Gates and Fakes Invade the Gullah/Geechee's Sea Islands

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DESTRUCTIONMENT: GATES & FAKES INVADE THE GULLAH/GEECHEE’S SEA ISLANDS

RYAN THOMSON

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2019

To Lauren, Neal, Patrick, and Kyle Thomson.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank Queen Quet, Ms. Brown, Abeena, Tiffany, Ed, and Ricky for their numerous inputs and insights during our collaboration. I thank my committee; Dr. Stephen Perz, Queen

Quet, Dr. Christine Overdevest, Dr. Robert Walker, Dr. Raffaele Vacca, and Dr. Allison Adams.

I also thank Mom, Dad, Grandpa Pat, Kyle, Mino, Dr. Lindsay Leban, Dr. Laura McKinney, Dr.

Samuels-Jones, Dr. Michael Schulman, Dr. Dick Reavis, Dr. Brett Clark, Dr. Ed Kick, Dr.

Clifford Griffin, and Dr. Cynthia Simmons for their years of the support.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

LIST OF TABLES ...... 7

LIST OF FIGURES ...... 8

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ...... 9

ABSTRACT ...... 10

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 12

Society and Community ...... 17 Weber ...... 19 Durkheim ...... 22 Rural Sociology ...... 25 Black Land Matters ...... 28 Environmental Justice Studies ...... 29 Gentrification ...... 33 Organization of the Dissertation ...... 39

2 GULLAH/GEECHEE STUDIES ...... 42

Introduction ...... 42 Colonialism As War ...... 42 Civil War ...... 45 Reconstruction ...... 46 Culture ...... 49 Language ...... 51 Social Organization ...... 53 Subsistence ...... 54 Bridges & Heirs ...... 55 Changing Tides ...... 58 Gullah/Geechee Studies ...... 59

3 METHODOLOGY ...... 65

Engaging the Gullah/Geechee for Research ...... 65 Participatory Action Research ...... 67 Situated Solidarities ...... 70 Developing the Research Questions ...... 71 Data Collection ...... 73

Coding and Analysis ...... 75

4 GATES AND FAKES: PERCEPTIONS OF THE SEA ISLAND INVASION ...... 78

The Gates of Destructionment ...... 81 Ruin Along the Sound ...... 83 Destructionment and Poverty on the Sea Islands ...... 85 Intentionality of Laws Changing ...... 89 Fakes: Misappropriated Caricatures “Neither Gullah, Nor Geechee” ...... 91 Conclusions...... 96

5 FISHING WHILE BLACK ...... 99

Denial of Physical Access ...... 100 Denial of Legal Access ...... 102 Competition With Outsiders ...... 106 Dependency ...... 108 Conclusions...... 112

6 LAYERS OF FAMILY ...... 115

Layers of Family ...... 115 Kinship ...... 116 Neighborhood ...... 117 Friendship ...... 118 Religion ...... 119 Graduating Class ...... 120 Subsistence ...... 121 Conclusions...... 122

7 CONCLUSIONS ...... 124

Corroding Community Customs ...... 126 Future Research ...... 128 Implications for Sustaining Activism ...... 130

APPENDIX FOCUS GROUP INTERVIEW GUIDE ...... 138

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 140

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 146

LIST OF TABLES

Table page

2–1 Historical Timeline of the Sea Islands ...... 63

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure page

2–1 Bibliometric Network Summary of Gullah keyword search via Thomson Reuters Web of Science Database ...... 64

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

DNR The South Carolina Department of Natural Resources

EJ Environmental Justice

PAR Participatory Action Research

Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

DESTRUCTIONMENT: GATES & FAKES INVADE THE GULLAH/GEECHEE’S SEA ISLANDS

Ryan Thomson

August 2019

Chair: Stephen Perz Major: Sociology

Urbanizing modern societies bring about numerous threats to rural communities around the world. A range of interrelated processes is particularly harmful to indigenous rural communities, encompassing both environmental changes such as land use decisions that urbanize rural places (i.e., gentrification), as well as the denigration, reinterpretation or replacement of traditional cultures. Such pressures pose ongoing treats to the cultural, social, bio-physical, and natural/ecological wellbeing of indigenous rural communities. I suggest that these interrelated change processes can be usefully captured by Queen Quet’s concept of “destructionment”, which calls attention to the simultaneous degradation of both environments and cultures when traditional or indigenous societies are undermined by outsiders. I argue that destructionment incorporates and goes beyond other concepts of social change, from Tonnies to the rural sociologists to theories of racism to environmental justice, as they apply to environment and society among indigenous cultures facing external pressures. To illustrate destructionment, I take up the case of the Afro-indigenous Gullah/Geechee people of the Atlantic Sea Islands in the lower Atlantic coast of the United States. There, ongoing gentrification by the largely white urban society has imposed multiple forms of environmental pressure and cultural threat on

Gullah/Geechee society. This dissertation takes up two key forms of environmental-cultural

threats to the Gullah/Geechee: land use changes paired with cultural appropriation of

Gullah/Geechee identity, and social conflicts over-fishing rights and regulations. In the process, I call attention to multiple underlying processes whereby outside interest groups have sought to undermine Gullah/Geechee claims to natural resources and to their cultural identity and traditional resource management practices. The Gullah/Geechee serve as an emblematic case through which we can understand the threats to rural indigenous communities, as well as a strong example of effective mobilization to resist pressures and sustain community integrity and traditional livelihoods. The Gullah/Geechee also show how the concept of destructionment offers a broad but sophisticated concept for capturing how outsiders simultaneously pose both cultural and environmental threats to indigenous peoples.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

“At Beaufort, Hilton Head, Savannah, Fernandina, St. Augustine and Jacksonville, the Blacks may remain in their chosen or accustomed vocations— but on the islands, and in the settlements hereafter to be established, no white person whatever, unless military officers and soldiers detailed for duty, will be permitted to reside; and the sole and exclusive management of affairs will be left to the freed people themselves, subject only to the United States military authority and the acts of Congress.”- General Sherman’s Special Field Order 15 January 12, 1865

Not all invasions are coordinated. The Afro-indigenous Gullah/Geechee of the Atlantic

Sea Islands know this better than most. For the invasion they have suffered has been an invasion of hegemonic racial others, who have found manifold ways to incrementally occupy the Atlantic

Sea Islands once proclaimed to the Gullah/Geechee by General Sherman in his field order during the Civil War. There are few places that illustrate the stark cultural distinction and asymmetries of such invasions better than the Port Royal region of South Carolina.

St. Helena Island is a rustic coastal headquarters of sorts for an Afro-Indigenous Nation unlike any other culture in the region, the Gullah/Geechee. They are the direct decedents of

African peoples kidnapped during the African Diaspora. “The Gullah/Geechee Nation represents the branch of Africa’s tree that took root in North America” (Goodwine 2015, 4). Islands such as

St. Helena are known for live oaks, prayer houses, family farms, roadside food stands, dark complexions, and thick accents mixing between old indigo, cotton, and rice plantations still bearing their original names. The relative isolation and plentiful resources of the Sea Islands enabled the creole language, religious practices, and culture of the Gullah/Geechee to flourish.

The island’s 8,407 inhabitants are 84% Black Gullah. For the past four centuries, the island of St.

Helena has become a mix of parts of Africa and America. The Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage

Corridor, stretching from the Cape Fear River in North Carolina to the St. Johns River in Florida and roughly thirty miles inland, runs through the Gullah/Geechee homeland and was federally

recognized in 2006 (NPS 2005). The Gullah once resided on nearly all the Sea Islands absent a military installation. That, however, has changed radically in the 20th century and beyond.

A prominent example can be found to the south of St. Helena, on Hilton Head Island, site of the advance of the invasion of Gullah/Geechee lands. There, tourist resorts and retirement development has reached build-out, resulting in the destruction of ancestral sites for commercial expansion. The population of 40,500 on Hilton Head is 83% white, .5% Black, and 16% Latino with a family income of $85,296 (US Census 2018). The retirement resorts are organized to ensure restricted access, for they are gated. Such gated communities constitute a manifestation of a key change in land use from traditional agriculture to elite suburban communities. Beyond the environmental changes are cultural modifications. Many of the private residential neighborhoods bear meaningless names such as Margaritaville and Spanish Wells Plantation. These changes show how over the past fifty years, the Gullah/Geechee communities of Hilton Head have been displaced by upscale migrant retirees and been forced to relocate (Beidler and Baker 2013). Port

Royal Sound thus constitutes the site of profound cultural and environmental degradation as a consequence of socioeconomic differences between the traditional Gullah/Geechee and the mainland outsiders.

The changes reflect numerous threats that have unfolded in the wake of the ongoing invasion of the Gullah/Geechee’s land. Such threats include impositions on Gullah/Geechee resource management rights (both terrestrial and squatic), as well as on their cultural practices and identities. This dissertation therefore pursues an analysis of several key dimensions of the injustices involved in the displacement of the Gullah/Geechee from a large portion of their homeland, focusing on the environmental and cultural degradation involved.

A key goal of this dissertation is to support and inform the ongoing struggle of the

Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition. In the scholar-activist tradition, this means identifying the key strengths, opportunities, and hurdles to activism for sustaining the Gullah/Geechee communities. I draw on both Gullah/Geechee thought on their experience as it can inform a broader understanding of how outsiders degrade indigenous societies both environmentally and culturally. The dissertation is also informed by Gullah/Geechee priorities stemming from their understanding of the threats they face and the tactics they employ to ensure strong social bonds as a form of social resilience.

The importance of the Gullah/Geechee extends far beyond the Atlantic Sea Islands, for they occupy a singular place in American history and yet their struggles have much in common with indigenous and traditional peoples in many places around the world. In the remainder of this chapter, I argue that the study of the Gullah/Geechee will benefit from engagement with broader literatures about relationships of society and community in urbanizing societies, family and kinship in rural communities, race and identity in stratified societies, and environmental justice where racial groups conflict over rights to use of natural resources. Selecting these literatures not only relates the study of the Gullah/Geechee to classical as well as contemporary sociology, and environmental and resource sociology to other specialties of the discipline. These literatures also have specific relationships with each other in light of the history of the Gullah/Geechee, relationships which make evident their limitations when applied to cases of environmental injustice involving unequal racial groups competing for natural resources.

I also argue that the limitations in the literatures just noted can be usefully addressed by taking seriously a key concept from the Gullah/Geechee, “destructionment”, advanced by their current leader, Queen Quet (Goodwine 1998). Queen Quet formally coined the portmanteau term

“destructionment” in her book, The Legacy of Ibo Landing (Goodwine 1998). The concept emphasizes the role “development” plays in degrading cultures and environments. Queen Quet defines the concept as “the act of those that self-identify as "developers" entering communities to bulldoze the native and indigenous cultural landscape under the guise of developing said areas when they are actually engaging in massive environmental impacts and the removal of the historical legacy of the people that were native and often sacred to the area.” The concept is multi-dimensional given that it recognizes various types of harm and considers these harms as exerting lasting negative effects over time. Queen Quet has advanced the concept of destructionment in broad and open terms. If understood in light of other thought as applies to the

Gullah/Geechee and other traditional and indigenous groups facing threats to land and culture from outsiders, destructionment stands to offset the limitations of other ideas to show how e.g. threats to land and water resources are also threats to identity, and more. This chapter therefore sets forth Queen Quet’s articulation of destructionment, offering it as a critique of other thought on societal conflicts involving the degradation of environments and cultures. I argue that destructionment provides a means of synthesizing and correlating the many facets of degradation in traditional and indigenous environments and societies, thus offering a useful contribution from an indigenous cultural perspective to a broad set of literatures of long standing in sociology.

The theoretical review that follows thus begins with a discussion of Tonnies’ classical sociological concepts of Gemeinschaft and Gelleschaft. I then turn to the classical sociological theorists Durkheim and Weber to outline the established critiques and concerns with Tonnies’ ideal types. The discussion then takes up the concerns of the rural sociologists with the issues of rural communities in urbanizing modern societies. Here the issues of traditional identities and resource-based livelihoods as they relate to environmental degradation gain consideration. I then

add a discussion of race and identity, which casts a harsh light on the long history of racial stratification in the United States based on ideologies of inequality and hatred. This permits a discussion of how inequalities contribute to cultural degradation in the encounter between urban industrial society (Gelleschaft with race) and indigenous rural societies (Gemeinschaft but with a broader cultural context). Lest we lose sight of the environmental consequences of such encounters, I then turn to the environmental justice literature, which has called attention to how racial inequalities map directly on to environmental inequalities, but often focus on urban environmental issues like exposures to pollution and other health hazards. I thus refocus environmental justice questions in two ways, by focusing on rural issues which have received less attention, as well as by calling attention to the relative lack of study of ethnic inequalities involving indigenous peoples. Against such a backdrop, I then take up a discussion of destructionment, which I suggest brings together contributions from all of the above literatures in a framework for understanding how race/ethnicity informs conflicts in the encounter between urban industrial society and indigenous rural societies that result in the degradation of environments and indigenous cultures. With destructionment, I assert that we gain a coherent framework for understanding the struggles as well as the persistence of the Gullah/Geechee, and arguably many other indigenous and traditional rural peoples.

Before proceeding, it is important to differentiate between a series of various groups and designations. The Gullah/Geechee Nation is a vast population of hundreds of thousands of people effected by the African diaspora and descending from a common West African tradition residing all over the world. This differs from the geographic areas such as the Gullah/Geechee

Cultural Heritage Corridor stretching the coastal region from North Carolina to North Florida and thirty miles inland. The corridor roughly reflects the Gullah/Geechee homeland and includes

smaller areas such as the Atlantic Sea Islands, Lowcountry, First Coast, Coastal Empire, and

Golden Isles.

The Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition is the grassroots organizing body striving to preserve Gullah/Geechee history, heritage, culture, and language. They publish the monthly “De

Conch”, maintain the “De Nayshun Nyews” listserve, and maintain the Alkebulan Archive. The

Coalition maintains several active partnerships such as the “Gullah/Geechee Living Learning

Center” with the Hunting Island Nature Center and St. Helena Branch Library providing monthly programing and workshops open to the public. The Gullah/Geechee Nation and Sea Island

Coalition are distinct from the Gullah/Geechee National Heritage Corridor which is a federal

National Heritage Area maintained by a Commission.

Society and Community

The Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft dichotomy is a once central but now largely retired ideal type from the classical sociology canon. The dichotomy was introduced by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies (1887) to describe different types of social ties as they correspond to traditional rural and modern urban societies. “There exists a Gemeinschaft (community) of language, of folkways, of mores, or of beliefs; but, by way of contrast, Gesellschaft (society or company) exists in the realm of business, travel, or sciences” (Tonnies 1887, 191). Gemeinschaft

(roughly translated as “community”) is characterized by organic communal relationships, which give rise to mutual solidarity based on kinship, neighborhood, or friendship. Gemeinschaft traditionalism views the world as having a basic order, and that order is the way things ought to be. It is organic in its character and division of labor. This way of life is more egalitarian and does not easily facilitate the creation of individual riches. Belonging to an authentic

Gemeinschaft community means having responsibility to one’s family, neighborhood, and friends.

In the case of the Gullah/Geeche, Gemeinschaft is evident in grand events such as

Juneteenth freedom celebration, learning traditional crafts, and oral histories grant an incredible sense of belonging both within the present community and historically. Such grand feeling of solidarity and duty can accomplish great things void of any monetary exchange. It simultaneously drives the fisherman to rise before dawn for decades in hopes of putting more food into community hands as well as creates incredible excitement for the young apprentice to join and learn their ancestral craft. It can produce tens of thousands of sweetgrass baskets without any bosses or entrepreneurial investments. The various crafts and receipts have partially evolved as the torch is passed between generations as it always has been. However, the

Gullah/Geechee’s traditions, ancestral folkways, and larger legacy perseveres.

Conversely, Gesellschaft (translated as “society” or “company”) is described as constituted by efficient associative or business-partnerships. Gelleschaft thus reflected modern rationality and corresponded to social relationships in urban societies. Tonnies described these universal relations with a quote from Adam Smith, “Everyone… becomes in some measure a merchant.” (1887, 200) Gesellschaft served as a forerunner concept for what has become referred to as modernity. Tonnies’ concept thus drove later thought about modernity and its implications

(cf. Giddens 1998). In turn, Gesellschaft as modernity is eminently relevant in the contemporary context of economic globalization, cultural homogenization, and other forms of social change.

Gesellschaft is thus resonant in the era of globalization, in which modern social relations are expansive and hegemonicwith regard to Gemeinschaft. The city and urban spaces have become the center of a single modern world polity and culture (Meyer, Boli, Thomas, and Ramirez

1981). Scholars such as Hobsbawm (2007) have argued that modernity has turned the entire planet into an increasingly remote kind of Gesellschaft. He argues that this has given rise to identity politics which seeks a fictitious remaking of the qualities of Gemeinschaft by artificially re-forging group bonds and identities. Jameson (2000) also highlighted the ambivalent envy felt by those identities constructed by Gesellschaft for the remaining enclaves of Gemeinschaft, even as the first corrodes the second. The hegemony of Gesellschaft contains a series of insights for the Gullah/Geechee, as a traditional culture facing external threats from modern society.

The concepts of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft are important for this study because they provide the classical formulation of the traditional-modern dichotomy. In turn, Tonnies provides a conceptual basis for considering the processes and outcomes that ensure when expansive modern societies encounter traditional societies. This provides a conceptual framework for thinking about the encroachment of outsiders and their modern economic relations into the Sea

Islands of the Gullah/Geechee and their culturally distinct practices

Weber

Tonnies’ ideal types of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft underwent substantial development with the work of German sociologist Max Weber. His major work, Economy and

Society (1921) can be interpreted as a rejoinder to Tonnies’ articulation of Gemeinschaft and

Gesellschaft. Weber employed the broader conceptual tool of the ideal type differently than

Tonnies, instead employing it to accentuate the key elements of a historic social change. This difference informs Weber’s critique of Tonnies’ articulation of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft.

Weber agreed that social ties can be categorized as belonging to personal social interactions and the roles, values, and beliefs based on such interactions. However, Weber saw these interactions as processes which could reinforce or undermine these social relationships over time.

The emphasis on dynamic change in social relationships led Weber to delve deeper into theorizing Gesellschaft. Unlike unified gemeinschaft community relations, gesellschaft is the atomization of relations into associative/mechanistic business partnerships. As worded by

Weber, Gesellschaft involves “Rationally motivated adjustment of interests or similar motivated agreement, whether the bases of rational judgement be absolute values or reasons of expediency”

(Weber 1921, 41). Seeking to capture the complexity of social relationships in modernity, Weber unpacked Gesellschaft into three categories:

The purest cases of associative relationships are: (a) rational free market exchange, which constitutes a compromise of opposed but complementary interests; (b) the pure voluntary association based on self-interest, a case of agreement as to a long-run course of action oriented purely to a promotion of specific ulterior interests; (c) the voluntary association of individuals motivated by an adherence to a set of common absolute values… (Weber 1921, 41)

Gesellschaft replaces the traditional status regime with a regime of multiple forms of relationships often featuring formal contracts, where unconscious law is replaced by deliberate, contractual law (Weber 1921). Weber’s analysis integrated an action orientation that highlighted the relational complexity of the shift from the traditional to the modern, as evident in the multiple forms of relationships in Gesellschaft.

For Weber, the most important historical change was not technical, or economic, or political. The biggest change that best distinguishes the modern world from the traditional one was a difference in the way people think about their relationships with each other. Weber argued that Gemeinschaft is rooted in a “subjective feeling” that may be “affectual or traditional.” This differed significantly from the rational agreement by mutual consent associated with Gesellschaft style commercial contracts. This contrast is relevant to the present study, for not only do the

Gullah/Geechee think differently than outsiders on the mainland who employ Gesellschaft

relations via contracts, they are not driven by the Gesellschaft profit motive as are most mainland communities.

To emphasize the fluidity and amorphousness of the relationship between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, Weber modified Tonnies’ terms to reformulate them as Vergemeinschaftung and Vergesellschaftung, which are the gerund forms of the corresponding German nouns. This grammatical shift roughly translates to “communitarization” and “socialization”, which emphasizes how these two ways of life manifest as distinct relational processes. While some scholars have adopted these terms for other meanings (e.g. Noyes 2011), the meaning here was primarily intended to convey how different social orders reinforce themselves.

A historical assessment informed Weber’s view that societies, and people, were becoming more rational. In Weber’s view, traditional communities undergo a process of rationalization in order to expand and become modern societies. This rationalization gives rise to bureaucracies, which are said to be both rational and efficient. Formalized hierarchies and clear chains of command are comprised of highly specialized roles held together by formal, written communications. Detailed rules and regulations without regard to the person they’re serving.

Weber’s concern was that bureaucracies could easily lose their reflexivity – to stop reflecting on your work or your role – and instead become locked in a calculated routine that becomes meaningless and unthinking. Weber worried that the systems that rationalization built would leave behind the ideas that built them, and that they’ll simply roll on forever, meaninglessly, under their own momentum. As a result, Weber feared that societies will become locked in an “iron cage” of bureaucratic capitalism from which we cannot escape. In that scenario, social life would be reduced to nothing, but a series of interactions based on rationalized rules with no personal meaning behind them. This led Weber to theorize about the

social meanings attached to modern modes of social interactions. Weber’s emphasis on the relational nature of social ties thus built on but went beyond Tonnies’ original formulation by detailing how social relationships changes, their complexity in modernity, and their consequences for the construction of meaning.

Durkheim

Tonnies’ application of Gemeinschaft and Gelleschaft also influenced other classical sociologists. Emile Durkheim reviewed Tonnies’ work and later utilized a similar conceptual framework in The Division of Labor in Society (1897). Tonnies’ publication entitled “Organic and Mechanical Formations” (1887) appears to have inspired Durkheim’s (1897) conceptual framework. However, Durkheim’s interpretation constituted somewhat of a reversal of Tonnies understanding. Durkheim characterized traditional communities as being unified by “mechanical solidarity through likeness” in the form of collective consciousness and ethnic homogeneity.

Similarly, he theorized that Gesellschaft social relations were governed by “organic solidarity” and characterized by individual consciousness and specialization. His emphasis on the more complex integrated division of labor that enabled interdependence, technological innovation, and greater systems of production. His structural-functionalist analysis examined the dynamics associated with the improved efficiency, diffusion of technology, interdependence and scale of trade.

Durkheim’s first criticism of Tonnies was that Gesellschaft society grew out of

Gemeinschaft communities (Aldous 1972). He took serious issue with Tonnies exclusion of this evolutionary transition whereby advanced urban economies emerge from traditional communities. He argued Tonnies took for granted the developmental transition from

Gemeinschaft community into Gesellschaft society, and that the transition brings benefits to society. Durkheim suggested that such transitions are indeed themselves managed by state-

society relationships. While it is hard to imagine a scenario where Gullah/Geechee communities would have evolved into something comparable to Hilton Head, it raises what I refer to as the trajectory issue. Is destructionment an inevitable outcome of a uni-directional path of development? Or alternatively, does St. Helena’s ongoing perseverance illustrate one among numerous possibilities for retaining community? Despite the serious theoretical implications of the trajectory issue, it was never resolved and remains a contested point.

Durkheim’s second criticism took issue with Tonnies’ description of Gesellschaft society as being “unnatural” or “artificial” depending on the translation. It is true that at times Tonnies presents society to be problematic because traditional social responsibilities have been undermined:

Such a negative attitude towards one another becomes the normal and always underlying relation of these power-endowed individuals, and it characterizes the Gesellschaft in the condition of rest; nobody wants to grant and produce anything for another individual, nor will he be inclined to give ungrudgingly to another individual, if it is not in exchange for a gift or labor equivalent that he considers at least equal to what he has given (Tonnies 1887, 197).

Durkheim questioned whether Gemeinschaft relationships were necessarily better than

Gesellschaft relationships. His portrayal of traditional communities as maintaining strong social bonds also appears backward relative to Gesellschaft’s advances in production. Durkheim argued a partial indifference towards other people could be necessary in advancing society. His analysis framed Gesellschaft in terms of (les progrès) its numerous advancements; foremost from the transition from penal to civil law, to the rise of science, to industrialization, and even the establishment of republican democracy. This was juxtaposed by Durkheim’s description of

Gemeinschaft’s attachment to community practices as backwards and at times bordering on primitive.

In fact, the sentiments thus in question derive all their force from the fact that they are common to everybody. They are strong because they are uncontested. What

adds the peculiar respect of which they are the uncontested. (Durkheim 1897, 103)

He continued in his review of Tonnies…

Gemeinschaft always presents the same general properties. We have indicated the most essential; others flow from them. In Gemeinschaft-type societies where the individuals not distinguishable from another, property tends to be communal… Consequently, there is no phenomenon of exchange… Things possessed in common do not circulate but remain immovable, attached to the group. Thus, land is the essential form of property… Each works not for compensation, but because it is his natural function (Durkheim in Aldous et al. 1972, 1195).

