. It sharpened the sensation that so much had been lost and the ominous feeling that there was still so much to lose. This part of the bay, Nye insisted, was becoming saturated with heavy-footprint projects—including the two largest oil-export terminals in North America—that threaten to intrude on not only Karankawa history but the future of the environment that drew them here a thousand years ago.
A lone dolphin, feeding at the edge of the channel, surfaced about twenty yards from the boat, trailed by a brown pelican interested in whatever fish and shellfish the dolphin might be stirring up. Having spent so much of my life in Corpus Christi, it felt odd to see the city’s skyline from this vantage point, off in the distance on the other side of the bay. But that challenge to my perspective also gave me a new sense of scale and made me realize how vast and intricate these coastal waterways were that the Karankawa had patrolled in their dugout canoes—a whole world they had once commanded and lost.
Very few of those vessels have survived, but a dugout canoe that is thought to be one that the Karankawa used is on display at the UTSA Institute of Texan Cultures, in San Antonio. A few weeks after the boat trip, Sanchez, her two teenage sons, and four other members of the Karankawa Kadla paid a visit to the museum to see the canoe. They were there not just out of curiosity. If there ever came a time when the Karankawa received federal recognition, they could then plead their case, under the federal law known as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, that the canoe be returned to the tribe or, as Nání Tūūk Hōhk told me as we entered the building, “At least it can say ‘on loan’ from us.”
She was there with her daughter, Sunshine, and her youngest child, Sovie, who lives in Pflugerville with her and is a junior in high school. They (Sovie uses nongendered pronouns) wore a thick beaded necklace and a long hair braid. Sovie told me that last year, kids in an Advanced Placement geography class had called them a cannibal, but it was clear they felt pride standing in front of the half-shredded, striated, hollowed-out log that was the dugout canoe. Not much is known about it except that it had been acquired by the University of Texas from a now-forgotten source, likely ahead of the 1936 centennial celebration. It sat inside a protective metal fence, spotlighted from above so that its honey-colored wood was almost glowing. “I don’t think there’s even a word for it,” Sovie said, meaning a word for what they were feeling at that moment. “There’s just a deep ancestral connection.”
Alex Perez (whose Karankawa name is Wo’l Ba’h, meaning Strong Wind) had driven in the day before from his home in California’s Coachella Valley, where he works as a building contractor, songwriter, and inventor of musical instruments. I knew something of his background from reading his brief book, Karankawa Kadla: Mixed Tongue, which was both a memoir and an informed stab at a Karankawa dictionary. He was born on Galveston Island, in 1972, and grew up on 8 Mile Road, near a major Karankawa site called Mitchell Ridge. It was there, he wrote, where he “found my own feet traversing and my soul consciousness channeling the memories of the land . . . of my ancestors.”
Perez showed up at the museum carrying a shallow drum and wearing a shoulder bag from which peeked the curly white head of Tika Marie, his bichon frise. “Culturally speaking,” he said, “we’re a dog people.” In fact, the name Karankawa may have originated from a phrase spoken by a neighboring tribe, the Cotoname, meaning “dog raisers.” An early misstep of Cabeza de Vaca’s shipwrecked companions had been to steal a dog—presumably to eat—from a Karankawa camp. The Karankawa, when they saw how emaciated and desperate the shipwrecked Spaniards were, seem not to have prosecuted the theft.
At the museum, the members of the Kadla stood in front of the canoe as Perez began drumming and singing a song to the four directions. (“Don’t worry,” he told the museum staff, “it’s the shorter version.”)
In a few months, Perez would split from the group that was gathered in front of the canoe, taking the word “kadla” with him and causing the others to rebrand as simply the Karankawa Tribe of Texas. The conflict stemmed, I later understood, from various personal, political, and procedural differences of the sort that are common to nearly every organization at one time or another. “The inner tribal conflict is killer,” Beaumont would lament on one of her Instagram posts. “Please do not ever imagine us as perfect peaceful Indians. We are human beings.” Another statement that would appear on Karankawas.com explained it this way: “There will always be Karankawa that go their own path.”
But at this moment, in this museum, in front of this ancient vessel, the Karankawa were united in what felt like awe. After the singing was over, somebody asked if members of the group could touch the canoe. An accommodating curator opened the gate of the little protective enclosure surrounding it, and one by one the Karankawa walked in, laid a hand on the canoe, and sat there silently beside it. One of the staff members, noticing all the tears that were being shed, rushed into an office and emerged with a box of tissues.
When they had all touched the canoe, the Karankawa delegation stood in silence, staring down at the vessel that they believed had once been piloted by their unknown forebears, that had ferried families and possessions and tribal memories back and forth between the mainland and the barrier islands of the Texas coast.
It was Perez, the language keeper, who broke the silence.
“Nayina-wal yetsoh wana,” he said.
This was spoken in Karankawa, as close as anyone could come to expressing themselves nowadays in that mostly vanished language, and it meant “We are all standing here.”
Stephen Harrigan is an Austin-based writer-at-large for Texas Monthly and the author of Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas.
This article originally appeared in the September 2024 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “ ‘We No Longer Have to Live in Secret.’ ” Subscribe today.
When you buy a book using a link on this page, a portion of your purchase goes to independent bookstores and Texas Monthly receives a commission. Thank you for supporting our journalism.
