Tokens in the Pocosin

O NE OF THE LARGEST groups of American Indians east of the Mississippi is the Lumbee Indians. Although some Lumbees live in urban enclaves in High Point and Greensboro, North Carolina, Richmond, Virginia, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Detroit, the homeland of the Lumbees is Robeson County in southeastern North Carolina. This is POCOSIN country, an area often described as marginal land, because it does not easily fit into the geographical characteristics of the coast, the plains, or the mountains. Pocosin, 'an upland swamp, marsh, bog, or dismal of the southeastern coastal plain', is low wooded ground, usually dry in the summer and covered with water in the rainy season (Bartlett 1859; Craigie and Hulbert 1938; Wentworth 1944). English settlers in Virginia borrowed this Algonquin word from the Indians, using it as the name of a river there as early as 1635 (OED; Stewart 1958). More importantly for the Lumbees and their ancestors, the Pocosin, considered undesirable land by white European settlers, provided an isolated haven in which Lumbees could retain a distinctive ethnic identity and consistently define themselves as Indians (in the sense of Williams 1979, p. 20). Like other cohesive communities, the Lumbees use language as a significant linguistic and cultural marker. Certain words, certain meanings of words, and certain pronunciations signal their ethnic identity and identify outsiders. For example, token, 'supernatural sign of death or evil', is a word frequently used and highly valued by the Lumbees; it functions as a linguistic symbol of their identity. The Lumbees employ token as a TEST ITEM, calling upon non-Lumbees for a definition, an invariable result of which is laughter, much to the puzzlement of the non-Lumbee. Few non-Lumbees can define the word to Lumbee satis

Geography · Linguistics · Lexicography and Language Studies · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity · History · Philosophy

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