A growing number of states, including North Carolina, recognizes the second Monday in October as Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

Our state is home to more than 130,000 Native Americans, as of the 2020 US Census, from nine-state recognized tribes:

Catawba Nation
Coharie
Eastern Band of Cherokee*
Haliwa-Saponi
Lumbee*
Meherrin
Occaneechi Band of Saponi
Sappony
Waccamaw Siouan

*These tribes are also recognized by the federal government.

North Carolina also has four Urban Indian Associations, with the closest to Winston-Salem being the Guilford Native American Association. In 2021, the state established an American Indian Heritage Commission to preserve and promote their history, arts, customs, and culture.

Winston-Salem’s Indigenous history

While Winston-Salem is not the designated home to a Native American tribe today, Indigenous people have been living in the Forsyth County area for at least 12,000 years, said Andrew Gurstelle, the academic director of the Timothy S. Y. Lam Museum of Anthropology and associate teaching professor at Wake Forest University.

Gurstelle explained that we know this because of evidence found by Douglas L. Rights. A reverend at Home Moravian Church in the early 20th century, Rights also was an amateur archaeologist who excavated hundreds of sites around North Carolina, including dozens in Winston-Salem.

Today, the Rights Collection — shared with UNC — comprises nearly two-thirds of the Lam Museum’s 30,000 objects. The museum is working with six different tribes based primarily in NC and Virginia to repatriate much of the collection, Gurstelle said.

These items also show that the last Indigenous group to live in the Winston-Salem area was about 330 years ago and that this area contains “the confluence of different Indigenous cultures.”

We spoke with Gurstelle to learn more about our area’s Indigenous history.

Q&A with Andrew Gurstelle, academic director of the Timothy S. Y. Lam Museum of Anthropology

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Many people may pinpoint the start of Winston-Salem’s history as the arrival of the Moravians in the mid-to-late 1700s. What was here when they arrived?

There weren’t really a lot of occupants. There were some isolated homesteads. The reason it’s sparsely populated is that the most recently known Indigenous village — the Saura people, who were near Hanging Rock — had left the area around 1700. We know that because, by 1670, a German explorer named John Lederer came and lived with them for a while. There’s two different settlements called the upper town and the lower town in Stokes County. While the Saura were based there, their territory extended all the way into what is now Winston-Salem.

It’s not exactly clear why they left. It probably has to do with the introduction of disease and people dying. It’s also possible that there was some conflict with other Indigenous groups in the area. Regardless, they all decided to leave and eventually settled with the Catawba nation, which is now in Rock Hill, South Carolina.

How were they dying from the introduction of disease if the area hadn’t really been settled by non-Indigenous groups until the Moravians?

Disease spreads way before the actual people do. To some degree, the Europeans were basically concentrated on the coast for over 100 years. But they still met native people and diseases transmitted through them. Down the line, through their own contacts, disease spread throughout the continent even though the Europeans themselves didn’t.

How much do we know about the frequency of interactions between tribes across North Carolina?

They interacted quite a bit. The concept of a distinct territory wasn’t really practiced before the Europeans came. There were different rights people had in the land but those shifted throughout the season and could be negotiated. People were also generally just more mobile. Because of that, they were coming into contact with each other.

Specifically in this area, while the Saura people were historically known as the most recent Indigenous group here, they weren’t the only ones. At some point, the Saponi tribes, which is a North Carolina recognized tribe, were living in the area as were the Keyauwee tribe, too, whose village was visited by Europeans and is essentially where High Point is now.

Beyond historical accounts, what evidence do we have that tribes lived here?

Looking at archaeological evidence, Forsyth County and Winston-Salem are full of artifacts. There’s all kinds of things left behind — broken pottery or tools that get buried and don’t biodegrade. They just stay in the ground forever until there’s road construction or a farmer runs his plow through a field or there’s a big flood, any kind of erosion that exposes these artifacts.

[We can tell how long people have been living here] based on the different kinds and aesthetics of artifacts that get discovered just like we can tell if someone shows up in bell bottoms and gold chains that they’re from a very specific time period.

For example, there was a huge village at the bend in the Yadkin River northwest of WInston-Salem called Donnaha. Between the years 1000 and 1300 AD, this would’ve been perhaps the biggest village between Georgia and Virginia. That was discovered archaeologically. Often from farmers plowing up the land and mentioning it to archaeologists who then excavated at those sites and found evidence of buildings, trash piles, and burials that don’t preserve well in NC soil and are protected today.

There were certainly smaller villages throughout the area. We don’t often find evidence of them because the construction was mostly wood and woven fibers, which don’t preserve very well. We often find evidence through trash piles, which are good indications of where people used to be.