In that context, some scholars have described Gullah/Geechee culture as “traditional”, emphasizing their strong sense of community, rich oral traditions, subsistent agriculture, and various cultural practices (Jarrett, and Lucas 2002). However, it would be misrepresentative to describe the Gullah/Geechee as primitive; many of them are quite tech savvy. In addition to numerous websites, they are active on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and

Instagram. Many Gullah/Geechees have a cell phone and most households have a car. In

Durkheim’s account, it was not entirely clear if individuals in Gemeinschaft relationships are incapable or simply not organized in a collective manner that facilitates the adoption or management of new technologies.

These differing views on the Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft ideal type were never really addressed largely due to a fundamental difference within Tonnies and Durkheim’s values.

Durkheim celebrated the transition as a success of cities and the new opportunities they provided within an interdependent division of labor. This differed significantly from Tonnies concerns for traditional communities. Within the field of sociology, these concerns for traditional communities have been largely maintained within the rural subdiscipline.

Rural Sociology

“Land is the only real wealth in this country, and if we don’t own any, then were out of the picture.” (Ralph Paige, Federation of Southern Cooperatives)

The dichotomy speaks directly to the rural/urban divide separated by the waterways of

Port Royal Sound. If classical theorists like Weber and Durkheim offered critiques of Tonnies framework, they often did so while agreeing that modern urban society tends to grow and supplant traditional rural communities. Rural sociology however adds the further critique that the advance of modernity does not mean the disappearance of the rural or traditional. While

Durkheim questioned Tonnies’ assumption that modernization is automatic, the rural sociologists provide the complementary argument that modernization as a process involves conflict precisely because modernity proposes to replace established Gemeinschaft relationships with rational

Gesellschaft relationships, that is, it replaces social relationships based on trust with contractual relationships based on law. Rural sociology calls for greater attention to the fate of rural communities and the consequent plight of rural peoples, who often resist at least some aspects of modernity due to what modernity cannot replace in traditional social relationships.

“Rural sociology is concerned with the relations of rural people to each other, the relations of rural people to other sections of national and world populations, with rural institutions with the rural standard of living and with the social problems which attach themselves to life and labor on the farm and in farm communities” (Taylor 1923). Accordingly, rural sociology’s theoretical and methodological preoccupations are well suited for engaging the challenges facing Gullah/Geechee communities (Gilbert, 1982). In particular, the applied orientation of much of rural sociology led to a prominent focus on social problems in rural communities. This offers a counter to the predominant sociological focus on urban societies with modern Gesellschaft relationships (Taylor 1927).

One noteworthy example of rural interation of the Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft dichotomy is Bell’s (1994) study of the English countryside and community of Childerly. Bell’s work is especially important for present purposes because he traced the shift within the representation of rural places and people who resided there. Tonnies’ work was particularly influential among the

Chicago School of urban sociology, notably in the work of Louis Wirth and Robert Redfield

(Bell 1994: 88). According to Bell, this is where the rural idyllic landscape morphed into portraits of isolated and backward enclaves. This portrayal was inaccurate, as it assumed that traditional communities were unchanging, and ignored the notion of place attachment as an alternate explanation for Gemeinschaft in rural communities. With that alternative, rural communities can still be dynamic in their own terms, including as they negotiate modernity while seeking to retain their identity.

Rural sociology has developed specific topical areas for research which underscore the challenges and difficulties of rural communities in the context of modernization and development. Specific topical areas within rural sociology include studies of community development (Flora and Flora 2008), agriculture (Newby 1983, Buttel, Larson, and Gillespie

1990), attachment to place (Smith 1999), spatial inequality (Lobao, Hooks, and Tickamyer

2007), rural poverty (Duncan 1996), and natural resource management (Buttel 2002). Several of these topical areas, such as rural poverty and spatial inequality, point to the social difficulties of changing rural communities. Others, such as community development and attachment to place, highlight efforts to sustain rural communities and Gemeinschaft relationships on which they are built.

Yet others, notably agriculture and natural resource management, bring up additional issues for sociology in the context of modernity. This is because none of the classical theorists

discussed above take seriously the environmental question, which rural sociologists have taken up by unpacking into a suite of different issues. Agriculture in particular and natural resource management in general often define the economic basis of rural communities which often depend directly on the land and other natural resources for their livelihoods. A key issue in the process of modernity concerns the terms of access and regulations on the use of such resources, and whether traditional practices are respected or persist, and whether they continue to provide sufficiently for the rural communities who depend on them.

Natural resource management (NRM) research is a sizeable body of scholarship pertaining to the decision making, impacts, and health of communities as it pertains to their relations with the surrounding ecosystems. Many of these texts analyze different management approaches, ownership regimes, and stakeholder implications among indigenous groups. Some notable works include Berkes (1993), Agrawal (1995), Jentoft, Minde, and Nilsen (2003),

Brosius, Tsing, and Zerner (2005), Dove (2006), and Hall and Nagel (2007) among others.

Theses studies share a managerial focus across a variety of resource-based industries such as agriculture, mining, tourism, fisheries, and forestry. Rural sociology and NRM thus go beyond the classical foundations of sociological thought about the fate of rural communities in the context of modernization to problematize the environmental question as it bears directly on social relationships.St. Helena Island, like much of the Lowcountry, is rural in its character and has retained its agrarian coastal identity despite mainland changes. As the City of Beaufort (as well as Hilton Head Island) has grown over the past fifty years, life on the island has become increasingly influenced by the Sea Island Parkway (USDA 1974, USDA 2003). Hilton Head has only partially spilled over from Port Royal largely due in part to the width of the channel and

Parris Island military outpost between them. In 2013, the USDA officially moved Beaufort

County’s (and St. Helena) classification to the lowest Metropolitan County Code (Counties in metro areas of a fewer than 250,000 population). While St. Helena has done a great job retaining its rural character, this decade brought the arrival of several white establishments and creation of a golf course on Lady’s Island. The shift from a high rural classification in 1974 (Urban population of 2,500 to 19,999, not adjacent to a metro area) indicates a rapid developmental transition. (Lichter and Brown 2011). It also highlights a remarkably unique situation where a single island has managed to hold out its rural character within a rapidly urbanizing area. Such concerns of scale, cultural identity, and subsistence agriculture/aquaculture speak directly to the century old rural sociological subdiscipline. These scholastic roots are worth tracing given that many of these more contemporary concerns reflect the historical Gesellschaft struggles of previous centuries.

Black Land Matters

Here it is worth noting that while many accredit the work of Carl Taylor with originating rural sociology, his foundations in turn rested on thr work of others, who in turn called attention to additional issues facing rural communities that in turn offer critiques of the writings discussed thus far. When he theorized Gemeinschaft social relations in rural societies, Tonnies’ account assumed racially homogenous groups. This is not however historically accurate in many parts of the world, particularly regions of colonization and enslavement, which includes much of the

Americas. This raises central questions in American sociology concerning racial inequalities, including the ways in which they influence access to and rights of use of natural resources.

The work of W.E.B. Du Bois was among the first to seriously consider the Black farmer as a central subject for sociological research, specifically his discussions of rural communities and the structure of landownership and agriculture (Du Bois 1901a, b). For Du Bois, perhaps nowhere was white privilege and racial hierarchy more evident than in rural communities. His

research applied quantitative agrarian analysis coupled with descriptive case studies of rural communities to advance the project of emancipation (Du Bois 1904). Du Bois’ work has since influenced numerous studies on these and related topics, resulting in a large literature on the

Black farmer (Jakubek and Wood 2018). Du Bois also had significant influence on

Gullah/Geechees of the time. Du Bois disagreed with Fredrick Douglass and argued that freedmen and their families ought to remain in the south.

Rural America may seem to many an unusual place to study race and ethnicity because of the misperception that rural communities are ethnically homogenous and immune to racial conflict (Snipp 1996). The plight and persistence of Black farmers have however remained a consistent theme within the sub-discipline. While the Black Belt South has received some scholarly attention, the Gullah/Geechee farmers of the Corridor have not been as popular. But in accordance with well-documented institutional manifestations of white privilege in urban areas

(e.g. job and housing discrimination), market dynamics have also been found to discriminate against Black farmers. This discrimination against Black farmers within the retail market has been shown to result in “the self-exploitation of household labor as a key determinant of smallholder decline and survival” (Schulman and Newman 1991, 278). It is this focus on race within rural contexts that this dissertation seeks to bring to the otherwise racially-blind

Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft typology.

Environmental Justice Studies

Within the United States, the intersection of race and environment is routinely framed in terms of Enivironmental Justice (EJ). EJ scholarship explicitly calls attention to racial inequalities as they are taken to directly affect environmental inequalities. EJ first emerged in the national consciousness in 1982 as a grassroots movement in opposition to the construction of a

PCB landfill in the African American community of Afton, North Carolina. EJ thought argued

that racial inequalities resulted in envirionmental inequalities, giving pride of place to disproportionate exposures to environmental health hazards among subaltern racial minotiries.

EJ originated as “environmental racism” as articulated by Reverend Ben Chavis but expanded over time to include other forms of social inequalities and unequal exposures to environmental hazards.

At the same time, the term EJ also came to be identified with the EJ movement that sought to mitigate and prevent environmental injustices. The EJ movement coalesced to focus on the reduction of environmental burdens borne by racial minorities in light of nationwide studies confirmed that hazards tended to be more prevalent in lower income Black neighborhoods (GAO

1983, UCC 1987). A broader supporting interdisciplinary body of research emerged (Bullard

1983, 1994). Since the 1980s, environmental justice movements have advanced several legal and institutional challenges to race- and class-based exposures.

The EPA established the Environmental Justice Office in 1992, which was then followed by Bill Clinton’s 1994 Executive Order 12898, which issued guidance on Federal Actions to

Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations. A wide variety of other legal changes have sought to ensure the protection of all people residing within

U.S. territories. The EPA now has its own definition of EJ: “Environmental justice is the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies” (EPA 2017).

Definitions of EJ variously emphasize specific aspects of justice, such as the spatial distribution of environmental risks and amenities; fair and meaningful participation in decision- making; recognition of local knowledge and cultural differences; and the capability of

communities to flourish in society (Schlosburg 2002, 2007). Whether these definitions have resulted in tangible gains for frontline communities remains an issue of debate, given that stark environmental disparities persist (Bullard, et al. 2007, Ringquist 2005; Roberts and Toffolon-

Weiss 2002). There has been sustained mobilization around EJ in many frontline communities around the country, which have increasingly formed organizations which have in turn constituted alliances and networks.

Another key concept for EJ is that of environmental harm, which emerged in the 1990s in the “green criminology” literature (Lynch 1990, Beirne and South 1998). Environmental harm served as a critique of legalistic definitions of environmental crime, which only considers environmental damage defined as illegal by law (Frank and Lynch 1992). By contrast, in a green criminology perspective, environmental harm takes an EJ orientation which considers any form of human-induced environmental damage to be a crime, regardless of whether it is categorized as illegal by law. Halsey and White (1998) discuss various green perspectives on environmental harm, noting distinctions between anthropocentric, eco-centric, and bio-centric orientations (see also Clifford and Edwards 2011; Gibbs, et al. 2009). Regardless of the specifics, the general concept of environmental harm calls attention to the legal dimension of exposures to environmental health risks.

In discussions of the spatial clustering of environmental health hazards, certain types of locations bearing the brunt of environmental burdens tend to be highlighted (Bullard 1996,

Bryant and Mohai 1992). The EJ literature has documented the typical characteristics of highly polluted sites: they are often waste disposal sites, old industrial cores, or sites of major infrastructure projects, all of which tend to occur in urban centers in districts with large populations of racial minorities or poor and working-class communities (Cutter 1995, Bullard

2009, Hanafi 2016). This has led to efforts to quantify the explanatory power of poor and minority populations to account for the distribution of environmental health hazards (Downey and Hawkins 2008). Such work has confirmed significant relationships between these variables

(Downey 2006, Chakraborty, Maantay, and Brender 2011).

Another reason that the EJ literature has expanded over time is because researchers have identified additional environmental health hazards and disproportionately affected social groups as research foci. By evaluating different kinds of hazards and affected social groups, researchers have identified different environmental hazards with diverse spatial distributions that affect social groups in different ways. For example, more recent EJ research has variously focused on pesticide exposures among Latin farmworkers (Harrison 2008) and Native American reservations as targets for illegal dumping (Lynch and Stretesky 2012, Vickery and Hunter

2015). Because this work focuses on new forms of hazards in rural sites with ethnic minority groups, it broadens the gamut of examples of EJ. These non-canonical cases call attention for the need to consider other forms of EJ, especially in rural areas where environmental injustices may take very different forms.

As a key example, given the importane of natural resource management to rural communities, EJ research in rural areas could usefully be expanded beyond pollution concerns.

Unequal access to land and other natural resources among racial and ethnic groups thus becomes a form of rural EJ. Changes in land use due to the incursion of modern social actors may undermine traditional community claims and practices. In that regard, land development to replace traditional communities with suburban neighborhoods becomes a form of EJ. Per

Brisman (2008) and White (2008), such an approach to land use change would push EJ beyond the urban pollution focus it has exhibited historically. Of particular interest in this dissertation is

that an EJ focus on land use change would call attention to EJ in rural areas as regards natural resource management, especially as tied to racial/ethnic inequalities. In that context, cases such as traditional peoples of racial/ethnic minorities like the Gullah/Geechee become important for study in an EJ perspective.

Gentrification

A key form of land use change that constitutes part of the transition from the rural to the urban, and thus embodies many of the changes from community to society, is gentrification.

Gentrification is typically the process of renovating deteriorated urban neighborhoods by means of the influx of more affluent residents (Glass 1964). Lees, Slater and Wyly (2010: xv) alternatively define gentrification as “the transformation of a working-class or vacant area of the central city to a middle class residential and/or commercial use.” This economic and political process drives up land-rents, and by extension the overall cost of living, in a district or neighborhood. Consequently, gentrification is frequently criticized as a social process of pushing out low-income and minority groups, who are replaced by higher-income hegemonic groups.

Gentrification provides a powerful theoretical optic for understanding land use change, for it simultaneously involves threats to the resource claims of rural communities, their traditional livelihood practices, and their ability to retain their identities as supported in part by place attachment. The key results of these multifaceted threats is the dispossession of traditional communities of their land, and their consequent displacement to other locations. The displacement of lower-income, particularly African American, families unable to afford rising property taxes is thus a central outcome of gentrification. The racial dispossession of property is fundamentally about denying access (Ribot and Peluso 2003). Within context of the Sea Islands, this has primarily unfolded via Heirs Property Law and will be further discussed in Chapter 2.

The primary limitation with gentrification is its orientation to urban spaces, even more so than environmental justice. Many have described the Gullah/Geechee as an atypical instance of rural gentrification, including the viral Vice documentary (Vice News 2016). Gentrification can also occur through more radical land use change, as via high-income suburban developments on farmland in the form of exclusive gated communities. Hence gentrification can involve radical land use change that still yields the same outcome of dispossession of low-income minorities who are then displaced by high-income groups of the hegemonic society.

The case of the Gullah/Geechee here emerges as instructive. Take for example what has happened on Hilton Head Island over the past sixty years. A series of rural Gullah/Geechee communities and their primary institutions were quickly displaced by luxury resorts. The community numbers did not constitute the size necessary for it to be considered a city and thus it exists beyond the confines of gentrification as traditionally construed. But the result of the land use changes involved the displacement of minorities and the installation of gated suburban resorts occupied by high-income groups. The loss of these communities that had existed for centuries is as tragic as the displacement of urban minorities due to rising rents. The strict focus on gentrification in urban centers is thus a limiting factor to the concept, which this dissertation seeks to address via the case of the Gullah/Geechee.

To this point, the theoretical review for this dissertation has proceeded in several steps. I first introduced Tonnies’ ideal types of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft to revisit the contrast between traditional rural communities and modern urban societies. I then reviewed Weber and

Durkheim’s adaption of Tonnies’ framework, along with their critiques, which featured aspects of how the two may encounter and interact and the process of change from the first to the second. The discussion then turned to the rural sociologists, who have highlighted how

modernity has not meant the disappearance of the traditional rural, and who have documented the travails of rural communities and the importance of place attachment for identity. The rural sociologists also importantly called attention to the importance of the environmental question in rural communities, especially with regard to resource use and resource-based livelihoods.

Sociologists of race and ethnicity added the key point that rural communities are hardly homogeneous or harmonious, and in many countries including the US have long exhibited profound racial inequalities and access to natural resources. That led to discussion of natural consciousness as one approach to recognizing the complex nature of rural communities of varying race-ethnic compositions. It also led to EJ, which recognizes the key link between social inequality and disproportionate exposure to environmental health hazards. Like other areas of sociology, EJ has exhibited an urban bias, and has tended to overlook the travails of racially unequal rural communities and inequalities in natural resource management. That motivated a focus on gentrification as a key form of land use change that involves the displacement of low- income and minority groups by high-income hegemonic groups. There I argued that gentrification can occur in rural as wel las urban areas, since the outcomes are the same.

This review thus followed several literatures focusing on a concatenation of social and environmental changes, where each literature offers a contribution but is subject to critique by others. In particular, the tendency to focus on urban areas and to presume racial-ethnic homogeneity and broadly shared benefits of modernization was called into question. But even if we admit all those critiques, we are still left with a highly fragmented set of ideas which only incompletely grapple with the manifold simultaneous changes underway in the shift from the traditional rural to the modern urban.

This is where the concept of destructionment comes in. Destructionment is important precisely because it offers conceptual advantages over other frames of understanding and fills a crucial gap within previous work. There are two reasons destructionment is important: 1) it is conceptually broad and thus seeks to encompass an array of cultural and environmental changes while recognizing inequalities and conflicts, and 2) it was developed precisely to understand the processes behind threats to rural communities. Accordingly, this dissertation seeks to refine, advance, and build upon Queen Quet’s conception of destructionment. The concept seeks to bridge the Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft ideal types with rural sociology, the sociology of race and ethnicity, EJ, and gentrification. In the process, destructionment affords innovations and adaptations to all these concepts as they apply to indigenous and traditional rural societies.

Queen Quet originally usedthe term “destructionment” to emphasize the role

“development” plays in degrading cultures and environments (Goodwine 1998). The concept underscores the multiple forms of harm. Consider this quote about the negative impacts of bridges, often viewed as key tools of development:

These bridges were the first major tools of destructionment used in the Sea Islands to threaten the survival of Gullah Culture. To ‘develop’ something is ‘to grow or expand’ according to The New Webster’s Comprehensive Dictionary of the English Language. However, the term ‘destruction’ is the direct opposite of this, defined as ‘the cause of ruin.’… [A]ny Gullah or Geechee can point specifically to how these (bridges, resort/vacation/retirement areas) were never placed on the islands for their benefit and have in fact only brought ruin to their culture, their language, their customs and their family ties. (Goodwine 1998, 167)

Destructionment thus has an important historical element given its focus on degradation over time. The historical dimension of destructionment provides the basis to form narratives that trace the various intertwined aspects of development as degradation. At the same time, destructionment also permits attention to spatial detail as development unfolds across landscapes and waterways. As the quote above notes, destructionment is both an historical and a spatial

process that unfolds via specific mechanisms that permit propagation of development and thus degradation.

Destructionment is important precisely because it offers a relatively broad and yet grounded conceptual approach to understanding the cultural and environmental aspects of development as degradation, which helps address limitations in the previously reviewed theoretical concepts. Specifically, destructionment revisits the the Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft distinction by focusing on the processes that unfold in their direct encounter, in ways that go well beyond the critiques offered by Weber and Durkheim. Destructionment makes clear that the encounter is conflictive and unequal and injust; but destructionment leaves open questions of how traditional communities can struggle to hold off external threats. Destructionment also builds in specific ways on the insights of rural sociology via its focus on rural communities and their reliance on natural resources for their livelihoods. Key in destructionment is the recognition that community access to multiple resources comes under threat; indeed, the assumption seems to be to assume that all resources come under threat. Destructionment also leverages the sociological hallmark concepts of race and ethnicity to underscore them as key explanations to constructions of development as a positive force, while problematizing that discourse as benefiting hegemonic identities and groups. Destructionment thus explicitly recognizes racial and ethnic identities as key targets of development via cultura ldegradation, which if undermined facilitates environmental degradation. Race and ethnicity are thus a central element of social conflict as understood by destructionment. As a result, destructionment goes well beyond the urban pollution confines of EJ by explicitly focusing on racial-ethnic diversity in general among rural communities who depend on natural resources. But destructionment leaves no doubt as to the negative outcomes of development as manifold forms of injustice, whether of Black or

Brown groups, urban or rural populations, pollution exposures or resource access. Similarly, destructionment pushes the concept of gentrification beyond urban areas by focusing on the outcome of the process of dispossession and displacement of anyone, rural peoples included, of land to make way for exclusive neighborhoods of high-income groups in the hegemonic society.

That said, destructionment has been framed in somewhat open-ended terms, and would benefit from further development stemming from this theoretical analysis. I therefore draw on but further develop Queen Quet’s concept via application to the case of the Gullah/Geechee and their Sea Islands. In this case, destructionment in the Sea Islands has involved a suite of strategies by outside interests involving white lies, technical misrepresentations, and fine print legal loopholes to pursue land rights. “As ‘developers’ moved in with the trucks to fell trees and dig lagoons, they also moved into the Gullah community with a great deal of fast talk and untruths” (Goodwine 1998, 168). A major outcome was the dispossession of Gullah/Geechee from some of their islands, and the displacement of their rural communities by suburban gated neighborhoods. The effects of the gated resorts are further compounded by their effects on the aquatic ecosystems in the surrounding waterways.

What was brought about in the guise of ‘development’ was the initial mode of ‘destruction’ that hit the Gullah and Geechee communities of the Sea Islands. Numerous people were forced to leave their land and go elsewhere, seeking jobs working for other people because they were only given menial jobs in resorts. Further, the resorts had caused the decline of sea life in the waterways, either due to the runoff of the chemicals used to clean the golf courses or the seepage from the congestion of so many septic tanks in a limited area. (Goodwine 1998, 170)

The incursions of outsiders into Gullah/Geechee lands thus led to claims on water and fishing rights, thus broadening the range of natural resources under threat. As the Gullah/Geechee saw their land rights incur impositions, they found the same happening to their rights to use other natural resources. These processes organize parts of the inquiry in this dissertation. In turn, insofar as destructionment understands development as degrading and valorizes rural

communities as exhibiting forms of social organization, I also consider mobilization strategies to pursue social resilience in the face of external threats.

Organization of the Dissertation

I organize this dissertation around three main research questions, and present findings for each in a separate chapter. The first research question takes up the issue of how the

Gullah/Geechee understand the processes behind outside threats to their traditional land rights.

As noted in the opening vignettes, the Gullah/Geechee people once held a substantial swath of land among the Sea Islands along the lower US Atlantic coast, but now they hold a small fraction of that land. Key then is to understand the processes behind the dispossession of Gullah/Geechee land by outsiders, as understood by the Gullah/Geechee themselves. I deploy the key concept of destructionment to organize a qualitative analysis of the multiple strategies employed by outsiders to displace the Gullah/Geechee. Destructionment affords incorporation of institutional/legal explanations tied to contractual law, among others, while also permitting an accounting of how gentrification from farmland to suburbs involves both cultural and environmental degradation.

The second research question focuses on the complementary issue of fishing rights.

Whereas outsiders have constructed bridges to reach islands and then build gated communities to modify land use, external social actors have also pursued displacement of Gullah/Geechee fishing rights on waterways. This component of the dissertation therefore deploys destructionment to pursue a qualitative analysis of “fishing while Black” that highlights the strategies used by outsiders to displace Gullah/Geechee fishing rights as viewed by the

Gullah/Geechee themselves. As in the previous component of the analysis, I employ destructionment to pursue a multifaceted inquiry that combines attention to cultural and environmental degradation.

Whereas the first two research questions focus on processes of destructionment as experienced by the Gullah/Geechee, the third and final research question pursues a complementary issue, the strategies employed by the Gullah/Geechee themselves to resist outside incursions and permit social resilience. Here a key concern is with Gullah/Geechee understandings of social relationships, based on kinship and more. This chapter thus draws on

Tonnies’ understanding of rural communities and Gemeinschaft, incorporating not only critiques of later thinkers but also the specifics of the Gullah/Geechee case. This qualitative analysis will reveal how the Gullah/Geechee have gone about constructing various forms of mutually reinforcing social relationships to resist destructionment of their communities.

