The Coree were a very small Native American tribe, who once occupied a coastal area south of the Neuse River in southeastern

North Carolina North Carolina ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern region of the United States. It is bordered by Virginia to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, South Carolina to the south, Georgia (U.S. stat ...

in the area now covered by Carteret and Craven counties. Early 20th-century scholars were unsure of what language they spoke,Coree Indian Tribe
in Frederick Webb Hodge, ''Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico'', Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1906, carried on Access Genealogy, accessed Mar 18, 2010 but the coastal areas were mostly populated by

Iroquois The Iroquois ( ), also known as the Five Nations, and later as the Six Nations from 1722 onwards; alternatively referred to by the Endonym and exonym, endonym Haudenosaunee ( ; ) are an Iroquoian languages, Iroquoian-speaking Confederation#Ind ...

and Algonquian peoples.

History

The Coree were not described by English

colonists A settler or a colonist is a person who establishes or joins a permanent presence that is separate to existing communities. The entity that a settler establishes is a settlement. A settler is called a pioneer if they are among the first settli ...

until 1701, by which time their population had already been reduced to as few as 125 members, likely due to epidemics of

infectious disease An infection is the invasion of tissue (biology), tissues by pathogens, their multiplication, and the reaction of host (biology), host tissues to the infectious agent and the toxins they produce. An infectious disease, also known as a transmis ...

and warfare. In the early 18th century, the Coree and several other tribes were allied with the

Iroquoian The Iroquoian languages () are a language family of indigenous peoples of North America. They are known for their general lack of labial consonants. The Iroquoian languages are polysynthetic and head-marking. As of 2020, almost all surviving I ...

Tuscarora against the colonists. In 1711, they participated in the Tuscarora War, trying to drive out the English settlers. The Native Americans were unsuccessful and suffered many fatalities. By 1715, surviving Coree merged with the remaining members of the nearby Algonquian-speaking Machapunga and settled in their single village of Mattamuskeet in present-day Hyde County.Hodge
''Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico''
p. 349. This was on the shore of Lake Mattamuskeet. The Coree soon left the Machapunga and joined the Tuscaroras.

Language

The ethnographer

James Mooney James Mooney (February 10, 1861 – December 22, 1921) was an American ethnographer who lived for several years among the Cherokee. Known as "The Indian Man", he conducted major studies of Southeastern Indians, as well as of tribes on the Great ...

speculated that the Coree were related to the

-speaking

Cherokee The Cherokee (; , or ) people are one of the Indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands of the United States. Prior to the 18th century, they were concentrated in their homelands, in towns along river valleys of what is now southwestern ...

, but he did not have convincing evidence. According to limited colonial reports, they spoke a language that did not appear to be mutually intelligible with any of the three major language stocks ( Carolina Algonquian,

Tuscarora, and Waccamaw Siouan or ''Woccon'') to John Lawson, who described Coree after recording vocabularies of the other three.''Handbook of North American Indians'' (2004, ) On the other hand, the Coree occupied territory that was historically mostly that of Tuscaroras, which suggests they were affiliated with these peoples, whom they ultimately merged into.

References

Bibliography

* * Ives Goddard. (2005). "The Indigenous Languages of the Southeast", ''Anthropological Linguistics'', ''47'' (1), 1–60. * Ruth Y. Wetmore (1975), "First on the Land: The North Carolina Indians" . {{authority control Native American tribes in North Carolina Carteret County, North Carolina Craven County, North Carolina Hyde County, North Carolina Extinct languages of North America Extinct Native American tribes Unclassified languages of North America