“Nayina Wana Ayapah (We Are Still Here)”

Chiara Beaumont, The Karankawa Tribe of Texas

Chiara Beaumont gave this talk in November 2023 at the Gulf South Historical Association conference in Natchez, Mississippi. She was part of a panel that included myself (Tim Seiter), Peter Moore, and Leila Blackbird. Without notes of any sort, Chiara finished her speech and my jaw was on the ground. Without a doubt, it was the best talk I have ever heard at a history conference. Funnily enough, less than a dozen people actually witnessed it in person.

Fortunately, Chiara’s mother Nání Tūūk Hōhk (“She Brings Together”) recorded the talk. And thanks to the efforts of Peter Moore and especially Michael Garcia at Texas A&M University at Corpus Christi who transcribed the audio, a version of Chiara’s talk appears below. Of note, I made slight grammatical and sentence structure changes to help with readability.

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Abstract from session proposal: Chiara Beaumont’s talk will include a traditional introduction that honors her contemporary and ancestral homelands, her lineage, clan, and preferred name. The main topics of the presentation include early life as a Karankawa child struggling to find the rest of her people, the struggles of being indigenous but not federally recognized in modern society, the journey to finding the rest of her people, the revitalization of her people, and the calls to action that have been organized to fight. The presentation will conclude with the ties federally unrecognized tribal communities maintain with the land and scholars and environmental activists, and how we can decolonize scholarly and environmentally conscious spaces to ensure balance is maintained between us all. 

And I asked her, “Where are the rest of us?” And she responded that, “Well, right now it’s us. We have our family who are in Texas, Corpus Christi, we’re still there. But the rest of us, we don’t know.” And the story went.

The story is, that though we had always been in Texas, when the settlers came, first the Spanish then the French, we had to leave. And so we did. We have no idea where all the rest of our relatives were for the later part of my adolescence. So my experience as a Karankawa woman mostly revolved around our very beautiful spirituality that we’ve still kept intact. It is a closed practice so I do not share about it. We were still able to hold on to some of our stories that are still told to this day. And we were able to hold onto our practices of sports that we still practice today, namely wrestling and archery, something that had always held special to my people.

And so, for the longest time, that was just fine. Just living within my immediate family, knowing we were Karankawa but not exactly realizing the implications of what it might mean to claim you are Karankawa. In a lot of Indigenous communities, and I’m of this belief as well, that it is one thing to claim you are Indigenous but it is another thing entirely to be claimed. And if your people are extinct, who is there to claim you? But this was enough. I went to college, and so this is where everything starts to unravel, a whirlwind of Indigenous activism, reclaiming our heritage and revitalizing our people. College.

So, at our first opening day—I went to Longwood University, this is a school in the heart of Virginia, right in the center—we did an orientation where a speaker on stage talked to us, the freshman body, around a thousand or so students, and asked us questions where if you related to the question you were asked to stand up. For instance, if I was to ask the room right now, “If you feel like you come from a single-parent home, please stand up,” you would stand up and then it would be a representation of just how much you have in common with the rest of your body.

And so these questions continued, if you consider yourself African American, if you ever had to use food stamps if you are a first-generation college student, stand up. And because there was many of us in this auditorium, after every question there was a noise. Chairs. People talking amongst themselves. Shuffling their feet and laughter. And then the question came. If you consider yourself Native American, First Nations, or Indigenous, stand up. And so I stood up, I’ve always been taught that my family was Karankawa. And there was just absolute silence. Me, and a body of a thousand other students, and two other students stood up. Indigenous. And so, as I stood there, I looked around and saw how there was no one. And, I decided there that it would be my living, breathing passion to revitalize my people. The Karankawa, specifically. But also my other Indigenous, Texan relatives who, because of the entirely complex history of Texas, hadn’t had the unfortunate bravery to claim Indigeneity.

Around this time, my mother, thanks to social media, started reaching out, asking the Internet, “Where are the rest of our people?” And the Internet told us that we are very much still here. We were able to make direct contact with many other Karankawa descendants. And to this day, personally, I consider my people a tribe of pieces. Each of us, because of the history that befell our people, were really only able to hold on to bits and pieces of our culture. Something that is a very sad point of conversation for anybody that is a relative and an honest one.

And as we started to find more Karankawa descendants, these pieces were able to be shared amongst us all and we were able to claim a much larger, more accurate, better unified picture of what exactly it meant to be Karankawa. Because when you think about the word Karankawa, really all that we’re talking about historically is the group of people along the Texas Coast who spoke the same language. The Karankawa, historically, were a group of seven or so different clans, and in those clans, much like it still continues to this day, there are different cultures, different histories, different ways to go about the existence as a Karankawa person.

My clan that I was able to reconnect to is the Hawk clan.

We come from the lands you would now recognize as Corpus Christi, Texas. And that is where my family has always been from, no exaggeration. As far back as documents take you, until the Spanish came and started documenting whatever they wanted to document, excluding what they didn’t want to document, my people were there. And then when the Texas border was established, we were still there.

