The Karankawa, Keepers of the Gulf Coast

For thousands of years before any European ship entered this bay, the people who lived along this stretch of Gulf Coast moved with the seasons. The Karankawa, whose territory ran from Galveston Bay south to Corpus Christi Bay, were coastal people in the deepest sense. They built dugout canoes and poled their way across the shallow bays and lagoons. They fished, gathered shellfish, hunted deer inland during winter, and returned to the coast when the warm months came. They built their shelters from willow branches and animal hides, designed to be assembled and disassembled as they moved.

Spanish missionaries tried repeatedly through the seventeen hundreds to settle the Karankawa into missions near Goliad and Refugio. The Karankawa came and went on their own schedule. They accepted gifts. They ignored sermons. When asked to labor they returned to the coast, because the coast was always sufficient. The missions record them as resistant. What the missions do not record, because no one thought to ask, was what the Karankawa understood the sea and the bay to be: home territory they had inhabited since before any written record exists.

European and Anglo-American accounts later accused the Karankawa of cannibalism, a charge that historians now read with skepticism. The accusations appear to have been exaggerated or invented entirely, a pattern used repeatedly to justify violent dispossession. What is established is that by the mid-eighteen hundreds, the Karankawa had been reduced by war, disease, and forced removal to near disappearance. Most historical sources placed their effective extinction around eighteen sixty.

They were not, however, entirely gone. Today, a group called the Karankawa Kadla, meaning culturally mixed in their language, maintains a tribal council, with clans centered in Corpus Christi and in Galveston. They have come back to the coast that was always theirs.