This dissertation is comprised of seven chapters. The remaining chapters proceed as follows. Chapter 2 provides a detailed historical and cultural background on the Gullah/Geechee, spanning their origins in the Americas, their acquisition of land, their cultural flowering, and the challenges they have faced over the past several decades. Chapter 3 describes the mixed use of methodologies driving the dissertation fieldwork; namely, the participatory action approach, and qualitative focus groups, and individual interviews. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 comprise three results chapters, addressing each of the three guiding research questions. A broad conclusion is provided in Chapter 7, which summarizes key findings in light of extant theory and research in diaspora studies and rural sociology. In addition, this chapter evaluates the implications of the dissertation’s findings for activism and provides a guide for how scholars might make sense of and better communicate the threats facing the Gullah/Geechee. Finally, the chapter assesses the strengths and limitations of the dissertation research and concludes with suggestions for future research on the Gullah/Geechee and other indigenous cultures facing marginalization.

This is but one front-line scenario illustrating an age-old conflict between two entirely distinct forms of social life. Within the social sciences, and western philosophy more generally, the tension between two entire ways of life have always been presented as being at odds with one another. That the logic and ambition of the city would eventually undermine the surrounding traditional communities residing on valuable coastal land. This study, being sociological in orientation, argues for a green interpretation of the classical gemeinschaft/gesellschaft typology.

While acknowledging the theory’s limitations, the ideal type provides a relatively fitting corrosive description for the invasion as well as a rough framework for explaining the range of events.

CHAPTER 2 GULLAH/GEECHEE STUDIES

The nation’s founding cornerstone is stained with the blood of the Africans that laid it using their own tears as mortar to hold it in place even as they endured the hardships of chattel slavery. The pressures of undue pain created the rich unique Gullah/Geechee culture including its language that is so sought after by researchers and tourists. Often in their search to simply hear the language, taste the food, hear a tale told or a song sung, they do not pay attention to the priceless jewel that Gullah/Geechee actually is. (Goodwine 2006, 13)

Introduction

The Gullah/Geechee have a rich cultural tradition and centuries of oral histories to match.

Their cultural capital or ‘traditional knowledge’ (as it is commonly referred) constitutes an incredible resource which numerous mainland academics have sought to exploit for personal benefit; often without ever talking to actual Gullah/Geechees. Accordingly, it can be problematic for a white outsider to write about the Gullah/Geechee’s history. I have done my best to uphold a scholarly commitment that prioritizes texts written by Gullah/Geechees. These are then supported by studies written in association with Gullah/Geechees as their primary sources.

Prioritizing Gullah/Geechee voice is not enough; further scholarly efforts are necessary as discussed further in the methods section.

Colonialism As War

In 1526 the Spanish explorer Vazquez de Ayllon founded San Miguel de Gualdape in present day Georgia. The settlers brought with them the first instance of Black slavery on the

North American continent. It also marks the first slave rebellion. Both the colony and rebellion failed quickly leaving minimal details. In 1670, another colony of planters migrated from the overpopulated British sugar island of Barbados and founded Charles Town (NPS 2016). They brought with them large numbers of African slaves to establish their new plantations. Charleston

quickly grew establishing itself as a center for slave trade in the English colonies. It took no time for runaways to establish their own maroon communities in the more remote sea island marshes and swamp forests. The first report of a Gullah maroon community was in 1687 by Spanish officials (NPS 2016). This is the presently earliest known document, but it is often inferred within other papers that runaway communities existed prior to this date. These early communities proceeded the massive influx of enslaved Africans and founding of Georgia that unfolded over the century that followed.

History, as told on the island, differs significantly from what is taught in many school curriculums. Many stories of the Gullah/Geechee Nation begin with the slave trade since it is the origin story that brought a diverse amalgamation of kidnapped peoples from Africa. The earliest files in the regional archives begin here with “cargo” statistics and plantation census counts. The key slave markets of Charleston, Wilmington, Beaufort, Savannah, and Sullivan’s Island were the primary destination for many ships. By 1800, over a hundred thousand African people had arrived and the population of the Corridor was upwards of 70% African (1800 US Census). The era of slavery and plantation system throughout the Sea Islands was ultimately a story of brutal violence. It is also a history of resistance, insurgency, and prolonged war.

In reviewing the era of slavery, a series of rebellions and two wars are the central focus.

These larger insurgent narratives are mixed in among the Seminole Wars. Regional history as told by Queen Quet, and many Gullah/Geechees, takes a different stance on the Colonial and

Reconstruction Eras than many textbooks. The First Gullah War began with the Stono Rebellion in 1739 on St. Johns Island before expanding inland to what s now Hollywood and Ravenel, SC.

The term “Gullah Wars” was coined by Muriel Branch in The Water Brought Us (1996), which provided an original Gullah interpretation of historical events. Although it was proceeded by a

series of smaller attempts, the insurrection and attempted exodus to Florida was the largest uprising of its time (Goodwine 1998). The Stono Rebellion denotes the start of a mass runaway effort characterized by low-key acts of sabotage and a dream of autonomy in the Spanish Florida.

It also signifies the start of the Gullah insurgency including the stories of resistance. Smaller- scale skirmishes continued throughout Georgia and South Carolina the attempt to reach the

Spanish territories.

The conflict escalated in Florida at the turn of the century when Andrew Jackson invaded

Florida resulting in notable battles at Horseshoe Bend (1814), Fort Negro (1816), and Suwanee

(1818). To the north, similar clashes continued but many larger rebellions were thwarted.

Perhaps the best example is the Denmark Vesey Conspiracy (1822) where Denmark, supported by his Lieutenants such as Gullah Jack, planned a slave rebellion in greater Charleston. Word of

“the rising” as it was referred at the time spread quickly but was called off due to fear of reprisals from Charleston militia; the conspiracy resulted in mass Gullah imprisonment and 35 executions.

The First Gullah War is characterized by a series of larger battles and low-key skirmishes throughout the southern parts of the Corridor to reach Spanish controlled Florida.

The drive South, much like earlier escape efforts to the East, resulted in a significant overlap between Indian and Gullah/Geechee resistance efforts aimed at slavery and colonial expansion. By 1834, some 10,000 US Army soldiers were deployed to Florida to forcibly remove the Seminole Indians and relocate the survivors to Oklahoma alongside the Creek

Nation. This has commonly been referred to as the Second Seminole War. However, this neglects the key role played by Gullah/Geechee insurgents who have often been referred to within this context as Black Seminole or maroons. Black Seminole can trace their roots to both the Gullah/Geechee Nation and Seminole tribe (primarily located in Oklahoma). Such an

exclusive framing enabled colonists to frame the war as a historical product of ‘natives resisting relocation’ rather than collaboration between natives mixed with a Black freeman uprising.

Astutely correcting this framing, this period is referred to as Second Gullah War by Queen Quet and many in the Gullah/Geechee Nation. This is an important point since it directly links the

Gullah with the Seminole and represents a branch of their national identity as moving beyond the

Corridor. The Gullah/Geechee ancestors were active participants in the Victory at Fort King

(Dade Massacre, 1835), Battles of Withlacoochee (1835), and Battle of Lake Okeechobee (1837) among others. The War concluded in 1842 when negotiations which resulted in many Seminole being forced to Oklahoma while a few bands persisted and remained on the informal reservation along the north boarder of the Everglades.

Civil War

The US Civil War (1861-1865) marked a period of great change for the Gullah/Geechee.

For many, it marked a period intensified conflict. The Gullah insurgency amplified their sabotage efforts of Confederate military infrastructure. This era contains hundreds of

Gullah/Geechee Stories which deserve far more detail and attention than afforded here. Stories such as the Gullah longshoreman Robert Smalls who escaped slavery, hijacked the CSS Planter military ship full of arms and ammunition, picked up several families including his own, impersonated the Captain who he had studied, delivered correct signals at several checkpoints, and sailed the ship past the Confederate Fort Sumter before delivering the ship to Union forces.

He then enlisted and participated in several decisive local battles (Sterling 1958). Following the war, Smalls went on to open a business in Beaufort and a successful political career in state and national politics serving two terms in the US House of Representatives (Miller 1995). Smalls is but one story among many that the Gullah/Geechee have from the Civil War era.

The Union victory would not have been possible if it were not for Black resistance to slavery. Historians such as Henderson (2015) have described the Black rebellion during the war as a sort of expanding unlimited general strike on the part of enslaved workers as the primary force which ended the war. As DuBois noted, “It was this revolt of the slaves and the prospect of a much larger movement among the 4,000,000 other slaves, which was the real cause of the sudden cessation of the war.” While this interpretation is becoming increasingly accepted among scholars, many textbooks throughout the US still prioritize credit the Union victory to the infamous General Sherman.

Reconstruction

A pivotal moment in Gullah/Geechee history came on January 12, 1865 with General

Sherman’s infamous Special Field Order 15. While being recognized as a key figure of the time,

General Sherman is remembered throughout many Sea Island communities as a brutal military leader and unsympathetic racist who advanced a compromise aimed at alleviating the harsh racial tensions following his scorched earth campaign. Upon reaching Savannah, surrounded by bands of refugees, fugitives, and guerilla soldiers, and with more showing up each day, Sherman couldn’t leave until he made an attempt to address the impending crisis. He met with a few local

Black leaders and drew up the “Sea Island Circular”. The order confiscated 400,000 acres, divided them into parcels no more than 40 acres, and sold to 18,000 formerly enslaved families.

These military orders granted the Gullah/Geechee an opportunity to legally possess their homeland. It was intended to concentrate Black landownership along the coastal region already known for having a large Black population. It was also known for malaria. The orders were immediately controversial and had only partial effect. President Andrew Johnson issued a proclamation returning the lands to the plantation owners ho took a loyalty oath. General Saxton and his staff at the Charleston SC Freedmen Bureau’s refused and denied all applications to have

the lands returned. Johnson removed Saxton and his staff but not before Republicans in Congress were able to provide legislation which kept some lands in the hands of Black families.

The Civil War brought an influx of freedman to the Sea Islands and sparked the Great

Migration out of the southern states. New Freedman townships began to emerge throughout the

Corridor, many of these were in the vicinity of military forts. This included the Port Royal

Experiment, Mitchelville, Navassa, Franklintown and multiple Lincolnville’s establishing themselves on large abandoned plantations. These Black townships were the first of their kind and have been detailed in Queen Quet’s most recent book (Goodwine 2018).

For many Gullah/Geechee communities, Era of Reconstruction was but a continuation of the violence associated with the war that proceeded it. The post-war Federal resources set aside to rebuild Black communities throughout the South were largely blocked by the state legislatures which created a reliance on Federal changes. Many freedmen quickly fell into new traps as an extension of the Black Codes to exploit their labor such as sharecropping, convict leasing, and child apprenticeship arrangements. These tensions drove competing claims to land and a larger racial contestation over ownership. This led to further revolts such as the weeks long Ogeechee insurrection of 1868 (Bell 2001, Stafford and Shirley 2015). The withdrawal of federal occupation of the South in 1877 further laid the groundwork for the rise of Jim Crow and terrorism of the Klu Klux Klan. The hopes of autonomy and freedom brought with Field Order

15 was largely betrayed and at best only partially realized.

Despite these drawbacks, many Gullah/Geechees managed to acquire land among the insulated communities of the Sea Islands and Lowcountry’s remote marshes following the Civil

War. Efforts by state level Democrats supported by the returning elites wasted no time initiating their effort to dispossess the recently emancipated free families of their land throughout the

Cooridor. Many of the early efforts exploited the fact that many free families could not read and were cheated out of their property under the guise of false pretense. These earlier instances of land theft oftent appeared as simple agreements such as a temporary farming lease or timbering a plot of land in exchange for the timber felled on the property. Many Gullah/Geechee signed away their land by placing an “x” on a piece of paper they could not read and were forced off shortly there-after.

Natural disasters in the form of hurricanes have made landfall in the Cooridor. While most Gullah/Geechees tend to stay and endure the storms, the salt brought by these massive storms have lasting effects. Throughout the early part of the the 1900’s a series of hurricanes hit the Sea Islands resulting in many farms becoming barren. The Gullah/Geechee have stories reflecting the events of many of the larger direct hits; this includes older stories of the 1893 Sea

Islands Hurricane and 1898 Georgia Hurricane. This also includes tales of harsh seasons such as

1959, which had multiple large storms. Hurricane Cindy, a slow-moving category 1, saturated the Cooridor with rain and partial flooding in July. This was then followed just over a month later by Hurricane Gracie, a massive category 4, which made landfall on St. Helena. Gracie was so powerful that the constructon of the University of South Carolina Beaufort campus was delayed and many islands such as Edisto required renourishment. While the effects of these various storms differ significantly by season, a common theme is present. If the land becomes infertile due to high salinity, then the men throughout the community return to the mainland to find work in order to support the family throughout the year through remitances. In some instances, Gullah/Geechee families cut their losses, sold their plot of land, and permanently relocated to the mainland. Such times of crisis has been another channel through which land has been dispossessed from the community especially around the time of the aformention hurricanes.

Much like hurricanes, economic recession has exhibited similar effects pulling family members to the mainland in order to cover property taxes. No event in Gullah/Geechee history illustrates this trend better than the Great Depression of the 1930’s. Many family members of all types including maturing youth departed the islands in search for an income to cover costs back home. Remitances from the mainland were used to cover these costs while life on the island minimized expenses through strict self-sufficiency. While some Gullah/Geechees ventured to the mainland, these natural and social disasters prompted further reliance on family bonds and community structures. These hardships ultimately enriched the Gullah/Geechee’s cultural practices and collective sense of identity among folks on island.

Culture

Resistance to slavery, two Gullah Wars, the Civil War, and Reconstruction are all essential parts of Gullah/Geechee’s social history and counter-narrative. While resistance across each of these periods serves as the historical focal point, other cultural features from these past eras persist today. Many of these cultural aspects were derived from the plantation system itself.

This system created the vast sums of wealth via the extraction of value in the form of cash crops for export. From this wealth arose a relatively small ‘Planter Aristocracy’ class of families further expanded their various operations.

The agricultural history of the Islands has moved through various one-crop economies including indigo, rice, cotton, potatoes and truck gardening. Indigo was before the American Revolution and was a government subsidized crop; the Revolution put an end to the price supports from Britain, and the cultivation of indigo ceased. Rice, a crop as capricious as indigo, become the big seller and continued until replaced by cotton, though both rice and cotton were grown simultaneously by owners who had more than one plantation. (Twining and Baird 1991 14, as cited by Goodwine 1998, 25)

Different exports saw their values peak at different times but a few essential staples (notably indigo, rice, and cotton) held on as symbols of the Sea Islands past. As these key staples expanded, so too did the slave trade and plantation system.

Take for example Carolina Golden Rice. “After twenty years of experimentation with possible staples, Carolina colonists found that rice could be grown economically near inland swamps. As rice production expanded, so did the importation of African slaves.” (Montgomery

1994, 146, as cited Goodwine 1998) Rice, like other central commodities from the era of slavery, further expanded the slave trade while building on preexisting farming knowledge from the

Winward Coast. . “The Africans who were carried in chains to the New World knew more about planting, harvesting, and preparing rice than did their masters. Some 43 percent of the slaves imported during the eighteenth century came from regions of Africa where rice was an important crop.” (Littlefield 1981, 113) This knowledge, mixed with Sea Islands flora, has also led to several local crafts and cultural artifacts that have outlived their traditional mode of production.

“The agricultural technology of rice production, especially in early decades of settlement, was distinctly African. It included what has become the most famous form of Lowcountry basket, the fanner, a wide winnowing tray used to ‘fan’ rice…” (Montgomery 1994, 146) These baskets were initially created for winnowing or fanning ‘Carolina Golden’ rice. While few

Gullah/Geechee still grow rice, their sweetgrass baskets remain a central craft and have grown into a symbol. Farming, harvesting, and cooking rice is a fitting example because it demonstrates how the plantation system expanded the importation of slaves, utilized their various African knowledges, and eventually grew a cultural meaning in the form of basket sewing still celebrated today.

Production for export was slowly phased out for selling produce at local and regional markets. This has led to a greater diversity of produce in the fields. Several roadside food stands have established themselves throughout the Cooridor and are quite successful. Even though many of the staple crops no longer dominate the Corridor as they once did, they still retain significant cultural symbolism. Indigo remains a symbolic color. It is one of the significant colors of the Gullah/Geechee Nation’s flag. Indigo carries similar cultural meaning in other places that speak languages which partially resemble Gullah.

Language

Slave masters sought to limit communication by strategically purchasing kidnapped

Africans from different tribal and linguistic regions. This backfired creating a diverse and adaptable creole language among captives on the plantation which integrated a wide variety of grammar into the Gullah language. The language emerged spontaneously around the need for enslaved people to speak to one another. Early on, some plantations featured a variety of different linguistic features. Gullah, or Sea Island creole, is distantly related to Haitian creole.

These creole dialects share many linguistic structures and pronunciations. Other distant cousins can be found in pockets throughout the Caribbean such as Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad and

Tobago. The language has never been formally standardized and accommodates a few different pronunciations which often differ between the various Sea Islands.

The Gullah language is of incredible cultural importance since it is one of the few things that unites branches of the Nation. The ability to speak Gullah remains a central element within maintaining cultural continuity. Queen Quet paraphrases Gullah historian Charles Joyener first book, “Speech communities imply a shared culture and worldview.” Language serves as the lenses through which we comprehend the world and the means through which we communicate understanding to one another. To share a language with someone else, especially a language as

unique as Gullah creole, implies sharing a cultural mindset. This harkens back to Tonnies understanding of friendship and shared mindset.

White outsiders are strongly discouraged from speaking Gullah. Such an attempt would be viewed as an incredible insult. For most of their history the Gullah language, and offshoot

Geechee dialect throughout the Georgia Lowcountry, have been considered degenerate. For generations, it was actively discouraged as a debased form of English and was often considered as having a “backward” accent.

Not the least of the ironies of Afro-American history is that aspects of Black speech related to Gullah are now stigmatized by many Blacks as well as whites as illiterate or associated with field hands, in contrast to the high prestige of ‘proper’ English. In retrospect, one should be more impressed with the success of the slaves, and people of diverse linguistic backgrounds and limited opportunities, in creating a creole language and culture than appalled at their ‘failure’ to adopt in total the language and culture of their masters. (Joyener 1989, 10)

The creole language developed amongst enslaved peoples as a tool to communicate between oppressed subjects but has suffered ridicule for centuries. It makes complete sense that of the remaining Gullah speakers, many actively work to hide it by code switching to proper American

English. Even today, many people lucky enough to hear the language from a native speaker are often quick to perpetuate the backwards stigma.

The prevalence of this stigma has made it difficult to pass the language on to the next generation. The language has been estranged from many local Gullah/Geechee youths throughout the Corridor. The continuation of the racist stigma should be viewed as a secondary outcome of destructionment. This challenge, and broader importance of the Gullah language, is further in the following chapter, within the larger context of academic research. It isn’t until years later that they once again hear the dialect and exclaim “you sound like my grandma!”

Simultaneously with the recent rise in cultural tourism over the past ten years, outsiders have begun to seek out the language and often request locals speak the language for them (see

Goodwine 2015). They want to hear what has historically been condemned by, and thus hidden from, mainland whites.

Social Organization

The Gullah/Geechee Nation’s structure is a loose affiliation of different communities, households, and individuals. Their communities are generally autonomous of one another and make many decisions locally in a collective manner. Family elders are generally consulted on important decisions. This is not a requirement but rather a courtesy resulting from a strong attachment to family and interpersonal social bonds. While Queen Quet and the Elder Council do have formal responsibilities, their roles as leaders tends to be more of a collective resource than a delegator of tasks.

Women hold many central positions throughout Gullah/Geechee communities. They often serve as the directors of households and maintain familial finances. Given the status of their Queen, and relative respect granted to women throughout Sea Island communities, it raises questions if the Gullah/Geechee are a matriarchal community. When asked about their organizational structure, Queen Quet replied… “We are not so much matriarchal or patriarchal, so much as we are egalitarian or communitarian.” On St. Helena, women share in a relative equal voice and footing as men. That being said, there are some elements of a gendered division of labor. There is a partial association with some women focusing on food preparation and crafting.

Some men prefer to focus on fishing and crabbing. This partial association differs between communities and by no means should be considered normative. Together, both genders work to maintain their local community and corresponding livelihood activities.

Subsistence

Arguably the most crucial livelihood activities uniting the Gullah/Geechee Nation across their numerous generations has been subsistent agriculture and aquaculture. These food practices are essential pieces of life in the Gullah/Geechee Nation. Planting, harvesting, weeding, aerating, preparing, angling, crabbing, and hunting are all central features of daily life.

The value of self-sufficiency in food supply is an integral aspect of the Gullah food system. Men and women of all ages are conversant with hunting, fishing and gardening as ways to provide food. From an early age, both men and women are socialized into the concept and practice of self-sufficiency as primary goal of the food system and are encouraged to participate in the outdoor food-procuring activities of parents and other kin or community members. (Goodwine 1998, 138)

Self-sufficiency had been a requirement for life on the island, today it is maintained more as a core value. These traditional foodways intertwine the material environment with their unique cultural practice.

Food practices also constitute one of the primary connections between locals and the natural environment.

While the Gullah depend on their natural surroundings as a reliable source of food, they also have a deep understanding of their coexistence with other living things and believe that the use of these resources should be moderate and nonexploitative. This sense of shared membership in the natural environment stems from Gullah belief systems, which emphasize harmony and social exchange between the human and natural world. (Goodwine 1998, 139)

Destructionment has placed great strain on the Gullah/Geechee’s relationship with their surrounding environment and natural resources. It has greatly altered their ability to maintain self-sufficiency and has forced the remaining communities to adapt to these changes.

These livelihood activities, much like the larger culture, are very much alive and have historically been subject to change. With time, the Gullah/Geechee have adapted to the changes throughout the Corridor, from natural disasters and poor harvests to land loss. These adaptations exhibit a collective resilience to changes beyond community control. One example of adaptation

over the past half century is how the smokehouse has slowly replaced thefreezer. As keeping hogs have become less popular on the island, freezing fish and shrimp has become increasingly popular. Just because many locals now have cell phones doesn’t mean their indigeneity is any less legitimate. If anything, these adaptations have enabled new authentic representations of

Gullah/Geechee culture. Both history and cultural identity are dynamic concepts which change over time. New information and current events change the present. Entertaining static definitions of culture only further enable extinction myth. Consequently, the extinction myth runs entirely counter to the hundreds of written works, numerous news headlines, and dozens of contemporary published works examining Gullah/Geechee practices and mobilization efforts to sustain their culture. The extinction myth is a convenient tool used by developers to alleviate any unethical concerns retirees might have in seizing their land. This myth is nothing new and began prior to the arrival of the first bridge.

Bridges & Heirs

The most popular destructionment story is the first. It is based around Georgia timber magnate Joseph Fraser and his son who sparked the destructionment of the Sea Islands in the

1956 (Goodwine 1998). This date is used because it’s the year the James F. Byrnes Bridge to

Hilton Head was completed, three years before the Woods Memorial bridge connected St.

Helena and Lady’s Islands to Beaufort. Fraser began by acquiring and timbering land on Hilton

Head Island before passing on the effort to his son Charles. Joseph and his three lumber mills on the island logged approximately 19,000 acres during the 1950’s. The father and son duo used this capital to build three “lavish resort plantations” Sea Pines, Hilton Head, and Honey Horn. Sea

Pines in Harbour Town was the first resort and is still distinguished today by its distinct red lighthouse. Other resorts quickly followed including Palmetto Dunes, Shipyard and Port Royal

Plantations.

The resorts constructed over the first three decades drove out many of the Gullah neighborhoods following the steady denial of beach access to a 12 mile stretch which had traditionally been used by local fishermen and churchgoers. With their departure followed the closing of the Juke Joints; popular rustic dance halls with music, food, and drinks. The invasion further intensified with the arrival of Disney’s Hilton Head Island Resort, fashioned after a 1940s hunting and fishing lodge, in 1996. The Cross Island Parkway arrived two years later further fast-tracking the rate of the invasion.

In historical context, the present wave of dispossession constitutes a continuation of prior invasion efforts tracing back to 1865. However, the present era throughout the Sea Islands is characterized by a different channel of dispossession than the previous periods. Heirs property is land held communally by family members (tenants-in-common) should a landowner die without a will or title. Since this informal legal arrangement complicates individualist-oriented property rights, it is viewed as a hindrance to economic development (Dyer and Bailey 2008). This legal arrangement often results in multipe co-owners of a piece of property. If it is unclear who the heirs are (whether the absence of a will or willing property to multiple people), the property then becomes what referred to legally as a “clouded title” or a “defective title” indicating a tenancy- in-common property arrangement (Deaton 2005). This designation restricts landowner’s agency with regards to improvement efforts and banking loans among other efforts to leverage property values (Gaither 2016). Such tangled webs of ownership create co-ownership arrangements whereby the inheritees each have the same rights to the property irrelevant of amount of fraction of ownership, financial investment, or physical proximity to the plot. With each additional generation, such arrangements tend to become increasingly fractioned (Craig-Taylor 2000).