Now, present day, and ancestrally, we have our sister clan, the Coyote clan, whose headquarters, for lack of better terminology, is going to be the lands we now know as Houston, Texas. Together, us two clans operate as the Karankawa Kadla. Kadla in our language translated into English means mixed, or calico. To add Kadla onto the end of Karankawa is done very intentionally to let people know that, no, we cannot be full blooded but that’s irrelevant to the topic of conversation. We are the direct lineal descendants to our ancestors the Karankawa, and because of how history has worked out for us, now we are mixed around. Karankawa Kadla.

This is all we have, excluding the very likely possibility that there are other clans that simply haven’t found us yet. So I went to college. I started reconnecting to my community, but not exactly reconnecting to my heritage because I can’t do that, I was always connected. And as I graduated I decided to return to Texas because my university experience was in Virginia.

And upon returning to Texas, I was able to meet more of my relatives, we are able to share with each other how we had been, what we were up to, and how we could grow together as a people.

Us two different clans were working alongside each other to fight a much larger issue. And this is where we started to get more notoriety and more public spaces, newspapers, magazines, news segments on the television. My people joined together to help fight Enbridge, an oil distribution facility that is based in Canada and is attempting to expand upon an oil terminal which is on top of a former Karankawa settlement in Ingleside along the bay near Corpus Christi, Texas. My Karankawa sister, also in the Hawk clan, Love Sanchez, had always been a water protector and she needed help. And so us two clans decided to gather up and fight. This fight included organizing a four hundred people strong call-to-action in Austin, Texas where we explained to the people what was happening. And then this call-to-action spiraled into other call-to-action’s happening in Houston, San Antonio, Corpus Christi. An ally from South Dakota also held a call-to-action at the same time, as did an ally in Alaska. So, what was this call-to-action for? What is our problem with Enbridge? Well, it’s pretty multifaceted.

The fight isn’t just about stopping a company from expanding, its also about protecting the environment. It’s about Indigenous sovereignty. It’s about Land Back. It’s about protecting water. It’s about missing and murdered indigenous women. It’s about calling for the end of fossil fuels, an impermanent solution to the growing problem of climate change

And Enbridge being a very huge fossil fuel corporation, they’re also building a brother, uh, company that was attempting to build on a Karankawa settlement.

And as Tim had stated earlier, my people were semi-nomadic which means that all along the coast we had different settlements that my ancestors would camp and live. And because my ancestors lived and camped there that means that there are artifacts and things in that land.

And especially because my people are not federally recognized nor are we state recognized, it was of utmost importance that whatever physical proof we still had be protected. Because it is much easier to continue the dialogue that the people is extinct if you build on their settlement where all their artifacts and remains are, for you no longer have access to them. There you go. They’re not here.

So we fought very hard, at least to bring awareness, at the very least asking Enbridge to not expand on this piece of land. But it brought up the topic of, well, what exactly does it mean to be a federally recognized tribe? What exactly does it mean to be a not federally recognized tribe and is anybody else going for this? Absolutely.

As a Karankawa person, I am so so so lucky that my people have found each other, we speak our language to each other, we tell our stories to each other, we share food, we share culture. And amongst us, everything is peaceful and good, and healed. However, outside of our tribe, my whole life even as I came to this conference today, I am met by people aggressively telling me that I cannot be Karankawa. I cannot be Indigenous because I don’t have a piece of paper that says that I am. And this isn’t just a story for Karankawa people. And, in fact, it’s a story that comes up for almost every Texas Indigenous tribe.

We are just one part of a much larger story of how colonization has stripped us (or attempted to strip us) of our roots. Many of us hail from homelands that we have forgotten, lucky for some of us we haven’t. We still remain on our homelands…

That we now call Texas—and this was shared to me by a Lakota relative of mine, not blood-relative but familia—that there are around twenty-nine different tribes in (the lands we now call Texas), whether they are detribalized or still active in their tribal bodies. And of those twenty-nine, there are going to be two recognized tribes, ones that are state recognized, the Coahuiltec Miakan-Garza, and one that is federally recognized, the Alabama Coushatta, whose headquarters is in Texas. Not including our more northern Oklahoma relatives, the Tonkawa, who we used to be on Texas’s northern portion up. And so these remaining twenty-seven bodies of Indigenous communities are very much so still here. But because of how I often say history worked out for us, because it was of the colonizers’ best intention to strip us of our identity. That’s exactly what they did. Push them or kill them. That aren’t so much so spoken about that did exist in the early settlements of Texas from the early 1800’s up into the 1840 somethings.

History, simply, was formed and written by Anglo-European descendants, colonizers, who made it very clear that if we were not going to be directly giving them answers and giving them the help that they needed, we would be either better off dead or missing. And so, for a lot of us, revitalizing Karankawa for a lot of being revitalized or rather reconnecting Indigenous Texans there is a huge journey between finding out, Oh wait, what exactly does it mean to be Tejano? What exactly does it mean to be Mexican, especially if you know that your people have been on Texas since before it was Texas. Since before it was called just one land. And working alongside my people also was able to help me build ties amongst all those different tribes, the twenty-seven that were living here.

