
Official Karankawa Reconnection Statement
Saturday, January 28, 2023
On behalf of the Karankawa Kadla peoples, our Five Rivers Council met to discuss a recent increase in questions about potentially reconnecting with additional relatives. Plah bewwus (Thank you) for taking the time to receive our below message:
We have recently received many requests from multiple people wishing to find out more about their Indigeneity and, specifically, wondering about whether they are of Karankawa descent. Most of the inquiries come to the www.karankawas.com website; however, others reach us through other social media (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok), emails, and in-person requests. Please know we see you and we hear you. We greatly empathize with the longing to learn more about your ancestry. Some of us have always known about our Karankawa ancestry through official records dating back centuries and others through oral history generationally passed down through our family. Each method reconnected us to the Karankawa Kadla relatives we are today.
We highly encourage everyone to start your individual searches by conducting a family genealogy trace to better understand where your families can trace your ancestors. While we most definitely do not subscribe to any sort of quantum blood theory, we have found that DNA testing helps to at least identify regions and timeframes of your ancestry, so we encourage you to consider making that investment especially if your oral history sources are in the spirit world. While we are very much interested in helping to reconnect all Indigenous relatives, we are simply unable to provide you answers that only your family can provide. We are, though, always happy to connect with you after you’ve completed the initial stage of your search. Once it becomes more likely that you are a Karankawa relative, we will invite you to a Reconnecting Zoom Call. We’ve only scheduled two so far; however, plan to schedule additional ones in the future.
Please feel free to visit www.karankawas.com for additional information about our peoples and our
Calls to Action. Additionally, please feel free to follow Indigenous Peoples of the Coastal Bend (Corpus Christi, Tx) on Facebook; @indigenous_peoples_361 and @karankawachicharra on Instagram; @jrvllarreal54 on TikTok.
We thank you, again, for taking time to read our statement and for understanding that we’d love to reconnect as many relatives as possible; however, we first need you to have an understanding of your family’s journey.
In peace, love, and unity,
-The Karankawa Kadla Five Rivers Council