Heirs Property Law, which had been intended as a legal tool aimed at preserving the intergenerational exchange of wealth, had devolved instead into a tool for dispossessing Black heirs of their land through court-ordered land sales (Casagrande 1986, Rivers 2006). By its very nature, a forced sale precludes compensation to the seller of a fair market value of the property

(Mitchell 2010). This mechanism of displacement garnered national attention in the early 2000s following series of high-profile cases (Chandler 2005). One such case involved the eviction of 25 members of an extended family in the South Carolina Lowcountry (Bartelme 2001, 2002). Since property laws differ by state, so too the rules of heirs’ property vary geographically across the

United States.

It is within the context of increased forced partition sales throughout the 1990s that a movement against this injustice began to emerge throughout the Sea Islands. After years of activism, the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act (UPHPA) of the Uniform Law

Commission was established in 2010. It was a significant legal step in addressing inequalities within the heirs’ property system, and has since been enacted in Alabama, Arkansas,

Connecticut, Georgia, Montana, Nevada, and South Carolina. The UPHPA provided a series of key provisions including a clearer definition of heirs’ property.

Locally, the Clementa C. Pinckney UPHPA was passed in Columbia in 2015 with some technical changes to the UPHPA. Despite these advancements, heirs’ property law and larger real estate system continues to displace Gullah/Geechee from ancestral plots of land. Throughout

South Carolina, like many other states, if an heir sells to a developer, then that developer becomes a partial heir to the land. The developer then forces a sale by appealing to the courts claiming a need to clean up the deed so it can become useful. Heirs not wishing to sell could purchase the interests of the buyer, and heirs would have to match the amount the seller invested

in the property (rather than the land’s higher market value). UPHPA added the requirement that courts must consider both economic and non-economic factors in determining wheather a property should be partitioned in kind or sold (Gaither 2016).

Continuing with this common example, if one heir presently wishes to sell, they have three options. They can buy out the other owners, partition the property, or sell the property and divide the money among the heirs. This third option is still often carried out in the form of a forced partition sale where if the owners cannot come to an agreement and the land is sold. This forced sale still obligates the family members who want to keep the land they partially own. The

Gullah/Geechee Nation continues to struggle to retain their heirlooms and familial plots of land.

The “#4DennisMovement” is one example of a grassroots effort to protect Gullah/Geechee land, in this case the 38.5-acre Allen family property on Hilton Head. More broadly, there are dozens of ‘Land and Legacy’ heirs’ property-oriented articles, workshop materials, Riddim Radio and

Gullah/Geechee TV episodes, available through the Gullah/Geechee webpage aimed at preventing further loss (see gullahgeecheenation.com). These resources constitute a serious shift within Gullah/Geechee

Changing Tides

The Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition was founded in 1996 as a grassroots organization and laid the groundwork for many important changes to follow. The

Gullah/Geechee Nation was established in 1999 and became official after being proclaimed on

July 2, 2000. The constitution was presented to the world in 2001 when it was ratified by the

Wisdom Circle Council of Elders, and the Assembly of Representatives was established later that year. Queen Quet was democratically elected as the Head of State in 1999 and was enstooled the following year. She has since been on twenty “Save the Sea Islands” world tours and has spoken at United Nations Conferences on numerous occasions, advocating on behalf of the

Gullah/Geechee Nation and against the dire effects of climate change. Queen Quet, “The Art- ivist”, is a published author, mathematician, preservationist, computer engineer, and spiritual leader among numerous other accolades.

Marquetta L. Goodwine was born and raised on St. Helena and, like so many others, departed the islands to pursue higher education and mainland opportunities. However, like too few she returned to her familial home to find many of the nearby islands had been ‘developed’ and replaced with private resort communities. While her status as Head-of-State is officially recognized and it is true that her living legacy proceeds her; her status is not linked with western ideas of royalty and monolith hierarchies. The Gullah/Geechee’s West African heritage is directly democratic as detailed by the Gullah/Geechee Constitution (2001). They tend to model themselves on their ancestors; griots, healers, artists, spiritual advisors, and community leaders.

Thus, her work and writing frequently defies western vocational or academic discipline classification. While all her work draws upon history, each explores different topics central to preserving Gullah/Geechee culture. Personally, I consider her a clever intellectual and dedicated grassroots organizer. Her efforts with the Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition, complemented by the supportive work of dozens of other activists, have grown into a sizeable mobilizing network extending far beyond the Corridor. Collectively, the Coalition and its partners can publicize issues, mobilize locals, and significantly influence people in political office.

Gullah/Geechee Studies

Within African Studies, particularly the Diaspora sub-field of African American studies, a substantial body of literature has documented the cultural history and struggles of the

Gullah/Geechee. Gullah/Geechee Studies, as it has become known, represents an emerging interdisciplinary field of inquiry, with contributions from linguistics, anthropology, history, religion, public/environmental health, ethnic studies, health/rheumatology, archeology,

architecture, agriculture/plant sciences, and the arts to name a few (Goodwine 2015). While local ancestral knowledge can and has been directly traced back to Africa, the western academic tradition began with the work of Lorenzo Dow Turner (1949). Turner was an African American scholar and served as the chair of the English departments at both Howard University and Fisk

University. His work focused on the integration of African syntax, terms, phrases, pronunciations, tones, and accents into the Gullah language. He began by recording and documenting Gullah speakers throughout the 1930’s.

Turner’s magnum opus, Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (1949), founded the research area and remains the area’s most widely cited work today. He was the first to argue that the language was more than a broken and debased form of English. The book has rightfully been described as a masterpiece, which illustrated the direct linguistic ties between the Gullah language and West Africa in detail (Campbell 2011). While the book was primarily focused on linguistic studies, the first chapter employs hand drawn maps to discuss the historic specifics of the slave trade alongside variations and different adaptations in the use of African terms. He worked both in the Sea Islands and Africa (specifically Sierra Leone). He argued that Gullah integrated Africanisms from Wolof, Malinke, Mandinka, Bambara, Fula, Mende, Vai, Twi,

Fante, Ga, Ewe, Fon, Yoruba, Bini, Hausa, Ibo, Biibio, Efik, Kongo, Umbundu, Kimbundu, and a few other cultural groups into its syntax (1949, 2). Turner, and his colleague Herskovits, hastened the development of African American culture as an autonomous field of study.

Gullah/Geechee Studies has since grown in this linguistic direction, building on Turner’s focus on the Gullah language. The linguistic focus is still a central component of the subfield and has linked the Sea Island Creole syntax to other diasporic communities. Some notable examples where similar linguistic links have been established in the Americas include Barbados (Hancock

1980, Goodwine 1998), Haiti (Mufwene and Gilman 1987), and Jamaica (Cassidy 1980), among other Caribbean Islands (Cunningham 1992). Linguists have been at the forefront of establishing a relational understanding at the core of Gullah/Geechee Studies. However, the field is much broader and is not exclusively confined to the social sciences.

Of Queen Quet’s present numerous books (including her independent texts and Winds of the Diaspora Series), the WEBE Anthology (2015) and The Legacy of Ibo Landing (1998) are both primary texts; the former for its breath and the latter for its analytical depth. Her first 1998 book is presently her most widely cited work. Numerous other works are cited here for their brevity and synthesis. As a native speaker, most of her work is written in English and selectively integrates Gullah sayings. Her work largely evades disciplinary classification. Her writing largely has the tone of a historian but with the focus of a cultural anthropologist and human geographer with activist intent. Given the struggle to recognize and celebrate Gullah/Geechee culture, much of her work involves historical research, archiving, and documenting community shifts. Perhaps the most creative of Queen Quet’s works is Africa’s Seeds in the Winds of the

Diaspora IV: 365-366 (Goodwine 2005). The text celebrates hundreds of Gullah/Geechee historical events and key figures occurring on every day of the year. Her numerous books have established her primarily as a intellectual Head-of-State. While Queen Quet’s works are a large part of this research sub-area, her applied works and the texts of numerous other

Gullah/Geechees remain largely distinct from many academics.

Gullah/Geechee studies more academically inclined research appears to have coalesced over the past half century. Although exploring and summarizing this expansive body of work was part of the larger collaboration; it goes beyond the scope of this analysis and are not included here. It was my intention to make this broad body of work published in peer-reviewed

journals more accessible to Gullah/Geechee locals without getting overburdened with excessive amounts of information. Accordingly, this effort culminated with the integration of visual representation of these collegiate works.

Figure 2-1 represents a bibliometric visualization summarizing the keywords associated with ‘Gullah’ within Thomson Reuters Web of Science Database. ‘Geechee’ saw far fewer keyword uses and was largely redundant. There are dozens of noteworthy works within this area, many of them exist beyond the field of relevant research. Numerous medical studies of

Gullah/Geechees and unique health variations (and are visible throughout the left side of Figure

1). Most of the research took place in South Carolina with a handful examining Georgia communities. The upper right portion of the figure is of interest because of the intersection of race, climate change, and culture. The growth of the focus area then slowed to a few sporadic publications leading to a lull in the 1990’s. During this time, Gullah/Geechee families were relatively strong but their communities functioned largely in private and were not yet considered actors in the public sphere.

Table 2–1. Historical Timeline of the Sea Islands. 1880’s A destination for slaves fostering an autonomous of Gullah/Geechee culture. Families spread out along the waterways and establish communal homesteads. 1900’s Since slaves were not allowed to read or write, many freedmen and their children had their land stolen out from under-them. 1930’s Great Depression leads to many Gullah/Geechee migrating to the nearby cities of Charleston, Savannah, and Wilmington to find work. 1950’s New bridges from the mainland enable ‘developers’ (destructionaires) and retirement communities seizing many of the Sea Islands. Resort tourism begins displacing Gullah/Geechee of their lands at alarming rates. 1980’s Development efforts take off and new taxes price many Gullah/Geechee out of their family plots resulting in foreclosures. 2000’s Heirs Property Law; finding the weakest link in the family chain to advance forced partition sales.

Figure 2–1. Bibliometric Network of Gullah via Thomson Reuters Web of Science Database.

CHAPTER 3 METHODOLOGY

This chapter outlines my methodological approach and procedures for working with the

Gullah/Geechee to collect data to address the stated research questions. Because of their history of territorial invasions and cultural appropriation by outsiders, the Gullah/Geechee have established detailed requirements on the protocols that need to be adhered to by outside researchers. I therefore begin with a discussion of those requirements, as they guided my my research within the Gullah/Geechee Nation. Further, those requirements call for active participation by the Gullah/Geechee in the research conducted by outsiders. I therefore discuss the participatory action approach I adopted for this research. Finally, because the

Gullah/Geechee have mobilized to resist outside incursions and defend their culture, they were active in framing my research questions to be responsive to their information needs. I thus discuss my research questions in the context of Gullah/Geechee priorities. I also outline the methodological details for the activities I pursued, jointly with Gullah/Geechee leaders and community members, to compile my data.

Engaging the Gullah/Geechee for Research

The Gullah/Geechee Nation has been studied thoroughly, but often by outsiders who failed to adequately respect Gullah/Geechee needs and priorities. Queen Quet therefore compiled and edited the WEBE Gullah/Geechee: Cultural Capital & Collaboration Anthology (henceforth

“WEBE Anthology”) for outside academics and audiences (Goodwine 2015). The WEBE

Anthology provides a detailed account of the requirements and regulations for outsiders who wish to work on Gullah/Geechee issues in their communities. The anthology is therefore the essential text that spells out the basis for the regulations along with the details of protocols for research with the Gullah/Geechee. It requires that outside researchers respect nine goals in their

practice. Those goals include respecting the living culture, communicating research aims up front, avoiding imposing outsider understandings, respecting requirements of research protocol, confirming sources (especially if outsider sources), following through on one’s commitments, and submitting the final copy of the research to the Gullah/Geechee Alkebulan Archive. In each case, the principles behind the goals are intended to ensure that any research done on the

Gullah/Geechee is conducted with their active participation, with their approval, and in some way supports their communities. The WEBE Anthology thus constitutes a remarkable volume of guidelines for research by an indigenous community.

As is protocol, I therefore began by reviewing the WEBE Anthology and its detailed expectations for collaboration by outsiders with the Gullah/Geechee. I then reached out to Queen

Quet’s Assistants in order to attend the 6th Annual Coastal Cultures Conference in 2018. My request was accepted, an important step in gaining access and beginning to build rapport. The presentations at the conference stemmed from projects that involved full and co-equal engagement by the Gullah/Geechee and various applied research activities on issues prioritized by the Gullah/Geechee Nation. It became abundantly evident that research on the

Gullah/Geechee is research with the Gullah/Geechee, and moreover is research for the

Gullah/Geechee. The question then was how to present the research questions in order to measure up to those expectations.

My research would not have been possible without the orientations of Queen Quet, who served as the gatekeeper of the Gullah/Geechee for my project. Making a connection with Queen

Quet early on was critical to the success of this project. As it happens, I was raised in

Wilmington, a coastal city in the northern-most part of the Gullah/Geechee Corridor. I have since engaged in various forms of activism on behalf of African Americans through my work with the

environmental justice organization NC Warn. We thus shared common interests and were able to relate over local environmental justice efforts along the Carolina coast. She is strong, humble, well-read, and a clever wordsmith with a quick wit to match. But per the anthology, she required an active role in the development and conduct of my research with the Gullah/Geechee. I therefore adopted a participatory action research (PAR) approach for purposes of my dissertation fieldwork.

Participatory Action Research

Taking the lead from the WEBE Anthology, this project was oriented towards both the co-production of knowledge with the Gullah/Geechee and on that basis the promotion of effective collective action by the Gullah/Geechee. As Queen Quet has noted about social research, “Social science is moving in the direction of action-oriented research. Research for the sake of research is no longer acceptable; therefore, all future research within the Sea Islands should be approached with an agenda for contributing, in some way, to local communities. We can no longer stand outside and observe communities with the intention of publication or prestige. It is imperative that research be conducted to preserve the oral histories, folktales, traditional herbal remedies, religious practices, and lifeways being destroyed by the current attack of development, but it must be managed in a collective effort with community leaders, activists, and organizations. We have much to learn from the real warriors, those who deal with these problems daily. They hold the keys to the future of the Gullah/Geechee as a viable lifeway and cultural tradition.” (Goodwine 2015, 21) The present circumstances facing the

Gullah/Geechee are growing increasingly dire; merely publishing the findings of research with them is insufficient to ensure relevance to their priorities or to permit effective action. It is therefore the responsibility of outside researchers to co-produce knowledge with the

Gullah/Geechee and disseminate information in ways that inform action, which aims to sustain

Gullah/Geechee culture.

Given these priorities, the project developed in the direction of PAR. PAR means

“recognizing locals as researchers themselves in pursuit of answers to questions associated with their daily struggle and survival” (Tandon 1988, 7). It’s a sort of grassroots inquiry grounded in in the co-production of knowledge.

Participatory research attempts to break down the distinction between the researchers and the researched, the subjects and objects of knowledge production by the participation of the people-for-themselves in the process of gaining and creating knowledge. In the process, research is seen not only as a process of creating knowledge, but simultaneously, as education and development of consciousness, and of mobilization for action. (Gaventa 1988: 19)

The PAR approach to research is effective because it recognizes the importance of involving study participants as active and equal actors in all phases of the research project as a means for facilitating social change.

Within a PAR process, action evolves to address topics and issues that are significant for participants as co-researchers. "Action unites, organically, with research" as a collective process of self-investigation (Rahman 2008, 52).” It is particularly useful for conducting research among marginalized populations. In this case, I began by working with Queen Quet to establish shared research goals and begin to consider different avenues for PAR. We initially began with two discussions before developing more concrete research questions. Queen Quet had more experience with such emergent collaborations than I and offered some initial suggestions to advance the process. She suggested looking into the work of past collaborations as examples such as Mufwene (1997), Hargrove (2000), Jenkins (2006), and Thomas (2019) among others.

We then agreed upon a general methodological direction which developed while attending

Coalition Conferences. Before proceeding, it is important to address some key difficulties associated within PAR.

While PAR has a long history of community-oriented inquiry and provides a radical alternative to mainstream analytical frameworks, it has a series of two critiques which are worth noting. First, PAR can vary across different methodological slants ranging from quantitative, to qualitative, to mixed. We agreed upon focus groups for advancing the agreed upon research questions. However, the study evolved to include a combination of mixed methods aimed at conveying previous research (bibliometric citation analysis in the previous chapter) as well as a geospatial (time-lapse mapping) component as tools for conveying the drastic effects of destructionment. These mixed method off-shoots prioritized visual utility for participants and served as compliments for qualitative analysis. These visualizations have since been used as communicative tools by the Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition. The integration of these mixed-methods off-shoots synced well with the pluralistic co-production of knowledge between participants. The visualizations constituted my contribution as an outsider within the larger exchange. This was then used to prompt further discussion.

The second issue facing PAR is the issue of scale. In this case, the project could have ranged from a single family to the entire Cooridor. To address this, we limited the central interview focus on the communities of St. Helena and nearby Gullah/Geechee living on the mainland. This sample boundary constitutes a limitation in the generalizability of the findings.

Additional research is needed to compare the effects of destructionment on other communities.

Furthermore, many PAR practioners have been quite critical of grand theory’s such as the

Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft ideal-type. However, I contend that employing both the ideal-type and destructionment can lead to mutually beneficial combination of ideas. PAR

Situated Solidarities

The Gullah/Geechee Nation encourages situated solidarities among their scholastic collaborators built on mutual trust, admiration, and benefit as articulated by Nagar and Geiger

(2007). The concept was developed by geographers to expand PAR to “better formulate and implement strategic interventions with activists and social movements” by “…rejecting the false distinction between academia and wider society in conceptualizations of valid sites of struggle and knowledge production (Chatterton, Hodkinson, and Pickerill 2010).” Thus, this dissertation employed situated solidaties as a series of strategies aimed at aligning the research with my political ideals and support fort the Gullah/Geechee Nation. Routledge and Derickson (2015) present these strategies as a set of best practices for realizing effective scholar-activist praxis.This includes being open to working with and ‘being moved’ by nonacademic others, actively resourcing and generating potential rather than providing mere intellectual critique, resourcing solidarity and expanding network ties, and sustaining collaboration.

This demanded participating in the practice of reflexivity, both as a white outside scholar and as an activist seeking to challenge destructionment. I became an active member of the

Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition shortly before beginning the project. Situated solidarities aim to disperse power in order to broaden participation as a means of facilitating the coproduction of knowledge. This in turn abides by Gullah/Geechee expectations as outlined in the WEBE Anthology. The upshot is to thereby encourage a genuine dialogue between outsider and community members as a foundation for more effective collaboration for activism

(Routledge and Derickson 2015). This meant aligning the project’s intellectual goals with supporting the Gullah/Geechee struggle to sustain their communities and living culture.

To foster situated solidarities, the Gullah/Geechee and I jointly pursued an extension of this dissertation to bring Queen Quet to speak at the University of Florida. The event was open to

the public and is available via Gullah/Geechee TV (Episode 226 https://youtu.be/qAXmMQvpDg0). The event created a space for critically reflecting on the role of academics seeking to work with indigenous and minority communities. In particular, the event focused on the issue of outsiders participating in different types of collective action for social change. In turn, the event constituted a resource for publicizing Gullah/Geechee issues outside the southern-most tip of their historical homeland. This was an avenue to broaden the terms of our collaboration in a way that disseminated Gullah/Geechee perspectives to a broader audience, as a means of opening additional avenues for future collaboration and support.

Developing the Research Questions

A key activity in engaging the Gullah/Geechee via PAR and situated solidarities was the central task of developing research questions. Over our first research discussion, I suggested some possible research directions to Queen Quet, who thereupon replied that they would not do, for they did not serve Gullah/Geechee priorities in supporting their struggles to secure their lands and culture. In the spirit of PAR, we then engaged in a process of identifying priority research foci that fell within the ambit of sociology as well as the priorities of the hour to the

Gullah/Geechee. This required successive rounds of dialogue in developing a research focus and corresponding questions that both advance knowledge and support the Gullah/Geechee in their struggles.

Sociology offers various theoretical perspectives as well as methodological tools for understanding social conflicts, including the appropriation of natural resources. The first research question therefore took up the question of how the Gullah/Geechee understand the processes behind efforts to appropriate their lands. Structural perspectives in sociology, such as political economies, can outline the dynamics of capitalism, contract law as it applies to traditional land claims, and other strategies used by outsiders to dispossess indigenous groups from their land.

But the Gullah/Geechee also sought more systematic documentation of their own experiences and understandings of how such dispossession comes to pass. We therefore agreed that I employ the key concept of destructionment to organize a qualitative analysis of the multiple strategies employed by outsiders to displace the Gullah/Geechee. Destructionment affords incorporation of institutional/legal explanations tied to contractual law, among others, while also permitting an accounting of how gentrification of farmland into suburbs involves both cultural and environmental degradation. Because destructionment is itself a Gullah/Geechee term, it permits a grounding in the lived experience of land loss and its consequences.

The second research question focuses on the complementary issue of fishing rights. If land dispossession permits one form of cultural and environmental degradation in the Sea

Islands, outsider contestating of Gullah/Geechee fishing rights has also proven an important threat to their culture and livelihoods. I therefore employ destructionment again, this time to pursue a qualitative analysis of “fishing while Black”. As in the previous question, the

Gullah/Geechee sought documentation of their experiences and perspectives on the strategies used by outsiders to impede Gullah/Geechee fishing rights.

Finally, the Gullah/Geechee prioritized a component of this dissertation to focus on their own strategies in response to the external threats they face. My third and final research focus thus complements the first two questions by taking up the issue of the multiple strategies employed by the Gullah/Geechee to resist outside incursions and permit social resilience. The

Gullah/Geechee have a broad understanding of kinship and other relationships that form complex webs of obligations among community members. This element of the analysis therefore works from Tonnies’ understanding of Gemeinschaft, incorporating critiques as well as adapting it to the specifics of the Gullah/Geechee case. This qualitative analysis will reveal how the

Gullah/Geechee have gone about construction various forms of mutually reinforcing social relationships to resist destructionment of their communities.

Data Collection

Given that the Gullah/Geechee prioritized compilation of information about perspectives on the invasions against their traditional resource claims as well as about their cultural practices to form and reinforce social bonds, I pursued a qualitative approach to data collection. I engaged in multiple forms of data collection, both before and during my fieldwork. Before fieldwork, I conducted archival work on historical documents. Fieldwork with the Gullah/Geechee included participant observation of Gullah/Geechee events and activities, as well as focus groups with

Gullah/Geechees. Together these forms of data collection provided me with the evidentiary basis for addressing their research priorities about activities such as livelihood activities as well as to compile their perspectives on the invasion of their lands and waters. The data collection also permitted documentation of Gullah/Geechee cultural practices for social bonding, which are quite intricate. In addition to those activities, I also conducted some interviews with state planning officials, some bibliometric work on publications about the Gullah/Geechee, and some geospatial analysis of the land invasion. For my analytical chapters, I draw primarily on the archival work and data from the fieldwork.

Throughout, given the participatory action and situated solidarities commitments behind my research, my goal is to document Gullah/Geechee perspectives. I do not intend to speak on behalf of anyone. Rather, I strove to engage in a genuine co-production of knowledge, in order to faithfully render the perspectives of the Gullah/Geechee. This of course also affords a more valid analysis and conclusions.

The three community-driven research questions were developed into an interview guide

(Appendix A). I shared the guide with Queen Quet for her input, which led to revisions. This

helped integrate knowledge, promote co-learning, and encourage action for mutual benefit. The questions were agreed upon with the intention of being open-ended. Merton (1956) describes open-ended questions as “one which does not fix attention on any specific aspect of the stimulus situation or of the response it is, so to speak, a blank page to be filled in by the interviewee.” (15)

Structuring questions in this open-ended manner not only encouraged the organic emergence of different themes but also encouraged dialogue and thick descriptions. The open-ended phrasing was crucial to making space for a diverse range of participants to express their experiences.

When I spoke with Queen Quet about conducting interviews, she recommended implementing them as focus groups. Queen Quet suggested that Gullah/Geechees prefer to speak about their culture and practices in a collective format. This consequently places great emphasis on the research process and community dialogue. Thus, community driven questions served as the impetus for the focus groups

The general goal of the research was to examine participants’ perceptions of threats to the

Gullah/Geechee’s living culture; the strengths, opportunities, and hurdles which they identify as being central to sustaining the Gullah/Geechee Nation. We agreed to focus on threats generally rather than be confined to environmental burdens as I had initially proposed. As it happens, this move permits and is greatly benefited by interpretation in light of the concept of destructionment. Establishing this broad approach and fitting it into the concept of destructionment required some negotiation to establish destructionment’s dimensions as an analytical framework. It took a few weeks emailing with Queen Quet and her aids to mold the

“general threats” theme into its cultural and environmental aspects.