And now, here we are talking about it.

There is a concept that whenever we are talking about Indigeneity, we are more familiar with the Indigeneity that surrounds our more northern relatives. We know very well of our friends the “Navajo.” I put that in quotes because they prefer Diné. The Diné. We know of our relatives the Crow or the Blackfoot. But when it comes to more southern states who, really without exaggeration, reached—were reached by colonizers first, considered these coastal lands an experiments of them. Where colonists were kind of figuring out what exactly they could do, what exactly they could get away with, what documents they could throw away, where they could push the people.

But as they worked their way inland and they found more Indigenous people they discovered oh wait, we can’t continue doing this. It’s something that won’t be able to be pushed up further as we continue to expand on the United States. And unfortunately, this kind of polarization between who is Indigenous and who isn’t follows us Indigenous folks within our own communities. It’s kind of like a snake eating its own tail. And as I speak with y’all in this room, there is a lot of fear that exists inside of me. Fear that is fed by my own experiences as a Karankawa woman. Having faced people who, presently in my face or find me on the internet, to tell me that my people are extinct, that I’m a larper, I am pretending and that I’m doing this to gain who knows what.

Thankfully though, though there was a lot of pain, in heart there shouldn’t be—a Karankawa person, not just Karankawa but an Indigenous person, and not just an Indigenous person but an Indigenous Coastal person, there’s also a shifting change in the rhetoric that is being used in the academia. As we continue to grow, and it’s kind of like how anybody grows, right?

A toddler doesn’t really recognized their reflection until, what, they’re one or two? It takes time to look in the mirror and see yourself and—and the United States is like that, in a way. We’re kind of just starting to look into the mirror and seeing what exactly has been done.

And we can see this being echoed in academia, people who are now asking fantastic questions like, “Well, who exactly wrote this history and why am I not hearing any sides of the history from the opposing side?” We all should be familiar with the quote, history is written by the victors. That’s still absolutely the case. We continue to ask ourselves with the lovely questions like, “Well, it’s not just who wrote the history, but why? Why did they write it like this? What is being hidden? What is being kept out?”

And it’s been a tremendous joy to work alongside Leila, Tim, and Peter and receive their support because we need it. A lot of activist allies, who are not Indigenous or who are, are continuously asking, “Okay, we get it. You’re indigenous. Whether you’re federally recognized or not then what can we do to help? Where can we look?” And one of the many, many things that you can do to help is solidarity.

We need white solidarity. Race is always going to be a topic of conversation, especially when you’re living on colonized land, the lands of your own rival is native land. And it’s a painful conversation to get into because it starts to imply that what we have learned in our history books is often times imperfect, and that’s scary. And it implies that what we have learned in our homes has been inspired by violence. And that violence comes from our own histories, colonizers, conquistadors, that came with the intention of gold, God, and glory but that’s just the surface of the picture.

And so I stand here today to attempt to show you that to be Indigenous is actually very simple. It means that my people are from the lands that we now call the United States and we have always been from the lands we now call the United States since before it existed. And it’s simple because our history, though it had been stripped from us, was able to survive because we made the conscious everyday choice not to just reclaim but to revitalize it. I didn’t grow up speaking my language. And I didn’t grow up knowing our creation story or our different legends that paved the picture of how my people became who we are now.

My people do the work to share those stories amongst each other. It’s a daily conscious choice that we make. And I hope, and I share this with y’all so that you can start to make the daily conscious choice to ask yourself these really burning questions like, “Where do I come from? What did my ancestors do? Who are my people? And what brought me here today?” There shouldn’t exist a polarization between Indigenous people and non-Indigenous but there is because of how history worked out. And I’m a big believer that if we are all able to decolonize which is to remove ourselves from aimed colonial rhetoric and structures that are built upon the violence and murder and genocide we can all start to be better rooted in the land we are on. And if we are all better rooted in the land we are on, we have a joining force that will give us not just surrounding but something in common we can talk about.

If I were to ask the room today, “Where are your ancestors from?” Maybe you have an answer maybe some don’t. I can tell you that my ancestors are the Karankawa, my clan, specifically the Hawk clan, are from the lands we know as Corpus Christi. My maiden name is Enriquez, we got that maiden name from conquistadores that approached our shores in the early 1800s that brought me here today. My people were going to make—that had to assimilate into Mexican American or Tejano American culture in order to survive. And there’s lots of parts of the history that are left out, but before I go, I’d love to share with you part of our creation story that is shared to me by a Coco relative.

[Coco creation story removed for oral sharing only].

 I’m very pleased to share with y’all my testament to say that we very much exist and we’re here. And though there is a lot of fear in speaking out for sharing this information with y’all, I personally am very excited for the possibilities of continuing here. I’m continuing repatriation, continued healing of the relationship of Indigenous people and non-Indigenous people. Thank you (applause).