The Karankawa Kadla Today

For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Karankawa were listed in history books as extinct. The word extinct was applied to them without much investigation, an assumption that fit the colonial narrative of a coast that had been emptied and then refilled with settlers. The historical record of how many Karankawa survived the wars, the introduced diseases, and the forced displacement of the early eighteen hundreds is incomplete. Exact population figures before European contact are uncertain, though scholars estimate several thousand people across the coastal band from Galveston to Corpus Christi Bay.

What changed in the early twenty-first century was that people who carried Karankawa ancestry began finding each other, first through genealogy research, then through social media. They discovered they were not as isolated as they had assumed. The communities had survived in fragments, dispersed along the same coastal corridor the Karankawa had always inhabited.

In twenty twenty-one, the Texas Tribune reported on a group called the Karankawa Kadla, which means culturally mixed, a name that acknowledges the realities of what five centuries of colonial contact does to a people. The group has established a tribal council with two clans, one centered in Corpus Christi and one in Galveston. They have undertaken efforts to recover cultural practices and language. They do not hold federal recognition, which means they lack the legal protections and resources that recognized tribes receive. That process is long and difficult under current federal standards.

The bay they are returning to is the same bay. The language they are recovering was spoken on these shores. The work of not being extinct turns out to be ongoing.