It is important for the Gullah/Geechee to accurately define their community while ensuring accurate and respectful presentation (Goodwine 2015). For the focus groups, Queen

Quet invited a range of Gullah/Geechee individuals from different generations, islands, and professional backgrounds to participate in a series of focus groups. This permitted inclusion of a diversity of perspectives from among multiple constituencies within Gullah/Geechee communities.

Focus groups permit a dynamic exchange with each participant building on comments by others. Although the topics for the focus groups were planned in some detail, we were not rigid about them. The focus groups amount to semi-structured group interviews since we encouraged and allowed participants the freedom to expand on topics and to introduce new themes to the research. During the focus groups, I as moderator allowed the participants to explore the subject matter in directions, they found to be important, thereby managing breath and depth.

The focus groups were held in the Gullah/Geechee Garden, located on family plot on St.

Helena. The first focus group lasted for just over two hours and the second ‘follow up’ focus group lasted for roughly an hour and a half. Queen Quet was in attendance as was the Queen

Mother, Ms. Brown. Two fishermen, Ed and Ricky, with the Gullah/Geechee Fishing

Association were present. Abeena travelled down from North Charleston and runs Naturally

Geechee, a health and beauty products company. Tiffany, a lawyer, had recently moved to St.

Helena to reconnect with her familial roots and was available to attend.

Coding and Analysis

For the coding and analysis, I initiall pursued inductive techniques, but they were also guided by my evolving understanding of Queen Quet’s term destructionment. Inductive qualitative approaches to fieldwork such as Charmaz (2014), Burawoy (1991, 2003), and

Kleinman (2007) are well-suited to identify alternative interpretations among the subjective perspectives of participants in the research. Given the agreed upon research questions, I initially focused on community concerns with regard to outside threats, as well as Gullah/Geechee

responses. Themes emerged in early discussions during participant observation and continued to develop throughout the focus group and interview process. My initial interpretations evolved via dialogue and collaboration during participant observation activities and after focus groups.

This study employed Esterberg’s thematic coding throughout the transcription process

(2002, 158). This entailed three basic procedures: 1) noticing relevant phenomena, 2) collecting examples of those phenomena, and 3) analyzing those phenomena to find commonalities, differences, patterns, and structures. Open coding was initially used to identify and develop key thematic interests within my fieldnotes and focus group transcripts. This is then followed by a second focused coding, going line by line with more in-depth codes. After key emergent themes were identified, they were organized into a series of follow up ‘clarifying’ questions.

During the initial coding process, I developed an interpretive understanding to key codes that emerged in participant observation and the initial focus group. While identification of the codes emerged inductively from the data, my understanding of the key themes evolved as guided by my evolving understanding of destructionment as defined by Queen Quet. This thus involved a data-concept dialogue that simultaneously began to clarify and dimensionalize destructionment while grounding my understanding of destructionment in the available data. Environmental burdens grew into threats to community livelihoods. Displacement pressure from economic interests was reoriented to examine a variety of threats to the living culture. Questions regarding pollution exposure were replaced with concerns about changes in natural resource use under the banner of “development” which drive environmental degradation. This became a key element of destructionment. I engaged in ongoing dialogues with Queen Quet and other Gullah/Geechee to pursue a fully participatory approach to guide my evolving understanding of the key themes.

These agreed upon foci spoke to the participants interests and enabled the project to be collaborative.

The preliminary thematic findings were then presented at a second focus group roughly a month later (alongside geospatial and bibliometric findings). This helped establish a secondary series of themes aimed at a deeper level of understanding regarding the historical specifics and perceptions of the larger invasion. It also helped ensure that the findings were both valid and accurately represented the experiences of the participants. These themes were then organized into general findings and presented at the 7th Annual 2019 Gullah/Geechee Nation Coastal

Cultures Conference. Following a few additional illuminating points, the study was then written into its present form.

CHAPTER 4 GATES AND FAKES: PERCEPTIONS OF THE SEA ISLAND INVASION

This chapter takes up an analysis of my first research focus, which concerns how the

Gullah/Geechee understand the processes behind efforts to appropriate their lands. This stemmed from the Gullah/Geechee priority on gaining a more systematic understanding, based on their own experience and perceptions, of how outsiders have appropriated and displaced the

Gullah/Geechee from various parts of their homeland. To address this research focus adequately,

I deploy the concept of destructionment, which is necessary to adequately incorporate both the cultural and environmental dimensions of land dispossession and displacement.

Destructionment centers the Gullah/Geechee perspective while offering a critique of development’s corrosive effects on culture and natural resources. As outlined in Chapter 1, destructionment permits a multifaceted interpretive analysis of the degradation of indigenous cultures and environments due to the processes associated with modernization and development.

This is possible because destructionment’s breadth allows it to avoid limitations of earlier analytical perspectives on the consequences of the encounter of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, particularly in rural communities dependent on natural resources where racial differences with outsiders and racism are present. Destructionment blends the strengths of rural sociology’s applied tradition in support of rural communities and its attention to resource management with gentrification’s focus on land use change that benefits hegemonic groups, while highlighting the intersection of race and environmental harm as inherited from the environmental justice movement.

Destructionment, or the simultaneous destruction of cultural and physical eco-systems via development, is a common word around St. Helena. Destructionment originated among the

Gullah/Geechee, which facilitated with their full participation in the data co-production. But as

noted in Chapter 1. That is not to suggest that destructionment is uniquely and only applicable to the Gullah/Geechee or that it somehow determines the outcome of inquiry.

In publication form, Queen Quet originally articulated destructionment in one of her earlier books (Goodwine 1998). While she has since produced an impressive amount of additional work on this topic, destructionment has received little attention from scholars over the past twenty years. On the one hand, this has helped ensure that the concept is authentically grassroots in its applied orientation. On the other hand, the concept stands to be further developed, and what is more, it has significant potential value for application to many other instances of outsider impositions on indigenous cultural and resource rights around the world.

As a point of departure, I note an example of the processes involved in destructionment that the Gullah/Geechee commonly reported. As noted in Chapter 2, the historical context for this study concerns the successive waves of dispossession and land theft in the Sea Islands, which have left the remaining island communities and their Lowcountry cousins increasingly fragmented along the coastal Corridor. As a result, many Gullah/Geechee families find themselves surrounded by gated communities with high land values and rising real estate taxes.

One example of destructionment are land use changes that diminish or render impossible

Gullah/Geechee access to Emancipation and Celebration Trees. These are ancient trees where many slaves commemorated their freedom, whether legally or as a community. In the Sea

Islands, as a result of land appropriation by outsiders, many Emancipation and Celebration Trees have been fenced in, cut down, or simply hidden from public access. This amounts to a form of destructionment because land use change results in the subordination of Gullah/Geechee access to and use of these trees for cultural purposes. The land use change at hand often involves the

creation of gated communities with access restricted to wealthy outsiders, and not to the displaced Gullah/Geechee.

At the same time, outsiders recognize the historical and cultural value of the

Gullah/Geechee for purposes of organizing other lucrative cultural tourist events. Indeed, the

Gullah/Geechee name and elements of their cultural identity are frequently appropriated to promote such events, but because they occur in gated retirement areas, the Gullah/Geechee themselves are unable to participate, and they are never invited to. Hence the private enclosure of the Gullah/Geechee lands is paired with the cultural appropriation of Gullah/Geechee history and culture. Both transpire for the same reasons: to benfit wealthy outsiders. Each thus constitutes an interrelated aspect of destructionment.

The remainder of this chapter then offers a detailed qualitative analysis of the processes behind destructionment, as well as its cultural and environmental consequences, as they understand them. I organize the sections to come around major themes that arose in participant observation and during focus groups as pertains to the strategies used by outsiders to dispossess the Gullah/Geechee from their lands, as understood by the Gullah/Geechee themselves. I begin with the issue of the cultural and environmental significance of gates as they reflect the physical manifestation of exlusivist land claims by outsiders, land use change that degrades terrestrial environments, and a cultural affront to the Gullah/Geechee in their homeland. I then turn to the land-water interface at shorelines to discuss the outsider practice of putting in boat docks, which modify coastal microenvironments and are easily washed away by storms, both forms of unsustainable land use. The third key theme concerns key social aspects of destructionment, such that development on the Sea Islands proceeds with persistent poverty due to the exclusion of the

Gullah/Geechee. Fourth up is a focus on the use of legal strategies by outsiders to appropriate

Gullah/Geechee land, using the Heirs Property Law, and how the Gullah/Geechee see the law, family relationships, and how they are employed by outsiders for dispossession. Fifth and finally,

I take up a discussion focused on outsider appropriation of Gullah/Geechee culture and identity for economic benefit, which does not accrue to the Gullah/Geechee themselves, the “fakes” denoted in the title of this chapter.

These themes collectively capture key aspects of destructionment as it manifests in various forms of land use change in terms of their cultural and environmental dimensions.

Together, they offer narratives of the processes behind destructionment, its manifestations in terms of aspects of displacement, and the cultural and environmental degradation involved. In the process, we gain a more systematic understanding of several key aspects of destructionment itself, at least for the case of outsider appropriation of Gullah/Geechee lands. In turn, the key themes provide a basis for collective reflection among the Gullah/Geechee for legal and other strategies to resist land appropriation and its attendant destructionment.

The Gates of Destructionment

“The final item to go up is yet another gate.” (Goodwine 1998, 171)

For the Gullah/Geechee, perhaps the hallmark manifestation of land appropriation by outsiders in the Sea Islands concerns gates following a land sale. Gates serve to declare the establishment of exclusivist suburban neighborhoods by land developers for wealthy outsiders.

As such, gates represent significant land use change, from traditional agriculture and community settlements to chemically treated lawns, exotic plants and high-impact suburban housing. Gates also symbolize a major cultural shift, from the Gemeinschaft rural communities of the

Gullah/Geechee to the Gesellschaft suburban neighborhoods of wealthy outsiders.

For their part, the Gullah/Geechee had plenty to say about the manifold impacts of gates and the suburban neighorhoods they denoted and protected. Queen Quet provided a multifaceted

summary, indicating legal strategies for appropriation and the economic and social impacts of land dispossession, all summarized by the symbol of gates:

Queen Quet: It was when the gated areas came in that’s when the taxes went sky high. And some people couldn’t afford it. Some people got duped. Thinking they were making a deal with a person to simply let them use the land, lease the land, then its double talk and doublespeak in different languages. Then they say go on, sign this paper right here… make a mark which is legally binding. So now you’ve got a ninety- five-year-old woman two months later with a bulldozer in her yard. You can’t be in this house ma’am; this is our property… They found a person who can’t read or write, and they duped them. A lot of people who lose their land die of heartache afterwards.

Stories of doublespeak and heartbreak are all too common throughout the Sea Island Corridor, and for the Gullah/Geechee, they result in posting of gates in front of suburban neighborhoods.

Gates thus symbolize the manifestation of incursions into Gullah/Geechee land.

The general panorama offered above applies to specific islands in the memories of

Gullah/Geechee respondents, such as the case of Fripp Island. Fripp is located just to the east of

St. Helena. In the minds of many participants, it most closely resembles the destructionment which has come to dominate Hilton Head. Land sales on Fripp led to the establishment of gated communities elsewhere such as Lady’s Island. The importance of land sales to land loss was plain to Gullah/Geechee participants in the research:

Queen Mother: When I used to fish with my father, Fripp was just an island with wild hogs, deer, and gators. One day, I was sitting back watching television and they were advertising Fripp Island. There developing Fripp Island?! I was so upset. So where are all the deer and wild hogs going? I couldn’t believe it because a lot of people were selling out…

Ed: Back when I was a kid, Fripp Island was no more than a camp. People would come from all over the world in a group and they would go over in a boat and camp. Once they put the bridge in that’s when the houses and development came. The people that ended up going there came down to the camp and wanted to go fishing, they didn’t even know where or how to catch bait. That’s when the County Government sent the man responsible for agriculture way back in the 30’s and 40’s. But he was too old to catch bait, so they decided to let my father have that piece of the property. And they built a pond there where my dad could go catch bait to provide for the people on Fripp Island with the bait. And they used to come

down eight time from as far away as Oklahoma and they’d come down every morning and buy. That’s how Fripp Island got developed.

Queen Quet: So now if you have any good sense, you go wait a minute. All of this hook line and sinker that we might have took at first, you better get that hook out your mouth and swim back down south. They’re trying to get you to believe your land was of no value so stay away from it while they move in on your land.

Land sales thus meant loss in various senses to Gullah/Geechee participants, with the eventuality of establishment of gated communities. This connection constitutes a key element of destructionment, and gates make manifest the economic and social loss.

Ruin Along the Sound

Destructionment emphasizes the way development replaces natural environments under regimes of traditional use with private resort communities. This has an important biophysical dimension due to the environmental changes which may ensue, whether due to land use change or biophysical processes themselves. This is because land use changes that ignore biophysical processes can result in environmental degradation as well as the loss of property.

A clear case of this for the Gullah/Geechee concerns coastal lands. The biophysical processes at play in the estuaries and coasts are in fact significant around the Sea Islands. While sandbars tend to migrate at a relatively steady pace, but a single king tide often moves thousands of tons of most sand overnight (Kaufman and Pilkey 1983). Outsiders frequently construct new structures with no regard for ecological processes and quickly fail. Outsiders routinely claim land with coastal frontage and build docks and other structures on the water. Such building fails to account for seasonal coastal storms. Many resorts and individual houses were quick to build boat docks which were washed away by a hurricane or simply a regular storm. Accordingly, it is not uncommon to see pairs of pilings stretching out into a Port Royal marsh. These failed structures are a common indicator that the owner was not raised in the area. One of the more frequently cited examples of this are the ruins of a large dock behind an AirBnb house with a large above

ground pool located near the bridge to Hunting Island. Thus, it is not uncommon to see ruins of failed structures such as boat docks and marinas along the water. Many structures require constant repair and reinforcement because the foundation is slowly being compromised by shifting sand or seeping water. It is becoming increasingly common to see houses that have been swept into the water during hurricane season.

For the Gullah/Geechee, a key concern with coastal building is its environmental impact.

Docks and other structures can also cause negative environmental effects on coastal habitats such as beaches, as noted by Queen Quet:

Queen Quet: Their building became a part of the erosion and made it erode even faster. I’m an engineer and they’re not, so… I guess that’s why I saw that coming.

Gullah/Geechee fishermen familiar with local waterways among the Sea Islands also saw the dangers, both to property and to the environment, of coastal building:

Ricky: Every day is different! The sand is constantly moving… to build in the marshes is to not respect the water or the land.… It’s like they never heard of the spring or king tide before.

Thus, an element of destructionment stems from a lack of traditional indigenous knowledge about local ecosystems and their climatic regimes. For the Gullah/Geechee, such knowledge is invaluable, not only to avoid the loss of community structures, but also to avoid environmental degradation of ecosystems with important natural resources.

For the Gullah/Geechee, destructionment goes beyond just the pillars of failed boat docks. It includes the full scope of harm from attempts to re-engineer the ecosystem. As Queen

Quet noted, “destructionnaires” (developers; people seeking to capitalize on destructionment) sought to modify coastal topography, but with dubious results:

Queen Quet: I have the records of Harbor Island, they spent 50,000 dollars on sand in order to build it up because Fripp had been built out already. So, in order to make a twin, they needed another area. So, they dredged the inlet and spent 50,000 more to put sand in. And now they’re wondering why all these tropical storms, not even

hurricanes, are knocking all those houses down and their foundations are cracked, houses are leaning, all this kind of stuff.

This lack of foresight by destructionaires and the permitting agencies in Beaufort not only destroys local ecosystems. They also frequently do so in vain regarding their investments since so many of the structures are only likely to last a few years before they are condemned. Many of the multi-million dollar houses along Fripp’s private coastline illustrate this point.

Ed: I was over on the backside two weeks ago fishing, they’re tore up. There’re about 15 or 16 houses in the middle of the water…

For the Gullah/Geechee, such immense investments are nothing more than a lose-lose proposition, for they not only lead to the destruction of the houses and other structures on the water, they also degraded local ecosystems.

Gullah/Geechee participants thus highlighted the artificiality of new construction of structures while also underscoring their disregard for local ecosystems and therefore their own investments. Such seemingly foolish investments reflect the arrival of a Gesellschaft society, where wealthy outsiders can afford new million-dollar mansions along with docks, and the costs of repair (or insurance against loss). This in turn reflects the importance of the concept of destructionment which captures both the socioeconomic as well as the ecological consequences of the decisions of destructionnaires and their homebuyers.

Destructionment and Poverty on the Sea Islands

If the process of destructionment stems from a contemporary version of the economic rationality of Gesellschaft, it was obvious even to agents of the hegemonic society that destructionment coincides with poverty for the Gullah/Geechee. Development in the modernization tradition was supposed to promote social inclusion and thus social mobility but development as destructionment would generate the exact opposite outcome, of persistent

poverty due to social exclusion. Here is it especially instructive to hear from planners involved in development of the Sea Islands.

An interview with Jayme Lopko, the Senior Planner with the Town of Hilton Head

Island, helped illustrate the persistence of poverty and the underlying generating processes of social exclusion as part of the development process as destructionment. The Sea Islands, known for wealth, nonetheless have a dense pocket of poverty. Not coincidentally, that impoverished area is one of the few remaining Gullah/Geechee neighborhoods.

Jayme Lopko: Hunger and poverty are issues on the island; these problems tend to be concentrated in old Ward 1 [the Gullah/Geechee neighborhood].

Despite rising land values around Ward 1, Gullah/Geechee residents remain poor and have not experienced benefits from development. More broadly, has impelled a rise in land values, but largely in gated communities. The socioeconomic result has been a checkerboard of land developments and Gullah/Geechee neighborhoods, with marked differences in wealth along racial lines (Dyer and Bailey 2008).

While parallels between poverty on Hilton Head and St. Helena exist, they differ in character given the stark contrast of wealth spread across Hilton Head.

Queen Quet: Its interesting how most Gullah/Geechees I’ve met, say “I didn’t know I was poor until somebody told me.” We never knew the word poverty and we didn’t know the word poor. It only when you went elsewhere that people say, oh my god you don’t have anything. But guess what, the people who are defining what is poor, don’t own land.

Tiffany shared in a similar experience back on the mainland when confronted with competing conceptions of poverty.

Tiffany: Emory University, my freshman year, was the first time I ever saw or viewed myself in somekind of income bracket. I had lived eighteen years in suburban Jonesboro… it was not even a thing. I have everything I need, more than enough, enough to give other people. That’s just what we have; land. Land is most important.

The underlying process at play concerns the manner in which land sales transpire.

Gullah/Geechee residents faced limited options if they chose not to sell and thus remain on their land:

Jayme Lopko: Land on Hilton Head is very valuable and sometimes people just want their piece of the pie, so they force a tax sale. Heirs [Property Law] usually effects the troubled properties where you can’t outright sell them and since they’re shared with family members and thus cannot get a loan to build, they’re forced to put mobile homes. There are not a lot of options.

Under the regime of land development for the wealthy, financial resources are tied up in development of gated communities for outsiders rather than local peoples. Many of the services provided to the numerous gated retirement resorts are not extended to the remaining

Gullah/Geechee population.

One key aspect in which land development absorbs governmental resources concerns road building and thus accessibility. Without public investments in roads, Gullah/Geechee settlements remain relatively isolated.

Jayme Lopko: Most of these properties are on dirt roads. They want to do more with their land, and they have the right to do more but they don’t have the road. They have dirt access easements and our rules require them to have a paved right-of-way. We even have difficulty providing emergency services but can’t do so on a rutter gut road. But in order for us to pave these roads, they have to give up their land. Not all of it but we have to have a certain number of feet for a right-of-way, that small piece takes their development rights and sometimes they are faced with losing a unit. So, if they have a half acre to put two units on and the road makes that .49, they just lost that unit.

Homes along dirt paths or other substandard infrastructure are thus not deemed good investments for banks, making it hard for Gullah/Geechee to obtain credit as a means of making improvements.

Gesellschaft relations that only benefit wealthy outsiders persist at the policy planning levels as well. With each additional retirement resort or club house, the remaining

Gullah/Geechee structures are further pressured to relocate. This occurs alongside the lack of options for Gullah/Geechee to obtain financing or other financial resources.

Jayme Lopko: Hilton Head is reaching build out. Basically, the only lands that are left are Gullah lands. So, it’s kind of a fork in the road right now as to what’s going to happen… There’s only so much land left and the value keep going up and up and up. Eventually, they’re just going to sell it because it’s worth so much. Many of them head to New York.

Hence the Gullah/Geechee are deprived of the means to improve their residences while they face pressure to sell out and leave. Planning decisions thus direct resources to outside land developers but not local residents, which cements the social inequalities among landholders in the Sea

Islands. This constitutes destructionment in the social sense due to the financial starvation simultaneously occurring alongside the application of pressure for dispossession.

The pressures for development also constitute environmental destructionment. So many buildings have been erected that there remains little ecological vegetation to help slow sizeable wind gusts or flooding.

Jayme Lopko: We seldom take a direct hit and Hurricane Matthew whipped us out pretty good. So we didn’t have any beach left so when Irma came in a year later many were flooded out. There were no trees or vegetation left to stop it… We had over two tons of trees removed. And we were using Honey Horn and Chaplin, our biggest parks for debris removal and it took months. Many houses got the red tag and were not deemed livable.

Destructionment is not limited to the immediate land use changes and initial deforestation. It also includes the deleterious effects of development planning over time. Following Hurricane

Matthew and Florence the following year demonstrates this point given how the island’s ecological features and various landmarks have been replaced with retirement resorts and golf courses.

Intentionality of Laws Changing

Destructionment would not be possible had it not been for deliberate changes within the law. Hence a key fourth theme for the Gullah/Geechee concerning land and destructionment focuses on legal strategies pursued by outsiders to appropriate Gullah/Geechee land and thereby displace them. In this regard, the intentionality of destructionment via legal means as it affects land tenure and land sales decisions cannot be overstated.

As shown in the last section, rising land values on the Sea Islands have brought pressures for land sales, pressures which can be facilitated by modifying the legal options available to outsiders to acquire land. The pressure on the Gullah/Geechee to sell has thus led to modifications in the legal code that permit misleading representations and other dubious practices which the Gullah/Geechee recognize as forms of land theft. Although land theft occurs in a variety of ways, Heirs Property Law constitutes the primary channel through which locals are dispossessed from their land.

Tiffany: As a lawyer, I’ll say we know how the law, and specifically property, law has changed. Property law changed specifically to target the structure and the way that our families preserved land. Our families, especially large families like mine, left it to everybody. Each generation adding on a couple dozen people. It used to be security, it used to be a way to insure inheritance. The laws changed right around you to pull the land right out from under you. The intentionality of laws being passed even know specific zoning laws, specific taxing laws, specific municipalities that law makers in those communities are changing and shifting the law to get the outcome that they want. The outcome that they always want, is what we have. What we are sitting on right now.

Modifications in laws made the Heirs Property Law a key mechanism for outsiders, who could identify one person, any person in an extended family willing to sign off on a land sale. This made it much easier to dispossess Gullah/Geechee families of their land. Property law and more recent land use policy rulings have thus enabled outsider encroachment into the community.

Economic justifications and “colorblind” planning have been found to enable land theft in a racialized manner in other places (Hardy, Milligan, and Heynen 2017). In the case of the Sea

Islands, property law favors land developers and their legal counsels, for they need only find one willing seller in an extended family. Becaose of Gullah/Geechee extended kin networks, they are arguably thus very vulnerable to this legal strategy that results in dispossession. Because most outsiders are wealthy and thus white, property laws as practices are inherently racialized. This took time for the Gullah/Geechee to recognize:

Tiffany: And now everybody knows ‘Heirs Property Law’ but why do we know that now? We know it because it has been created in order to take hundreds of thousands of acres. And now we are in a position, where there is no way out. Until groups and people were actively fighting to shift the law, it was up to the local judge and his discretion. Imagine small communities where you know the judge, judge knows you. His family knows that your family has been sitting on that a long time and that anything that comes up to challenge that is his discretion? We know that that’s not right.

Thus the Heirs Property Law is now seen by the Gullah/Geechee as a key legal strategy for outsiders to appropriate land and thereby displace local peoples.

That said, the legal strategy itself bears some unpacking. The present Heirs system is directly linked with probate, the judicial process where a will is “proved” in court. Tiffany explained…

Tiffany: As long as there has been property law and probate, and it is judge discretionary, and long as that is the case and most people are not aware of that. People will just think we’ll probate the will; you don’t even get to talk when you go in front of the judge. If your family is not in complete agreement before you get in front of that probate judge, they’re going to sell it by default. The default is to automatically liquidate it. That’s how a lot of families lost their land, they think the judge is here to mediate and help us come to some agreement. And whose been leading them astray with that information? Who’s going to come and correct that information? Are they even going to trust anyone else talking to them about unless you’re talking in our own language again? So, there are lots of different levels and reasons.

Dispossession of land and the accompanying gates pose a constant and serious threat to the

Gullah/Geechee’s living culture. Each plot of land is a potential loss which could drive up the cost of living in the surrounding neighborhood. If a large piece of land is lost, such a family tract or a farm, this increases the likelihood of an entire development moving in.

The pressure from outsiders taking advantage of the legal system is compounded by the tax system. Rising land values mean higher property taxes, and if families are unable to pay those, it becomes more likely one member, or another will take the fateful decision to sell out.

Ed: We are being taxed out of our property.

Abenaa: And when you have land by the water, the taxes are unreasonable.

Should a family refuse to sell, they are then faced with the challenge of amassing a sizeable debt trying to secure the funds to cover the property tax. This pressure to cover the impending tax can force the community to come together, but frequently drives many young people to look for a job over the mainland.

Legal changes in property law and increased taxes thus constitute another form of destructionment on local community livelihoods. Destructionment thus has a significant legal dimension, since the use of Heirs Property Law by wealthy outsiders with lawyers directly serves to dispossess Gullah/Geechee families of their land, resulting in land use changes and community degradation noted in the previous sections. This significantly differs from indirect and abstract forms of destructionment via efforts to commoditize the Gullah/Geechee’s cultural identity.

Fakes: Misappropriated Caricatures “Neither Gullah, Nor Geechee”

The Gullah/Geechee culture constitutes one of the few authentic Gemeinschaft enclaves in the South. It is a strange thing to observe that Geechee has historically been, and in many

places remains, a derogatory term for “backward and country.” The name was initially intended to be an insult.

More recently however, the term was embraced and reclaimed. As Queen Quet explained in reflection,

Queen Quet: That’s one of the issues, you get called a pariah. When the Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition came into existence, it was all fine and good because nobody wanted to be called Gullah or Geechee.

The Gullah/Geechee were thus well aware of the negative connotation of their cultural identity.

In the years since, as Gullah/Geechee has become a more accepted name with the rise of the coastal real estate economy, outsiders have sought to take advantage.

Queen Quet: Twenty-one years ago, we started the Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition. I find out now that people thought I had lost my mind. What would you want to do something like that for? Now, there’s a whole plethora of these fakes who call themselves story tellers. They go around and there is an entire market for them to get paid, to testi-lie to people. Most of them don’t even teach Gullah/Geechee history, most of them don’t speak Gullah fluently or anything. But there’s a market, so they can label themselves as Gullah storyteller and get paid.

The association of the Gullah/Geechee name with land of high economic value thus explains the change. But it also raises concerns among the Gullah/Geechee themselves about the appropriation of the name without permission and for the benefit of outsiders. This thus adds a cultural dimension to the concept of destructionment.

Evidence of the newfound cache of the Gullah/Geechee name was evident in both participant observation activities and came out in focus groups with the Gullah/Geechee. Flyers posted outside gas stations throughout the Corridor, television advertisements, and vaguely worded billboards all seek to capitalize on the Gullah/Geechee identity. Abenaa pointing out that such references are commonplace as far away as Charleston.

Abeena: Some people aren’t even from here. They moved here and were told some stories by some Gullah/Geechees, but they probably thought we were simple minded and now they found that there is money in it. So now, their regurgitating these stories.

Queen Quet: The cultural tourism is being usurped from the people who lived the culture. They call it appropriation, I call it misappropriation and exploitation.

The Gullah/Geechee name is thus attached to cultural celebrations without the approval or support or participation of the Gullah/Geechee themselves. Many traditional Gullah celebrations such as the Native Island Gullah Celebration have been replaced with white retiree-oriented versions such as the Hilton Head Gullah Celebration.

The misappropriation to which Queen Quet refers brought up a key theme of cultural destructionment, the issue of “cultural fakes”. Queen Quet situated the arrival of the fakes as a cultural effort to appeal to the distorted sense of Southern history among outsiders.

Queen Quet: They sound like Uncle Remus Stories or something out here. They’re doing briar rabbit. Are you serious right now? That’s what outsiders prefer to buy into because there is a certain comfort zone in the tourist industry. Where, especially with Anglo people, they want to be entertained by again… I’m sorry but it’s a reality, the happy singing negro. Especially when they come south, they’ve been sold the plantation as a place to live. They’ve been sold the plantation a la Gone with the Wind. (Imitating an exaggerated Savannah accent) “The place where you sit on the piazza and drink some sweet tea… and the people come to you. And you get to be just like a southern belle in your mind.” You aren’t talking about the mosquitos carrying malaria killing some of you. You ain’t talking about that. So, you now have this warped sense of American history. And you don’t want anyone to change it, to challenge it. So that whole tourism industry now has become a thing where for instance, Juneteenth was last weekend, now every gated area is exploiting Junteenth, having Junteeth Affairs.What did they do?! They fly in Ranky Tanky, an all-white group except one Black woman and have them at Mitchellville at Hilton Head. They had another group, that’s not from here, from Ohio originally. Everybody that is going to be the rented negro is going to give the appearance that “we support Black culture and we support cultural tourism.” Because when they put the ads on TV, they show just the Black person. They don’t show you that the rest of the band is Anglo. So, then all of these Black people who, hopefully hear about it in all the hotels and resorts, they’re going to buy the 25$ ticket and come to the Juneteenth. Because this is a Black event.

These exploitative performances thus coopt Gullah/Geechee Holidays for the benefit of outsiders but not the Gullah/Geechee.

Cultural misappropriation occurs in other forms, outside of annual celebrations. For example, there are year-round tour groups. There are at least 18 non-affiliated Gullah/Geechee

tour groups in Beaufort County area. Some are more sophisticated than others with larger advertising budgets. A few white owned tour groups have established themselves in Beaufort and are slowly coming over the bridge into St. Helena. Such tour groups seek in some ways to reclaim Gullah/Geechee identity.

Queen Quet: Now there is the whole market up and down the coast for that. That has changed. On the positive flip side of that, are the younger people who are proud. Where now they are happy to display that they are Gullah/Geechees now (gestures to her shirt) … Ten years ago they would have hidden it in public and put a jacket on. Now, they’re hoping if someone will ask if they’re Gullah/Geechee.

On the one hand, young Gullah/Geechees have begun to reconnect with the lost ancestral roots and take pride in their partially restored identity. This constitutes a monumental feat which has taken decades of work.

That said, tour groups also constitute a form of misappropriation of cultural identity. This is marked by the arrival of fake cultural tourism seeking to capitalize on the Gullah/Geechee identity. The presence of fakes derives its character from the racialized nature of the retiree populations and their outsider viewpoint on Afro-Indigenous communities. Fakes actively appeal to racist and obnoxious caricatures in hopes of giving the affluent white retirees an enjoyable experience.

Queen Quet: The tourism industry has changed because now the real natives can’t even keep their foothold over the fake ones, the pseudo-actors and actresses, the storytellers, that are moving in. That’s a problem. That misleads the people coming in as well. Because they want to go the show where they understand most of the show. They don’t want me to come in there (switches to Gullah) “talking and joking like this” with the only people laughing in the audience are Black; they don’t like that. So, they don’t want me, they want that person “Hi Y’all! You knows I a Gullah/Geechee too. I just live over on that other island…” and making up stuff that sound neither Gullah, nor Geechee.

Such racist misappropriations exist as the cultural extension of a market logic seeking to profit off the commoditization of Gullah/Geechee identity. A large, wealthy white audience with a racist set of expectations of Gullah/Geechee identity will exert substantial demand for a cultural

performance that is similarly racist and thus meets racist cultural expectations of that audience, resulting in many such performances.

The cultural misappropriation associated with the arrival of fake cultural tourism also corrodes the very names Gullah and Geechee. One notable example is a collaboration between two white owned establishments tracing back in 2015. Revelry Brewing Co. has maintained a collaboration with the ‘Geechee Boy Mill’ to create the ‘Gullah Cream Ale’, which remains one of their top four featured beers as of 2019. Both companies are white establishments with no

Gullah/Geechee employees, and they both lack any association with the Gullah/Geechee Nation.

Other examples of this misappropriation include knock off sweetgrass baskets, Gullah recipe books, and even Gullah language classes being taught to non-Gullah populations at Harvard.

Efforts to commodify the living culture seem to be increasing as the culture becomes increasingly celebrated within the public sphere.

The ongoing expansion of the local economy following a market logic is cause for concern about the misappropriation of Gullah/Geechee identify for tourism and other businesses.

Jayme Lopko: The difference between St. Helena and Hilton Head in my mind is St. Helena is known for being Gullah and people go there because of them. Nobody comes here just because of the Gullah, so we haven’t had the fake people come in. But I worry, that once we broaden, with the Gullah Museum, Mitchellville, and Gullah Tours, making them more available, market them better and brand them, competitors are going to come in that aren’t the originals and yield to the pressures of what the tourists want versus what accurately representing the group of people.

The Gesellschaft society is thus likely to continue its reinterpretation of Gullah/Geechee identity and other cultural content insofar as it is profitable.

For their part, The Gullah/Geechee have sought to counteract fake performance by advancing their own production of cultural content in the form of various media to convey their cultural expressions. The Gullah/Geechee identity and associated cultural symbols (such as the

Gullah/Geechee name, logo, or flag) embody such authentic cultural production, and serve as tools for building Gullah/Geechee community. That said, these same tools risk cooptation from marketing and tourism by outsiders. Historically, the Gullah/Geechee’s tendency towards oral histories, rural insulation, and distrust of mainland property agencies has resulted in them avoiding obtaining legal copyrights for their symbols and products. This has left them vulnerable to attempts to co-opt the Gullah/Geechee’s slogans, symbols, and identity.

Conclusions

This chapter has engaged destructionment as the encroachment of outsiders onto

Gullah/Geechee lands and other aspects of their culture. I built my interpretation on classical sociological thought stemming from Tonnies’ terms Gemeinschaft and Geselschaft, focusing on the Gullah/Geechee concept of destructionment as the process through which Gesellschaft market relations corrode Gemeinschaft community bonds in various ways. Destructionment lays bare the economic and legal strategies employed by outsiders and the many manifestations of degradation that ensue, in terms of Gullah/Geechee land rights, natural resources and culture. As we have seen, there are multiple aspects of destructionment that result from displacement of indigenous peoples, ranging from material land loss to cultural misappropriation by fakes within the cultural tourism industry.

The concept of destructionment has a lot to offer since it is not strictly confined to the

Sea Islands but applies to rural communities and indigenous and traditional peoples more generally. Destructionment offers valuable insights to better understand the degradation of other traditional and indigenous cultures faced with a similar onslaught. Destructionment thus bears application to other contexts, where the specific details may differ, and the particular aspects of degradation may vary. Land loss throughout the Black Belt South, encroachment into Native

American trust territories (such as the Navajo or Sioux Reservations) and dredging of ancestral

waters throughout the Pacific Coast are all cases where destructionment may be usefully applied.

Destructionment can also be applied elsewhere in the world beyond the United States. Queen

Quet has noted numerous parallel scenarios thoughout the Caribbean. Resort expansion has presented similar threats to Maroon communities throughout Barbados and Jamaica.

Destructionment is thus arguably poised to offer a counter-hegemonic critique of “development” in rural areas throughout South America, Africa, and Asia where there remain many

Gemeinschaft communities still intact.

Looking ahead, destructionment should be further developed by exploring the institutional (legal) dimensions of the phenomenon. This begins to move beyond the material/ideal dichotomy into a more sophisticated framework. Many locals present destructionment as a story, perhaps because such descriptions best relate their experiences and personal harms associated with the process of development. In true Gullah/Geechee fashion,

Queen Quet often prefers to tell one of the many stories of destructionment since it is historically factual, provides an engaging narrative centered around Gullah/Geechee voice, and is more relatable than a definition. While the benefits of framing the concept in this manner are highly effective within the local sphere surrounding the experience of the Gullah/Geechee, this work seeks to clarify the conceptual dimensions of destructionment.

One of the concept’s key strengths is its versatility in emphasizing the harm brought by outsiders on both the physical ecosystems and traditional cultural practices. For the

Gullah/Geechee, the physical ecosystem does not stop at the water’s edge. The waterways, sound, surrounding ocean, and aquatic resources are also subject to destructionment.

Consequently, the bountiful water ways which for centuries have served as insulating barriers for

Gullah/Geechee culture have themselves become spaces for conflict. The next chapter therefore takes up issues of destructionment applied to issues of aquatic habitats and resource claims.

CHAPTER 5 FISHING WHILE BLACK

The previous chapter considered the immediate and highly visibile threats posed by destructionment as displayed within the arrival of gates (indicating land loss) and cultural misappropriation of identity (associated with fake commoditization). Within the scope of previous considerations, the gates of destructionment have already drastically altered the manner and scale of the Gullah/Geechee’s daily food practices via land theft and heirs’ property law. The issues of land loss, land theft and the misappropriation of identity as forms of destructionment in turn raise the issue of other manifestation of this concept in the case of the Gullah/Geechee.

This chapter therefore addresses the second research question, which focuses on the complementary issue of access to water resources in the form of fishing rights. Whereas land dispossession amounts to one form of cultural and environmental degradation in the Sea Islands, outsider contestation of Gullah/Geechee fishing rights has also proven an important threat to their culture and livelihoods. The Gullah/Geechee have community fishermen, who spend much of their time catching fish to share with other community members. This makes fishing a key livelihood activity for the Gullah. This also constitutes an infringement on Gullah/Geechee fishing and another major threat to their livelihood, culture, and social organization. I therefore employ destructionment again, this time to pursue a qualitative analysis of “fishing while Black”.

In addition to the physical alterations of the landscape, the market-oriented relations associated with Gesellschaft destructionment brings with its numerous attacks on

Gullah/Geechee fishing practices as a form of Gemeinschaft. Attacks on Gullah/Geechee fishing rights include the denial of physical and legal access to fishing areas, harassment by governmental environmental regulatory enforcers, competition from outsiders for fish, and dependency on competitive mainland markets for fish. Such attacks are hard to ignore, but they

are not as visible since they tend to occur in a boat far from shore or along a remote stretch of beach.

I therefore organize the analysis in this chapter around the various forms of attacks on

Gullah/Geechee fishing rights noted above. I first provide some interpretive context to understand Gullah/Geechee fishing as a livelihood activity and as a means of constituting

Gullah/Geechee identity. I then turn to qualitative data from my archival work, participant observation and key informant interviews and focus groups. I begin the analysis with a discussion of Gullah/Geechee perspectives on outsider attempts to deny Gullah/Geechee access to their traditional fishing grounds. That is followed by a discussion of Gullah/Geechee experiences of harassment by government agents seeking to impose state-based environmental regulations on the Gullah/Geechee. I then report Gullah/Geechee views on growing competition from outsiders for fishing grounds and fish. The analysis concludes with the last step in fishing as a livelihood activity, the sale of fish, to review Gullah/Geechee difficulties in marketing their catch.

Denial of Physical Access

Port Royal is 3.62 miles wide and has three deep spots over forty-five feet deep. Each is located near the mouths of the Beaufort, Chechessee, and Broad Rivers, which converge into a single delta. Many fishermen tend to prefer the surrounding inlets and creeks leaving the larger waterways to the commercial trawling ships. Nearly all Gullah/Geechee raised on St. Helena island know how to fish, but not everyone spends their days in the creeks.

The primary issue associated with destructionment and fishing concerns the denial of accessing fishing areas. Access is defined here as “the ability to derive benefits from things” broadening from the classical property definition “the right to benefit from things” (Ribot and

Peluso 2003, 154). As seen in the previous chapter, with the loss of land rights comes land use

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changes, including modifications of lands around waterways. This includes wetland destruction, dredging, and privatization of spaces that had previously been open to the public. Gates not only enclose lands to exclude all but the wealthy, privatization also brings the denial of access to boat ramps and prime fishing spots.

For example, the government on Hilton Head prides itself on having all public beaches.

However, it conveniently fails to mention that many of them are only accessible via private access points or by walking a couple miles down the beach. This physical denial of access to fishing sites is an immediate hurdle to the responsibilities placed on Gullah/Geechee fisherman, and therefore the Gullah/Geechee as a whole.

Jayme Lopko: It started when Charles Fraser first developed Sea Pines. It was our first planned development and gated community. Now over 70% of our island is a gated community. That’s where a lot of Gullahs lost their land, these huge corporations came in and whipped up a big chunk of land, developed it into a PUD, and now they no longer have access through there. They don’t get to go fishing or crabbing through there. Access to that land is no longer open to them. Prior to the Clementa Pickney Act came into play, a lot of people were losing them in the tax sales.

Hence the occupation of Gullah/Geechee lands bears directly on fishing rights in the surrounding waters. Destructionment on land is thus closely related to destructionment in the water.

Further, just as gates were noted in the previous chapter as a key manifestation of destructionment in terms of displacement from land, gates also serve to exclude Gullah/Geechee from fishing. Gates not only prevent access to land but to the shoreline and aquatic resources offshore. Most gated communities have one or more security guards responsible for preventing

Gullah/Geechess from crossing across a retiree’s lawn. Retirees outside the gated communities do not seem eager to accommodate local fishermen using paths bordering their property either.

Many have been known to construct fences adorned with large signs demanding “Trespassers

Keep Out!” Others simply call the police for trespassing if they see you.

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Access to fishing spots can also be denied through punitive measures such as fines, arrests, and even jail sentences. For the Gullah/Geechee, this adds insult to injury in the case of community fishermen. By taking away a community fisherman’s access to fishing grounds, that individual has had their labor removed from contributing to the larger Gullah/Geechee community. Fines and worse penalties thus significantly raise the risks of fishing to community fishermen. This tends to result in the fishermen being forced to find a wage paying job back on the mainland. In turn, this not only diminishes a key livelihood activity but removes a key food source to the community.

Denial of Legal Access

In addition to denial of access to fishing grounds, the Gullah/Geechee face increasing legal restrictions on how they can fish the places they can stillreach. The arrival of outsiders has brought with them the regulatory state of Gesellschaft society, in the form of fishing regulations, permitting systems, and SC Department of Natural Resources (DNR) enforcement agents. The result of the environmental regulations established during the past half century are twofold.

Foremost, new regulatory policies change which fish you can catch, during which times of year, and in what quantity. Many Gullah/Geechee on St. Helena can name the DNR policy makers and local enforcers, because of their many interactions over-fishing infractions.

Gullah/Geechee fishermen indeed had stories to relate over run-ins with DNR enforcement agents regarding legal problems overfishing. Here the various purposes of fishing came into conflict. Whereas the Gullah/Geechee fish for subsistence purposes, the DNR designated some of those species as sport fish, and thus subject to regulations. Those regulations were in turn in conflict with fishing for subsistence. Ricky had been quiet but quickly perked up when the topic of fishing came up.

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Ricky: Them guys came down and changed the rules, they make the fish that we fish for and eat “sports fish.” I don’t fish for no sport! I don’t fish commercial. The guys that changed the law are from Chicago and Detroit. They get their fish at the supermarket so they can afford to catch and release.

Hence a key conflict overfishing regulations concerned the issue of fishing for subsistence, and thus catch-and-keep, as opposed to sport fishing, which implies catch-and-release.

The imposition of designations of sport fish has led to shifts in Gullah/Geechee fishing practices and fish take. DNR regulations have significantly changed Gullah/Geechee fishing practices to avoid catching ‘sports’ fish. This has in turn altered the fish available to community members, as well as Gullah/Geechee cuisine, since their centuries-old recipes call for certain species of fish. During fieldwork, we discussed the species of fish (such flounder, red, whiting, and sheepshead) have slowly become less prevalent within Gullah/Geechee diets. The underlying contention behind DNR fishing regulations is that Gullah/Geechee fishing practices are unsustainable.

On that point, it is worth noting that oysters have begun to play a more central role in

Gullah/Geechee diets and is regulated just like other types of seafood. But that does not necessarily mean that Gullah/Geechee practices of managing oysters are unsustainable. That is because oysters have a cultural importance, commemorated with an annual oyster replanting.

This celebration is regarded as a revered annual holiday. The oyster replanting is thus at once a sustainable management practice and a culturally significant event among the Gullah/Geechee.

More generally, young Gullah/Geechees are taught environmental stewardship from an early age, many are blessed with a knack for cast nets, patience and a general appreciation for observing nature, making them well disposed to become expert anglers. Those who do fish tend to particiate in a community-oriented division of labor whether they hold a recreational or commercial fishing status.

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Most Gullah/Geechee anglers are happy to share their memories of a time before DNR regulation. The new DNR policies have by contrast resulted in regular harassment of

Gullah/Geechee fisherman by DNR agents. Such harassment has some key characteristics and bears ironic implications.

Ricky: DNR harasses me a lot. They try to sneak up on you. They try to say I am with the illegal fishermen over there. I would never be with those guys, they’re trying to make fishing illegal. Right now, the law says I can catch three bass. When July comes, I can’t but catch one dog gone bass. I say y’all keep changing the law overnight, even though they don’t ever let us vote on nothing. He checked us, all he wanted was our license and fish. He never even checked the loud nearby white guys.

Gullah/Geechee fishermen have thus directly experienced racial discrimination with regard to fishing practices and regulatory enforcement by DNR agents. What is more, Gullah/Geechee fishermen perceive that discrimination is likely resulting in reductions in fish stocks due to depletion by white outsiders and their fishing activities.

The DNR is given a set of laws from the general assembly in Columbia at the start of each year. These are supposed to be n the fishing guide for the year, which anglers receive when they renew their licenses. However, many of these regulatory laws are changed throughout the season without updates to fishers. Consequently, local fishers may get penalized based on the length and amount of a certain species of fish as they relate to the “allowable catch”.

Historically, Gullah/Geechees caught whatever fish they wanted for traditional use before other people moved to the area and began “sports fishing”. That led to overfishing, which in turn has led to the creation of new laws which imposed restrictions on subsistence fishing. While the new laws putatively pertain to commercial and recreational fishing, they create conflicts for subsistence fishers, whose practices are not officially recognized. The upshot is that sport fishing causes declines in local fish populations, resulting in legislation that negatively impacts

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subsistence fishers. The failure to differentiate substance practices from sports fishing is ultimately a failure of policy, not of practice.

Unannounced changes in fishing regulations have led the Gullah/Geechee to view the practice of fishing for the community as an increasingly risky behavior. This is not only the case for the fishermen themselves, as apprehensions can easily result in an arrest and a sizeable fine, and more.

Ricky: That fine starts at $1,095. I know, I have had about five or six. I’ve gone to court and the judge threw it back at me; he could see my passion for fishing. He said alright Mr. Wright, I’ll tell you what we are going to do. We’ll keep it like it is and we take your license for a year. I said, your honor if you go to the supermarket and pay for the stuff at the supermarket, you get to take that home with you. I’m paying a thousand dollars for some fish, so where are my fish at?... You pay the fine and they take all your fish. They take it to the police camp down there, across the creek from Eustis. They go down there and have a ball… They celebrate with the fish and confiscated liquor…. That’s what they do. They fine you, they take your fish, and sometimes even take your equipment.

This enforcement activity effectively amounts to spending one’s day confiscating fish and alcohol, fining and jailing those found in violation. Corruption by DNR officials via the abuse of their enforcement powers again makes evident their willingness to engage in racial discrimination against Gullah/Geechee fishermen.

The criminalization of traditional fishing practices extends into the courts as well. To defy DNR regulatory statutes and can result in extreme consequences in terms of jail time for fishing offenses.

Ricky: Keith Ellis is the example. They fined Keith in 1999 for 2000 dollars. So, Keith went to jail on other issues. So, I told him, you’re in jail now when they bring you the warrant for the fish, and you finish serving your time for that, that you want it to run concurrently. You want the fish issue to get time served. They did all that. Then in 2010, they took him to the Penitentiary. They’re treating Keith like he killed 10 or 11 people, they have him in there for fish. They’ve got him on a federal offense on some fish. We went and had a fund raiser, gave the money to his mom and paid $800, they still took him from Beaufort to Columbia Co Penitentiary over fish. He’s in there for fishing while Black.

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The ability to invoke federal regulations, the graduated fines, the extended jail time, and the transfer to penitentiaries are all aspects of the regulatory burden on fishing that gets applied to Gullah/Geechee for subsistence fishing offenses. Because the Gullah/Geechee fish for subsistence without recognition, it is likely that offenses will be repeated due to community need and discriminatory enforcement by DNR agents and the court system. Keith is but one example, others have had their licenses stripped from them for multiple years at a time. To someone living on the mainland, this is roughly the equivalent of losing one’s job and being barred from your vocation anywhere in the state. It also means that many community fishermen are no longer able to provide food to their extended families.

The criminalization of Gullah/Geechee fishing by the DNRrepresents a serious threat to both their livelihood and to their communities. As Queen Quet summarized,

Queen Quet: When they criminalize fishing, they aren’t just challenging our practices but rather the livelihoods of the people who you are going to be giving fish to when you come back. They’re threatening a whole community and the larger tradition.

This has led the Gullah/Geechee to mobilize in defense of their fishing rights and led to the creaton of a new community organization; the Gullah/Geechee Fishing Association. Founded in

2010, the group emerged in response to these various threats to the aquatic relationship central to their culture (Gonsalves, Brey, and Lews, 2014). While supported by the Sea Island Coalition, this group is more specific in their focus on preserving the fisheries and aquatic ecosystems on which they depend.

Competition With Outsiders

Beyond denial of access and regulatory discrimination, the Gullah/Geechee face yet other threats to fishing for their community subsistence. With the arrival of numerous restaurants in

Hilton Head, Beaufort, and Bluffton, the demand for seafood has grown rapidly over the past two

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decades. Dozens of trawling boats pass by and through the sound daily. This constitutes a significant new source of competition for fish that the Gullah/Geechee must face. This competition just offshore has had serious effects on the volume and quality of the local catch in the inlets and creeks. Given the complexity and rapid pace of these changes alongside wetland destruction, it is difficult to assess the effects of increased demand on the local fisheries. While shrimp farming throughout the Corridor has helped off-set some of the pressures on aquatic ecosystems, the arrival of outsiders has increased the demands on local fisheries.

Another source of competition stems from the seasonal arrival of recreational sports fisherman and boat tours. Recreational fishermen have come to treat the waterways as their own personal playground. From St. Helena, loud parties of boaters can often be heard celebrating on sand bars and racing around the waterways. During hurricanes, many boats are abandoned and sink to the sea floor, congesting the relatively narrow waterways and obstructing access. More affluent residents from Hilton Head and nearby Beaufort often spill over into the waterways where the Gullah/Geechee regularly fish. For their part, local Gullah/Geechees tend to do a pretty good job maintaining their customary sweet demeanor. Many Gullah/Geechee fishermen actively avoid conflict around the waterways, given that DNR often considered their practices to be deviant. Should a certain fishing hole or popular dock become known for conflict, the area will often be patrolled more frequently or in some instances temporarily closed.

The upshot however is clear: Gullah/Geechee blue crab, oysters, shrimp, and fish (catfish, mullet, spot, croaker) hauls are in decline (Gonsalves, Brey, and Lewis 2015). The numerous commercial fishing operations have cornered the market. This again reflects legal designations by Gesellschaft institutions, which distinguish larger “commercial” operations and “recreational”

Gullah/Geechee angling. This not only has consequences for DNR enforcement as discussed

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above with regard to sport fishing, it also bears implications for commercial fishing and thus competition for fish for market sale.

Queen Quet: Let’s say we decide to go out in a boat right now. We check the tides and take the boat out right over here. They can pull our boat in the water and ask to count and check the length of our fish. One fish too many, that’s a thousand dollar fine. You got one too short, that’s a thousand dollar fine. If they find someone with fifty fish over the limit, you’re done and going to jail. So now, we have to figure out how to raise the money for the fine or we all go to jail. If we didn’t go in the creek and went to the fish market in Beaufort, we could buy more fish than what we caught. And there is no law against that. So how can they tell us we have too much fish if we go get it ourselves. But if we go buy it in the market, there is no such thing as too much?

Hence regulations on recreational fishing, which is how the Gullah/Geechee are regulated, differ from those on commercial fishing, whereby definition fish take will be much greater. The criminalization of subsistence fishing, which gets regulated as something else under Gesellschaft law, means that many Gullah/Geechees can no longer fish as they did in the past. The combination of legal restrictions with competition from trawlers on available fish thus squeeze the Gullah/Geechee in this key subsistence activity. Consequently, they no longer have a freezer full of fish to help make it through winter. Raising hogs isn’t as popular as it used to be, and chickens are not far behind. The indirect effects include a range of actions from reconsidering fishing trips with grandkids to many younger locals viewing fishing as risky.

Dependency

Denial of access (whether physical or legal), harassment from DNR, and competition with outsiders are undermining traditional subsistent practices. Each of these various pressures encourage locals to purchase their fish from mainland markets. This in turn creates dependency of the Gullah/Geechee on mainland markets for fish. This represents the completion of the destructionment of Gullah/Geechee fishing livelihoods. Where once Gullah/Geechee

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communities had previously been self-sufficient with regard to fish by their own practices, they are now made dependent on fish caught by others which they now must buy.

Queen Quet: You can no longer be self-sufficient, now you must buy your fish from me. If I am now, Kmart, Walmart, the local restaurant, whatever. You’re now coming here to eat whatever you used to eat at home because you can’t catch it any more without getting fined. You become dependent upon me and are no longer independent… herein lies the problem.

Hence the combination of the other insults to Gullah/Geechee fishing – denial of access, regulatory abuse, and competition – together result in dependency on external markets.

In turn, external dependency pressures generate internal effects among the homes and families of Gullah/Geechee communities. This is because Gullah/Geechee fishing involves norms of distribution and reciprocity. Whereas community fishermen provide their take to their neighbors, neighbors for their part provide goods and services to community fishermen.

Queen Quet: If they have it their way, [our neighbors] won’t come to us anymore. And so here we have a whole systemic issue of trying to cause dependency where none existed before. It’s like a drug dealer, I gave you the first one for free because you’re gonna keep coming back. And them and their children are going to keep coming back, it’s a long-term plan. They’re going to keep coming back because they never learned how to fish.

This transition has serious implications for community relations.

Queen Mother: If your neighbor won’t give you a slice of bread, do you think they’re going to help when the storm comes?

Dependency on markets for fish thus undermines Gullah/Geechee social relations, with potentially negative ramifications for Gullah/Geechee community. Rather than catching the fish themselves as they have for generations, the Gullah/Geechee are now forced to rely on transportation, availability, and income to purchase the fish they would have preferred to catch themselves. The economics of Gesellschaft relations directly contradict Gemeinshaft practices for subsistence and community maintenance via relations of reciprocity.

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Market dependency thus replaces social reciprocity as the means of acquiring fish.

Gesellschaft replaces Gemeinschaft, and economic exchange replaces social exchange. The economic rationale not only threatens the larger culture, it artificially seeks to create value by claiming the standard fish catch to be a delicacy.

Queen Mother: When you’re in the city, nobody gives you nothing. Everything you get you have to buy. So, then I feel that if we live here in this country and have some farmland, why not grow something that we eat. So, during the winter months, I grow collard greens and rutabagas. I have some of that in my freezer right now, all I have to do is stew down some beef and throw in some collard greens and I’m good. You’ll only see that in Hilton Head for $20 or $30 a plate.

This description outlines the classic shift from Gemeinschaft traditions to Gesellschaft market exchanges. The flip side of these changes however concerns the destructionment of

Gemeinschaft practices, which are actively undermined by Gesellschaft relationships. The commodification of subsistence thus proceeds by the degradation of traditional practices which then impose market relationships. Scholars such as Longo, Clausen, and Clark (2015) have described this process as the “tragedy of the commodity” to highlight the economic forces in transforming and undermining oceanic environments.

Making fish a delicacy becomes a means of dispossession and thus social destructionment. Once again,

Queen Quet: How much would bass cost to eat in a local restaurant? That’s another reason to drive prices up and drive us out. They don’t want us eating what they consider to be “a delicacy” even though this has been a part of my diet all along. Because if we fished commercially, with the hotels and the restaurants who buy up everything, we’d make more money. We ain’t making any money with these Gullah/Geechees giving fish to one another.

In the framework of destructionment, the shifts have multiple aspects as described above: physical changes in access, environmental changes in sustainability of resource use, institutional changes in entities that regulate, legal changes in the regulations themselves, cultural changes in the importance of fish, and social changes in community fishing and reciprocity. Their net result

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concerns the economic changes made manifest in the imposition of market relationships via dependency on fish purchased in stores. The imposition of market relationships in turn places burdens on the Gullah/Geechee, and thus constitutes another means of displacement. Over the past decade, increased competition from outsiders, harassment, and loss of access has tended to result in a steady decrease in protein by community members.

For their part, the Gullah/Geechee resist the impositions of Gesellschaft society in various ways, including over claims made by outsiders about fishing. In seeking to challenge the

DNR policies that enable the creation of dependency, the Gullah/Geechee are faced with challenging the statistical claims on which they rest. While the bulk of local communities rely on subsistence fishing, some have found a vocation in fishing and running bait shops.

Ed: I’m a commercial fisherman… The main thing is, they talk about what scientists say, what scientists say, what scientists say, scientists don’t have a clue what goes on around here. They talk about some statistic they’ve got down on paper from somewhere. I’m going based on what’s really out there.

When the Gullah/Geechee mobilize to protect their surrounding ecosystems backed by expert testimony and real-world evidence, they are labelled ‘emotional natives.’ When they contend that environmental regulation has gone overboard and actively enables harassment, they are presented as green criminals without respect for nature.

The Gullah/Geechee have been so effectively excluded and marginalized from the realm of policy that outsiders refuse to acknowledge their culture as distinct from mainland Beaufort.

At times, it looks to be an unwinnable situation. This circumstance has not slowed the

Gullah/Geechee from mobilizing for basic recognition among policy makers and introducing their own legislation.

Queen Quet: Michael Rivers is our representative; he was one of the few people who fought against the change because he’s from here. He’s fighting on our behalf and trying to put our bill through right now. The rest of them from up country, they don’t live on water. To them “well y’all are over-fishing is what we heard, and the

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scientists tell us ain’t enough of this one fish so that’s the justification so you can’t catch but one now.

The Gullah/Geechee have thus sought a suite of strategies to offset or otherwise mitigate the negative consequences of impositions on fishing, whether via the shift to oysters and the annual replanting celebration or by pursuing legislative and other legal means of recourse. The contrast in these strategies is noteworthy: the first reasserts traditional relationships in Gullah/Geechee society by invoking community activities, where the second engages the outside society’s institutions to recognize Gullah/Geechee rights and practices.

Conclusions

Daily challenges to Gullah/Geechee subsistence fishing constitute the less visible threat in the Gesellschaft invasion. But the multifaceted challenges of access, criminalization, competition and dependency nonetheless constitute serious threats to Gullah/Geechee livelihoods and culture. What is more, the threats to land rights parallel in many ways and directly influence in some ways the threats to fishing rights. The same outside interests, regulatory institutions and market forces that lead to gates and fakes also lead to the problems of fishing while Black: in both cases, the result is exclusion and displacement. Further, displacement on land in turn hinders displacement in water via denial of access and more.

The parallels and relationships of land and fishing displacement thus reveal the extensive and intricate relationships at play that are collectively captured by the concept of destructionment. Destructionment thus applies to conflicts among groups that traverse land areas as well as the waters edge and recognizes the biological integrity of both as being subject to numerous types of harm. As we saw in the previous chapter how gates represent and embody mechanisms of physical exclusion of the Gullah/Geechee, gates also permit the constitution of social spaces where cultural fakes misappropriate and thus misrepresent the Gullah/Geechee.

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Similarly, in this chapter, denial of access, regulatory discrimination and abuse, external competition and dependency on markets all serve to undermine Gullah/Geechee fishing practices as well as the relations of social reciprocity that constitute cultural practices in their communities.

Environmental studies have tended to treat land and water conflicts as separate, resulting in specialist treatments in the academic literature. Destructionment avoids essentializing land and water as distinct arenas instead emphasizing the interconnectedness of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. The concept of destructionment allows for a more holistic perspective on land and water conflicts, not only by showing that they have common origins, but also that the processes at play generate numerous different manifestations of the outcomes. Moreover, destructionment forces us to attend to the many relationships among the processes operating, for the degradation of cultures and environments is eminently related, as is the degradation of land and waters.

In the process, an analysis of fishing destructionment calls attention to processes featured in critiques and emendations of old renditions of the shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft.

Destructionment forces us to recognize that the shift is eminently conflictive, that it comes at the expense of traditional rural societies, that it features the appropriation and degradation of natural resources by outsiders, that it involves racism and racial discrimination, and that rural societies have means of responding adaptively by drawing on both their cultures as well as Gesellschaft instititions to defend their traditional claims and practices. On that note, the strategies and practices of the Gullah/Geechee to respond to the many external threats they face deserves further attention. I suggest that destructionment is not merely a concept to describe the dynamics and relationships of threats and harms. It also provides a conceptual foundation for

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understanding how the Gullah/Geechee and other traditional peoples respond by drawing on their cultural resources. The next chapter takes up this issue of resiliency and family.

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CHAPTER 6 LAYERS OF FAMILY

Queen Quet: So that’s when you realize, wait a minute. Family is people who look out for you. So, when you look at family from that perspective, we have so many interlocking circles of family here it’s amazing. It starts looking like a DNA double helix… it’s really a powerful thing. Having travelled up and down the Gullah/Geechee Nation, makes it even more pronounced to me, our kinship on St. Helena.

In answering the final research question ‘How do the Gullah/Geechee make sense of their community’s ability to sustain their living culture?’, the answer had less to do with programmatic efforts and more with personal affinities between people. Here we find another original Gullah/Geechee concept, the layers of family. When and who exactly coined the term remains unclear. Nevertheless, the idea provides a fitting description of the hundreds of interpersonal ties which unite the Nation. These… “[c]ommunal relationships may rest on various types of affectual, emotional or traditional bases.” (Weber 1921, 41) The community is not just a collection of individuals, it is a mass constituting a unity of social, cultural, economic, religious, and linguistic spheres. Layers of family also speaks directly to and offers a superior extension of the classical sociological ideal type. Tonnies described three types of gemeinschaft community; kinship, neighborhood, and friendship. He described the community classifiations depending on the type of bonds; kinship (by blood), neighborhood (of place), and friendship (of mind).

Layers of Family

All three types of Gemeinschaft are closely interrelated in space, as well as in time. They are, therefore, also related in all such single phenomena and in their development as well as the general human culture and its history… human beings are related through their wills in an organic manner and affirm each other. (1887, 195)

According to the Gullah/Geechee, there are five qualities that explain resiliency of their remaining communities and endurance of their culture. The Island, and arguably larger Nation, is

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perhaps best described as a large extended family. The grand kinship network, building directly over the plantation infrastructure, has remained geographic in its character throughout much of the Corridor. This distinction has been and remains noticeable within the way people talk

(McDavid and McDavid, 1951). These differences appear quite stark between St. Helena and nearby ciy of Beaufort.

Queen Quet: Beaufort always had the attitude “we’re not Gullah, we’re not that. We’re not Geechee, we don’t talk like that and all. So that was another bond that formed, where the whole island is considered family…

The arrival of bridges effectively linked the two racially distinct social worlds. This historical shift both demonstrated the racial formation of Gullah/Geechee identity as it had formed over the past several centuries but the racialization of St. Helena territory as well (Hardy, Milligan, and

Heynen 2017, Cooper 2017). While the bridge laid the groundwork for the invasion, it also re- united locals in a larger sense of family as distinguished from Beaufort.

Kinship

On the island, family names retain their importance since it indicates the branch which situates an individual within the larger Gullah/Geechee family tree. Following emancipation, the growth of Gullah/Geechee communities continued to develop organically according to the free movement of families along various waterways.

Queen Quet: Before the bridges… the waterways were always the way we went back and forth... and our family members migrated along water. So, the so-called boundaries that the county has doesn’t mean much to us.

Families are often located next to each other based on the size of the plot among other familial dynamics. Residing on shared or adjacent piece of land is often an indicator of kinship given that land is the primary form of property throughout the Nation. This has been reinforced by heirs’ property law, where siblings often end up sharing a piece of property as neighbors along a road or a creek not far from where they were raised. Kinship, dense social networks, and strong

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community bonds on St. Helena provide a stark contrast to the surrounding mainland social relationships. Gullah/Geechee notions of family, and corresponding support, go well beyond just extended branches. Many of these gated communities appear to have few ties (outside perhaps a rare homeowners association) especially since many of the homes are only used for two weeks out of the year during vacation season.

Neighborhood

Ed: It’s the first question locals ask when you say you’re from the island. They ask what area you’re from. But back in the day, they used to ask what plantation you were from.

“Neighborhood describes the general character of living together in the rural village. The proximity of dwellings, the communal fields, and even the mere contiguity of holdings necessitates the connection of human beings and cause inurement to and intimate knowledge of one another.” (Tonnies 1887, 195) The geographic isolation and post-civil war history of the Sea

Islands led hundreds of families to grow into the Nation observed today. Unlike Hilton Head, these plantations still bare their original names. Frogmore, Wallace, Eustis, Cuffy, MacTaureous,

Tombee, Scott, Lands’ End, Coffin Point, and Tom Fripp today are basically neighborhoods comprised of overlapping family names. Some communities are tucked back from the road between other neighborhoods and don’t really have names. It’s not uncommon for a dirt road to go a short way through the woods before opening into a large familial plot with several homes.

This remarkable and popular attachment to the various places throughout St. Helena retains strong affective, cognitive, and behavioral components (Scannell and Gifford 2010). In many instances, these attachments extend beyond the lives of the elders and are contained within the details of the local oral histories.

Queen Mother: To be home, is where my grandfather owned this 10-acre plot in the 1800’s and when it went up for sale, my father bought it. Because we used to live across the road. Ever since he bought this property, I’m one of the Holmes, where one brother bought his plot half live across the highway where it’s noisy. The other

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brother, my father, bought this ten-acre plot so we have peace and quiet. And I love it because it’s only family that lives here on this plot. My children grew up here.… I like to dig in the dirt a little bit when I am able.

Tiffany, the young lawyer who had recently moved to St. Helena, described the feeling as having returned home despite not having lived there before.

Tiffany: I already know who I am, but it is affirmed when the people around you know who you are. And I don’t get questions aside from ‘who are your people?’ and that’s what I’m accustomed to. ‘Whose are you?’

Kinship and strong relationships between neighbors run deep; it provides a sense of belonging.

Tiffany: To me, home is where I am known without having to speak. Even when I do speak, that makes me even more known. By when I open my mouth, living and working between here and Beaufort… I can be in Walmart and someone will recognize my face and they’ll ask, “are you related to so-and-so?” Because something about me looks familiar to them and it’s not just because my skin is brown. And then when I tell them my last name, oh are you related to so-and-so. I reply I don’t know but want to find out. And that’s how I knew I’m home even as kids and now as an adult, I can go somewhere and strangers know exactly who I am and they might not even know my parents, or grand parents but by looking at me they know who’s I am. And those same names are right here. It seemed to me that is no better place for me to figure out how do we get over there. It’s beyond uncanny. I just don’t know which steps they took.

While blood relation is important and is often reflected within the organization of each neighborhood, thus it is incredibly easy to confuse kinship with friendship. Relative to the mainland, the Gullah/Geechee’s strong and dense community network structure places a great deal of importance on friendship.

Friendship

Within Gemeinschaft communities, friendship is a central feature within daily life serving as the overarching theme for the local organization and division of labor. The community on the island is so intertwined that it is difficult to distinguish exactly who all is blood related; friendship appears indistinguishable from blood to many outsiders (myself included).

Queen Quet: Sometimes people are like why, you’re kin to everyone. And I’m like oh, I am not actually bloodkin with that person. But there’s the close bond, so sometimes you

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have to distinguish, “this is my real family” because… they’ll look out for you the same way.

These strong friendships often serve as channels for resources, a prime example being food.

Queen Quet: So if you want fish or something, I’ll ask one of the guys. They say “ok what kind do you want… alright I’ve got you. They’ll go ahead and make sure you have that because they know you don’t particularly go in the creek. So, they’ll make sure that you have something that they get. That’s the other layer of family, whether you’re bloodkin or not, there’s a family bond on this island.

The importance of friendship cannot be understated throughout the Sea Islands.

In addition to gemeinschaft’s three-part typology (kinship, neighborhood, friendship), the

Gullah/Geecheee layers of family also include an additional two categories (religion and graduating class). Tonnies had included mentions to these types of bonds as extensions of friendship. While his simplified classification makes sense, in the case of St. Helena it fails to describe the qualitatively different roles and character of these bonds. Like many rural areas, religion and who you went to school with form lasting bond. These ties often play a central role in social life.

Religion

The Gullah/Geechee religious tradition is a combination of Christianity mixed with ancestral tellings and interpretations. The Gullah transcription of De Nyew Testament was released in 2005 during a heritage celebration at the Penn Center on St. Helena. Local praise houses are scattered throughout the Sea Islands uniting numerous families across the waterways.

These small buildings initially emerged in response to non-assembly laws during slavery and became integrated into the religious practice. Some praise houses are prominently displayed along key roads and serve as a stop for cultural tourism. Others are hidden from the general public and serve as a more personal spiritual connection for those nearby. Like throughout much of the South, the church remains an important institution throughout the Corridor.

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Queen Quet: Then there’s the praise house and church, your spiritual and religious family. People take it seriously who your godparent is. Who took you out of the water during the baptism. They are someone you can look to for guidance. That’s a whole another circle. So, we have all layers.

Social ties extend throughout congregation and broader parishes, this partially includes

Lowcountry Black churches to the north and south. Queen Quet has a series of works that have a religious or spiritual element (2012, 2015). Although religion and education tend to overlap depending on where you live, they remain distinct social spheres.

Graduating Class

The layers of family also include a unique attachment to who they went to school with.

This is important for many Gullah/Geechee because of how the education system sought to assimilate their culture over the past two centuries. On St. Helena, the Penn School was established in 1862 by Quaker Missionaries and was the first school in the South for educating the children of freed slaves. It is located a block south of the central intersection in Frogmore and not far from the St. Helena Branch Library. For nearly a century, the school had been the central education institution in the area. The Penn School ceased operation in 1948 and reopened in

1950 as the Penn Community Services Center. Its new aim was to provide support for locals

(trained midwives, daycare, cafeteria, and a health clinic). Martin Luther King frequented the island and hosted a series of conferences there. Perhaps the most well-known was Southern

Christian Leadership Conference staff workshop at the Penn Center in 1966. It was designated a

National Historic Landmark in 1974 and two of its buildings (Brick Baptist Church and Darrah

Hall) were declared part of the Reconstruction Era Monument in January 2017. Historically, the

Penn Center had a mission statement claiming to “preserve Gullah culture”. More realistically, the institution served to assimilate and discourage Gullah/Geechee culture. Decades later, the center became Penn Center, Incorporated and now seeks to exploit the local culture for tourism

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purposes. Overall, Penn did little to preserve Gullah/Geechee culture. Like the contemporary schools of today, it brought young people together and formed lasting ties at an early age.

Queen Quet: St. Helena for me has different levels of family. Everybody else has been describing the bloodkin. But also, throughout the Gullah/Geechee Nation, your classmates become your family because they are die hard. So whatever year you graduate, they keep up with where you went at. Did you go to college or the military? Did you get married? How much time have you been married? Where are your children at, what are they doing? You could have graduated fifty years ago; they still keep up with you. And so, if you can say well, I have a classmate that lives in California and somebody says they’re going to California, you say “hold it!” Here’s the phone number, you have got to call so-and-so while you’re going and carry this package. So that’s a family in and of itself.

Graduating classes on the island truly means something. Connections formed in school persist long after graduation; both in terms of social capital and material support. While there are a few remaining ties initially formed at the Penn School, this layer of family has been transferred to the newer schools. Today, St. Helena Elementary, Ladys Island Elementary, and Coosa

Elementry are where many local Gullah/Geechee children are first socialized. From there, young pupils graduate and moving further down the Sea Island Parkway to Lady’s Island Middle

School, and eventually to Beaufort High School across the street. The Gullah/Geechee are industrious people. Their general work ethic can best be described as ‘do it yourself.’ Many of them hold degrees in agriculture, architecture, engineering, and other technical skills.

Subsistence

Subsistence agriculture and aquaculture are an essential part of community life on St.

Helena. While it does not constitute a separate layer of family, it is hard to separate subsistence practices from the dense community network since food are often distributed along these channels. Rather, self-sufficiency can be viewed here as the result of the strong bonds associated with the layers of family.

Ed: The people here on the island, we didn’t have grocery stores. We were always self-sufficient, that’s what makes it home. We always a way to survive, even when hurricanes

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came through, we had a way to survive. In wintertime, we go get oysters and catch some wintertime fish. And then in the summertime, we farm. We get a lot of farming done in the spring, summer, and into fall.

The cultural practices surrounding food are central parts of daily life. The harvest and catch are distributed among different households from there.

Ed: Okra, tomatoes, and if someone had a cow or hog, they raised. When it came time, they would spread the pieces of meat around to the family. We share.”

Ms. Brown added how some aspects of this shared practices have changed over the years.

Queen Mother: My father would send me around the neighborhood with a pan for each house… younger people today are not doing much of that because it’s more modern. Even if you raise the hog, you don’t have to kill it yourself. You take it to the to the market and get it arranged however you want.

Collective food practices are not a uniform tradition throughout the Corridor, it tends to be place specific. Many communities have become so fragmented that fences, individual property, and economic rationality has come to entirely replace more communal understandings of land and nature found elsewhere.

Abeena: Over onJohn’s Island, whoever’s name is on that map, you stay here… They better not catch you getting in the boat going across the creek because that’s going to be a problem. So, when you start looking at the historical dynamic you start seeing a difference and nuance throughout the Nation.

These nuanced dynamics differ depending on the developmental legal and local planning patterns. Accordingly, destructionment is broader historical-geographic process which unfolds at the property parcel level with asymmetrical effects.

Conclusions

In the wake of destructionment and increasing outsider encroachment, this chapter has discussed how the layers of family as primary means through which the Gullah/Geechee has managed to sustain their culture. It presents the Gullah/Geechee Nation as a large extended family with countless network ties uniting their people across space and time. These layers

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correspond to different times of bonds including kinship, neighborhood, friendship, religion, and graduation class. The layers of family elevate the importance of spiritual and socialized bonds by differentiating them from Tonnies ‘friendship’ classification. These numerous connections simultaneously serve to channel cultural information, traditional knowledge, resources, and at times even mobilize in defense of the Gullah/Geechee identity and their remaining islands.

During times of disaster, such as hurricanes or financial collapse, the layers of family serve as the primary resource. Even though no Gullah/Geechees on St. Helena have access to say the resources of Hilton Head, everyone gets taken care of. Many folks on St. Helena lost a lot during the 2018 hurricane season but as soon as the roads were open Gullah/Geechees from elsewhere in the Cooridor were caravanning in with necessities. This comraderie also exists outside of emergencies. Mobilization against destructionment grown into as a constant and daily emergency unto itself. Focusing on the city and county levels is no longer enough. A series of larger coalition protests (mostly focusing on environmental issues) in the Columbia have the appearance of something resembling a nascent social movement. Such mobilization cannot come soon enough. From new zoning proposals and taxes, to seismic testing and offshore drilling, the departure of the one supportive judge in the Beaufort courthouse; the steady creep of development has posed a much more serious loss to the Gullah/Geechee than any hurricane season ever did.

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CHAPTER 7 CONCLUSIONS

The ‘developmental’ process at the heart of this dissertation has been described here as

Gesellschaft incursion into Gullah/Geechee Gemeinschaft communities. These threats include the highly visibile arrival of gates (of private retirement resort communities) and fakes seeking to commoditize the Gullah/Geechee’s identity. The threats of destructionment are also observed within assaults to their subsistent fishing practices. These three manifestations not only deteriorate the social character of community relations and undermine the community’s subsistent practices, but also represent a larger effort to assimilate Gullah/Geechee culture into economic-based rationality.

In addressing the general question of threats facing local Gullah/Geechee communities, chapter four explored how the process of destructionment is accompanied by the arrival of gates and fakes. Outsiders seeking to capitalize on land for the creation of lucrative retirement resorts via heirs’ property laws have produced pressures on the Gullah/Geechee community. This includes forcing partition sales as well as caricaturizing the Gullah/Geechee identity in the form of cultural misappropriation in an effort to gain profit in the local tourism industry. These daily threats differ in their nature, the former constituting an immediate material threat of land theft which limits traditional farming practices and serves the place-based attachment of locals to their ancestral homes. The latter constitutes a more abstract threat, one which dilutes the reclaimed

Gullah/Geechee name in hopes of accruing financial gains. Preserving the remaining tracts of land remain a primary focus. This invasion has actively been facilitated by probate and intential changes within the law which have enabled drastic changes to the landscape alongside the denial of access to the surrounding waterways.

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In addition to land theft and the physical alterations of the landscape, the market-oriented relations associated with Gesellschaft destructionment brings about numerous attacks on

Gullah/Geechee fishing practices. These affronts were explored in chapter five and include the denial of physical and legal access, harassment by DNR enforcement officers, competition with outsiders, and ultimately dependency on mainland markets for fish. Thousand-dollar fines have effectively criminalized Gullah/Geechee fishing practices and fear of taking such costs actively discourages young people from participating in subsistent aquaculture. This criminalization of fishing constitutes a less visible manifestation of destructionment but threatens the livelihoods of the community and its cultural practices all the same.

Coupled with the denial of access and loss of land, cultural misappropriation constitutes an abstract threat associated with the arrival of outsiders and destructionment. These two processes at first glance do not appear linked but are in fact inseparable. As Gesellschaft relations have corroded Gullah/Geechee Gemeinschaft, it has created a space which seeks to capitalized on their reclaimed identity. The arrival of outsiders provides the market and expectation to which fake cultural actorsare happy to provide in exchange for the price of admission. The same vein of racism runs through the outsider legal strategies stripping the

Gullah/Geechee of their land and private efforts to misappropriate their symbols and identity.

The incredibly offensive portayls would not be possible had the original Gullah/Geechee townships and island ecosystems not been bulldozed to make way for retirement resorts.

Destructionment is a total process and one should avoid parceling the effects.

In the face of these threats, the Gullah/Geechee community has demonstrated a remarkable capacity to resist external pressures and sustain their cultural livelihood. The community’s strength appears to be derived from their layers of family and numerous strong

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bonds which hold local communities together in face of destructionment. Accordingly, the

Gullah/Geechee Nation can be described as a large extended family. As discussed throughout chapter six, the layers of family include kinship, neighborhood, friendship, religion, and graduating class. The thoroughly intertwinted bonds of this understanding go beyond Tonnies’ community typology, suggesting that religion and scholastic cohorts are distinct extensions of friendship. These numerous connections simultaneously serve to channel cultural information, pass down traditional knowledge in the form of oral histories, retain resources for the community, and mobilize in defense of the Gullah/Geechee culture.

Corroding Community Customs

Situated within a classical sociological understanding, the phenomenon of destructionment and the various threats facing the Gullah/Geechee community are akin to the process through which Gesellschaft market relations corrode Gemeinschaft community relations.

By revisiting the Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft ideal type, we can recognize the invasion as a contemporary manifestation of the complex and centuries-old conflict between two distinct ways of social life. As I have argued, the Gullah/Geechee constitute a unique insulated case which also includes the added complexity of race and ethnicity previously neglected from the ideal type.

Rather than prioritizing the city, Tonnies’ initial theorization speaks to the defense of traditional livelihoods and preservation of the pastoral land and seascapes. Weber’s orienting rationalities illustrate how these distinct ways of life reinforce themselves within local modes of thinking. In turn, these ways of thinking then reinforce certain actions. The resultant actions either uphold

Gullah/Geechee community traditions or market-oriented exchange with the intent of accruing profit. Such a consequence represents an either/or scenario. That is, you cannot sell the fish and eat it too.

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Additionally, Weber’s emphasis on fluidity (via the gerund conceptual forms) speaks to the way gesellschaft relations have morphed into abstract attacks on identity. Beyond the material conflict overland, vergesellschaftung ‘socialization’ aim to claim the Gullah/Geechee identity for private financial gains while stripping it of it’s meaning. In the context of St. Helena, this corresponds to cultural misappropriation and usurpation of cultural tourism by fakes.

Weber’s relational emphasis helps us understand why Hilton Head officials would drive out

Gullah/Geechee locals and then pay actors to deliver scripted racist portrayals, all while claiming their name as a vehicle to celebrate Black events to the exclusion of inviting actual Black folks.

In extending the ideal-type to consider various types of harm, this study further addressed the material-ideal dichotomy which has limited previous work.

By centering its analysis around the experience of the Gullah/Geechee and building upon

Queen Quet’s conception of destructionment, this study allows us to move beyond the material- ideal dichotomy. The concept lays bare the multi-pronged attacks on Gullah/Geechee land rights, daily practices, and culture associated with the invasion of affluent white outsiders.

Destructionment posits a fundamental challenge to popular development narratives and corresponding claims of progress. It draws upon ecology, culture, and social inequality to demonstrate the toxic effects of constructing private retirement resorts over the cultural jewel that are the remaining Gullah/Geechee communities. Should the policies and economics of this process be continued to devour whole islands and peoples unchecked, it will not be long until the

Corridor is reduced to giant gated area void of cultural diversity reserved only for those who can afford access.

While retaining focus on land use and issues of access, the norion of destructionment goes beyond the urban focus associated gentrification. Destructionment also integrates an

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atypical understanding of environmental burdens from EJ studies to consider the racial politics of the environment. The concept recognizes various types of harm, ranging from material threats such as land loss and ecological destruction to more abstract issues of identity and cultural misappropriation. The concept of destructionment has a lot to offer the social and environmental sciences, since it is not strictly confined to the Sea Islands but applies to processes affecting rural areas more generally. This offers valuable insight to other traditional and indigenous peoples faced with a similar multifaceted onslaught. Thus, the processes that threaten the Gullah/Geechee bear application to other contexts, where the specific details may differ, but the concept still applies, and the multiple dimensions are integratively treated.

Future Research

In advancing a systematic study of destructionment, the concept should be further developed by exploring the institutional (legal) dimensions of the phenomenon. This study of destructionment has informed the prospect of a more specific definition, as well as one which preserves the concepts expansive intent as being organized around a framework of multiple dimensions’ harm unfolding as a series of complimentary processes. This study has employed destructionment and its broad consideration of harm as a bridge to the materialist/idealist divide.

Further research is needed to reinforce and popularize the theorization.

An analysis of the legal system as the institutional driver behind destructionment and its relationship with the destructionires is required. Both in terms of advancing grassroots legal efforts but to further explore the develop the concept. Everything from the agency of local judges and their internal politics, to the established precidents and how they might be undone, to the implementation of the Clementa Pinckney Uniform Partititon of Heirs’ Property Act within the courts all warrant serious exploration. Other supporting research could be benefial on issues of

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land use change, political ecology, and documenting the present standing of different plots in hopes of identifying Gullah/Geechee lands presently at risk.

While many scholars have been quick to begin collecting data on the surrounding ecosystem, further exploration of Gullah/Geechee subsistence and investigation into how market-oriented pressures have affected these practices are a fruitful pursuit for further research.

One worthy differentiation which ought to be distinguished is how the inter-generational changes are distinct from economic rationalit. An examination of how these pressures manifest within the perceptions among Gullah/Geechee youth of their heritage and issues within the transference of traditional practices are areas which certainly warrant further study. Furthermore, exploring new avenues for protecting their land from forced partition sales remain a top priority. This undoubtably requires further study of heirs’ property law throughout the Corridor, including variations within local laws and state-based applications of probate.

In terms of situated PAR and situated solidarities, this project was the first study assessing the Sea Island landscape and becoming introduced to many new ideas. It was a learning experience for everyone involved. My resources in the forms of networks and opportunities to access resources proved to be helpful. Past organizing experiences helped me get up to speed on ongoing mobilization and a sense of other cultural efforts relatively quickly. As a graduate student, my personal support in organizing and activist resources were appreciated.

Some academic tools such as bibliometric and geospatial visualizations also proved helpful in communicating the harms associated with destructionment to outsiders.

The racial dynamic of affluent outsiders and stigmatized Gullah/Geechee identities appears to only celebrate cultural diversity when it is convient for white organizations. An all white Juneteenth Celebration in an affluent gated neighborhood is in many ways a celebration of

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exclusion. The burden has been unjustly placed on local Gullah/Geechees to communicate their opposition to cultural misappropriation and anxieties over land theft to a group of people who for the most part appear indifferent. Overcoming this dynamic is a much-needed next step for arriving at an authentic representation within the public eye, this could open new opportunities for strengthening the Nation and mobilizing to ensure the next generation will be able to retain the remaining lands.

More broadly, PAR runs the risk of substituting small-scale participation for genuine democracy and fails to develop strategies for social transformation on all levels. A primary limitation of this study is the small sample size of the focus groups and interviews which raise concerns of limited generalizability. This project rightfully remained at the small scale as it explored three general community driven questions. Further rearch is needed to consider geographic variability within the process of destructionment throughout other Gullah/Geechee communities elsewhere. This dissertation would have to be expanded significantly to realize a larger democratic effort to transform the encroachment surrounding St. Helena.

Implications for Sustaining Activism

The fall of Lady’s Island is presently underway, and it is difficult to watch as new gated developments and golf courses are constructed over ancestral Gullah/Geechee land. A Walmart and Taco-Bell also recently arrived on Lady’s Island next to the airport. The encroachment extends along the Sea Island Parkway into St. Helena and shows little signs of slowing as new establishments have begun to arrive in Frogmore. The line between Gullah/Geechee and retirement communities has become increasingly fragmented with new outsider homes are presently being constructed at Lands End and Coffin Point.

Resources are desperately needed to protect St. Helena from following the fate of Hilton

Head. Messaging needs to continue striving to convey whats at stake among policy makers and

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retirees who enable destructionment. The Gullah/Geechee people mobilize as a community, and as a result have its full weight when taking on an issue. Accordingly, their community and the wealth of cultural capital therein is itself their greatest resource. The layers of family not only serve as a vehicle for managing their identity, but also function as a means for organizing as a

Nation.

Queen Quet: So, people always ask, what do you think is going to happen? I say, “we are going to be right here.” We Gullah/Geechees knew to build on the high land. Look at the latest report from the Union of Concerned Scientists that came out a few days ago. They keep talking about how Hilton Head is one of the worst places to live for flooding, and poor Charleston too. They don’t ever mention St. Helena, because we are on higher ground. And so, we know that in the future, God will have us here just like they had our ancestors here for the last four hundred years. I’m not worried about that.

Resiliency, whether to climate disaster, cultural misappropriation, or another gated retirement resort, is ultimately derived from the people who build and reinforce their community in response to these threats.

St. Helena locals are empowered by strong sense of family but remain thoroughly marginalized from the policymakers over the bridge in Beaufort. Presently, the primary challenge is translating this vibrant living culture into other forms of capital, most importantly financial resources. Financial capital is desperately needed to hire lawyers, advance public awareness campaigns, and disaster relief efforts (such as Hurricane Florence). The

Gullah/Geechee Angel Network, Rising Sea, and Land & Legacy fundraisers have certainly been promising beginings. However, there remains a long way to go before the Gullah/Geechee reach their sizeable goals. The real goal is to have resources available, or even to have the ability to purchase the land that they inhabit.

When a group is in possession of materials or qualities that others desire, whether it be an authentic traditional community, ancestral knowledge, or land along the coast; that group then

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faces the immediate risk of commoditization. Communicating such threats to the broader population and policymakers also demands further expressing the Gullah/Geechee community’s uniqueness and sharing that which makes this island so special. However, celebrating the community’s unique identity must be done in a way that discourages affluent retirees from partnering with destructionaires to force more partition sales. Thus, effective resistance may require organized representation within the public sphere, court room, and even marketplace.

Essentially, this means continuing to escalate the work the Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition but on a larger scale. Outsiders interested in supporting ought to consider becoming a member of the Coalition and contributing resources to aid in sustaining the living culture.

Celebrating their culture and keeping it at the forefront of their mobilization effort constitutes a tactic unto itself since it draws visibility and celebrates their ancestors simultaniously. St. Helena is known for the Gullah/Geechee and occupying their spaces with visible celebrations of identity make it known that if you’re looking for a golf course, this is not the place. Culture can serve as both a shield from outsiders and a beacon for their returning cousins seeking to authenitically reconnect with their roots. However, a key barrier on this front is the fake tour groups which make it difficult for those people seeking to learn more or reconnect with their Gullah/Geechee heritage to have an authentic experience. As more fakes arrive in the Corridor, its is increasingly difficult to distinguish who is authentic

Gullah/Geechees, especially for outsiders who are visited the area for the first time.

These community efforts have managed to win a number of significant victories. The

Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage Act from the United States Congress in 2005 which established the Corridor was a huge step forward. This victory brought with it the aforementioned 2006 NPS designation of the Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage Coordior and

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corresponding Federal Commission (https://gullahgeecheecorridor.org). The Comission has been tasked with

recognizing, sustaining, and celebrating the Gullah/Geechee by assisting state and local governments preserve folklore, arts, crafts, and music; and to assist in identifying and preserving sites, historical date, artifacts, and obects associated with the Gullah/Geechee people and cultural for the benefit and education of the public. (National Heritage Areas Act of 2006)

The Heritage designation was the result of a tremendous grassroots effort. However, this victory was not without limitations. This Heritage legislation is limited by the home rule of states. This means that the legislation is restricted in protecting the Gullah/Geechee citizens spanning across four states. Given that this designaton is largely symbolic, further intervention is needed to prevent further corrosion. The success of such community efforts is largely responsible for the second and third primary resources.

The second primary resource is the return of young Gullah/Geechees back into the area.

Tiffany and Abeena are two examples of young people who prefer to live nearby the Corridor embracing a traditional sense of belonging and being home. This return migration brings with it new resources and opportunities for defending against the arrival of further gates. Tiffany’s legal skills and labor have already contributed to efforts to protect Gullah/Geechee land. Abeena’s health and beauty products company has advanced representation efforts, being one of the few companies to rightfully claim the identity. Young people returning to (or simply staying put in) the Corridor also represents a chance to pass the torch to the next generation and allow them to improve upon what has already been built. This opportunity does not exist in all Gullah/Geechee communities. For instance, many young people have departed the Hog Hammock community on

Sapelo Island, GA. When the last elder passes, it is unlikely that Gullah/Geechee culture will return to that island. A similar outcome is likely on Hilton Head, albeit for different reasons.

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A third primary resource has been partnerships with other organizations. Two

Gullah/Geechee partnernships with mainland state organizations have proven surprisingly fruitful. The first collaboration has been with the National Park Service (NPS) and in many ways parallels the Corridor Comission. While the the creation of the NPS’s Reconstruction Era

National Monument located in downtown Beaufort in 2018 and local partner sites such as parts of the Penn Center and Mitchelville have helped raise some public awareness

(https://www.nps.gov/reer/index.htm). The primary benefit of this partnership has not been providing financial support, but rather in publicizing a history which has been largely neglected from local and regional history.

The Gullah/Geechee Nation could greatly benefit from more substantial state-level support in altering the present legal-institutonal arrangment. This support could take many forms from indigenous recognition to legal revisions of heirs’ property arrangements. Their unique culture in many ways is lacking support because it falls within an institutional gap left in the mandates of a series of different institutions ranging from the Department of Agriculture to the

Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Although some recognition of status has been granted, the Gullah/Geechee remain a long way from being granted reservation recognition. Such a status seems like one of the few things that could slow gesellschaft encroachment. Given the huge influence destructionaires have over

Beaufort legal structures, mobilization should consider petitioning state or federal agencies instead. This is where most of the recent successes come from opening opportunities for building new coalitions.

The Gullah/Geechee Fishing Bill recently introduced to the South Carolina General

Assembly could effectively decriminalize subsistence fishing by granting recognition of

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subsistence practices. The Gullah/Geechee Fishing Association, supported by the

Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition, have been the primary groups who popularized the petition for the creation of a third subsistent classification be considered alongside sport and commercial.

This effort has made significant advancements inacquiring indigenous fishing rights. Looking forward, this could be framed as a transformative response to climate change to sound more palatable depending on the audience (Pelling 2011). It is perhaps possible to draw upon the precedents established throughout Washington, Oregon, California, Wisconsin, or Minnesota.

Such a policy change would rollback the more recent criminalization of fishing, and uphold the subsistent traditional practices, while providing food as a counter-act mainland dependency pressure. While the effort is still presently unfolding, the legislature has been slow to advance the

Gullah/Geechee fishing bill aimed at relieving the DNR pressures throughout the waterways.

Another notworthy successful partnership has been with the SC Sea Grant Consortium’s quarterly publication, Coastal Heritage. In 2000, a special issue titled ‘Living Soul of Gullah’ authored by John Tibbetts helped further introduce Gullah/Geechee culture to white outsiders in an accurate and palatable reading. The issue has since gone on to win numerous awards, has been reprinted four times, and has been followed with similar strong works including the 2005

‘Gullah’s Radiant Light’. Other smaller partnerships with local green non-profits have also aided in mobilizing across local environmental issues while providing some resources.

Coalitions, partnerships, and publicizing local efforts have been central to the

Gullah/Geechee strategy over the past two decades. In a relatively short period of time, the

Gullah/Geechee have reclaimed their identity, gained substantial regional recognition, and won a series of hard-fought victories. While limited resources are a constant hurdle to preventing further encroachment, larger cultural concerns regarding Gesellschafts adaptability and

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destructionment also need to be considered. Should vast resources become available, slowing the effects of Gesellschaft requires a shift within the legal institutions which facilitate this process.

Local judges exhibit little sympathy for Gullah/Geechee families and remain favorable to forced petition sales. To preserve and empower Gullah/Geechee communities over the coming decades, it is necessary to alter the present legal-institutional arrangement as it presently exists. While gaining access or electing sympathetic judges might be the easiest route, obtaining small alterations to the Heir’s property system could also be greatly beneficial.

In considering the effects of destructionment within the context of classical scholars, this project has afforded a broad consideration of harm beyond strict urban and terrestrial environments. In response to the ongoing invasion, Tonnies would likely encourage further cultural celebrations as a Gemeinschaft effort for promoting solidarity throughout the corridor.

Durkheim, believing in the inevitability of Gesellschaft integration, would likely suggest the traditional community adapt to Gesellschaft relations and position themselves within the cultural tourism industry, online branding, and fishing in a way that permits them to hold onto their land for as long as possible. Weber’s concern for fluidity of Gesellschaft adaptability of social relations would likely add that the Gullah/Geechee have and will continue to benefit from taking control of their cultural narrative and that contesting other attempts to coopt their identity. This will require an increased effort as Gesellschaft seeks to commoditize their identity in the form of further adaptations. Rightfully so, given that fake tour groups and beer brands using the name are not likely to be the last attempts to dispossess their reclaimed identity. Considering the bigger picture, the southeastern US is presently at risk of losing one of its oldest sources of cultural wealth in the name of ‘development’. The arrival of gates, fakes, and fishing pressures have already altered many of the oldest remaining traditional communities in the region. Some people

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will undoubtably get rich off the sale of St. Helena, as many already have. The value gained by such destructionment is negligible when compared to the cultural wealth presently residing on the island. Houses can be rebuilt and even some marshland can be restored, but once the Gullah are gone from St. Helena there is no going back. A people and their customs cannot be revived once gone. Many developers contend this process is inevitable since the arrival of the first bridges, but many locals disagree and plan accordingly. The layers of family that unite St.

Helena have weathered numerous storms over the centuries since the diaspora and have no intention of abandoning their homes anytime soon. Given the incredible value of the

Gullah/Geechee to the region, and St. Helena in particular, the continuation of their ancestral knowledges and traditional practices warrants considerable action before it is too late. How we go about preserving and ensuring the continuation of this incredible culture with the resources at hand is a question that should be asked by everyone, not just citizens of the Gullah/Geechee

Nation.

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APPENDIX FOCUS GROUP INTERVIEW GUIDE

Opening Question • How long have you lived in the area and what is it that makes the Sea Islands home?

Introductory Questions • What other factors have led you to stay in the area?

• Pull Factors - Have you considered moving from the area? o Probe: Why have you considered moving? o Probe: Where have you considered moving to?

• Push Factors - Have you experienced any difficulties with living in the area? o Probe: How have these difficulties affected your daily activities? o Probe: Have your reasons for staying been consistent over the years?

Transition Questions • What does “resiliency” mean to you? (You personally? You as a member of the Gullah/Geehee Nation?) • What do you see as the primary threats to the Gullah/Geechee’s Nation’s living culture?

Key Questions

Development/Present Day Colonialism • How have the Sea Islands changed over recent decades? • How has being Gullah/Geechee changed? (racialized identity, personal experiences) o Probe: Has the rise of ‘cultural tourism’ altered treatment by outsiders? o Probe: How are colonial relations affecting the Sea Islands today?

• What is the relationship between social oppression/exclusion and environmental destruction on St. Helena?

Climate Change • How is climate change affecting St. Helena Island? • What aspects of daily life appear to be most threatened? o Probe: What steps are necessary for slowing these injustices? • How has the Gullah/Geechee Nation responded or adapted to these changes? o Probe: Resistance – What are the present local environmental struggles? • With all these changes in mind, how might the survival of Gullah/Geechee living culture be insured? o Probe: Culture – What can the rest of the world learn from the Gullah/Geechee Nation?

Closing Questions

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The Gullah/Geechee are a strong example of cultural resiliency in the face of colonial oppression and climate change.

• What do you anticipate for the future of the Sea Islands? • What are your hopes for the Gullah/Geechee Nation in the decades to come?

• Do you have any remaining thoughts or comments? Anything else you’d like to express? Perhaps something you’d like to return to or something we missed?

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Ryan Thomson is a scholar-activist and doctoral fellow at the University of Florida. His areas of research focus include rural and environmental sociology with an emphasis on social geography and environmental justice mobilization. He is an active participant within the UF

Graduate Assistants United (GAU), Civic Media Center (CMC), Divest UF, and Gainesville

Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC).

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