Dr. Crystal Cavalier-Keck is a citizen of the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation. She is an adjunct professor in the social sciences department at Salem College in Winston Salem. In this oral history interview, Dr. Crystal discusses her upbringing in Alamance County, North Carolina, and reflects on her Afro-Indigenous community and heritage. She also describes her experiences with colonization and how it has shaped her path into becoming an advocate for Indigenous rights and MMIW.
Antoinette: Crystal Cavalier-Keck, thank you so much for being with our Southern Oral History Program today and for helping us to map the movement.
Crystal: Thank you so much for letting me be here, especially with you. You’re always on it and answering it. You’re such a good journalist and I really like the work that you do. So, I’m really honored to be here with you.
Antoinette: Before we get into some of how we met and connected through our MMIW conversation, I’d like to know a little bit about how you grew up in North Carolina. And can you tell us a little bit more about your upbringing?
Crystal: I was born in Alamance County in 1978. Both my parents are from the area. While my mom had a pretty stable upbringing, my dad, he didn’t really have that. He had a really hard life. That kind of shaped how I grew up.
I lived in Alamance County until I was 18. Then, I graduated and just moved to Greensboro and went to college. And then I just moved around. I did a lot of volunteering in my community. I was a senate page in high school for George Daniels, a former state senator. I really got involved in trying to help out with the community. We had a pretty tight-knit community, and I just wanted to just give back.
But I also wanted to leave. My grandparents always instilled in me to, get out of the community. There was nothing to do here. Growing up, I saw a lot of colonization, but I really didn’t know what it was until I went to college. That was when I lived the experiences that I have now.
We had a lot of land and farming that we were doing. We had a huge farming community, but now that’s down to one farmer. And now I can say, from the education I’ve had, that the settler colonizers disrupted and dismantled our way of life.
They refused to see our governance structures, and so we had to acculturate into theirs. This shaped our people, the way colonization does with exploitation and division. Nota lot of people treated us well. They had little regard for the people who lived in these communities. Even in the public schools, we were taught a version of history that kind of shaped the victors.
The United States has a a narrative that glorifies conquest and silencing people who have endured these consequences. I know this as someone who’sAfro-Indigenous. My dad’s mom is of African heritage, and his dad comes from the Nasman people. And my mom is Occaneechi. So learning about what happened here in the South – how our people and tribal histories were erased – led to how my community is today.
Our people are pretty educated and they have land, but there’s still a lot of trauma. They don’t understand their connections to the community or heritage. I’ve likened it to this cultural genocide. It’s trying to erase us.
We’re up here at the Mashpee this weekend, and we were talking about the rights of nature. And this woman was talking about how her dad has been trying to avoid this melting pot to retain his heritage. We call it America’s melting pot, but what do you do when you jump in a pot or put food in a pot of boiling water? All of the scum floats to the top. Who wants to be doing that, to be the scum or on the top? That’s how they say it; everybody who’s on the top is the scum.
You can still see it today in our political society. But we’ve been trying to reclaim our heritage and stories, things like our language and ceremonies. Really, we’re trying to gain a connection back to our ancestors, identity, and the spiritual practices that sustained us.
So that’s just a little bit about me and where I’ve been and where I’m going.
Antoinette: Can you tell us a little more about the Occaneechi Band andthe history of the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation?
Crystal: To understand the roots of these present challenges today,, we have to journey back, almost to the 1500s. When the colonizers came, they first settled here in 1608 in Jamestown, and they were pushing westward. Fast forward to where people got their feelers or how to sustain life here, because this was very foreign to them.
There was a lot of disdain and hostility towards American Indians, and it was growing rapidly among the colonists, right. They framed us as being savage, deemed us less than human, and they denied our right to land and resources – things we shared with them. We were very giving and sharing the knowledge. But they saw that as something to take. And they ingrained in their colonial expansion of wanting more, laying that foundation for widespread violence, exploitation and cultural erasure.
Right around 1676, there was Bacon’s Rebellion, when Nathaniel Bacon had an uprising against Governor Spotslewood. Others who were marginalized – Africans, indentured servant whites, Irish and Scottish people and, of course, American Indians – all came together. They had this first popular uprising against the English tyranny.
This wast always hailed as the precursor to the American Revolution. But since the United States was formed in 1776, a lot of people refused to think about anything pre-colonial. The reality is, American Indians people were scapegoated and targeted during this Nathaniel Bacon’s Rebellion. Many of the colonists had frustrations with the English government, and it became an excuse to attack our people. They dispossessed many of our American Indian communities here in Virginia and North Carolina. And they kept having this idea that we were expendable for their benefit, whether it was through the slave trade or marrying into our people to take the land.
Many of our histories were erased. A lot of our treaties aren’t recognized, either. We have the Treaty of Middle Plantation that has been just erased. When the United States was formed, they failed to recognize those treaties.
Right around the 1780s is when my people, the Occaneechi, came back to the Hillsboro area. They found that our village had been settled. So we moved about 15 miles north in Orange County, which is the Cedar Grove, Pleasant Grove area. And we just stayed there around 1780 and have lived there since.We’ve been trying to preserve our identity, which is hard since we were forced to be Christian and learn English. Essentially, we were made to forget our cultures. Many of our ancestors really forgot who they were.
It’s been profound because a lot of people who don’t have their identity struggle and don’t understand why they’re struggling. And it’s just not one of the stories for our people; it’s stories all across the southeast. We were stripped of our identity and autonomy through apprenticeships or bound to be indentured servants to white families. There’s also the forced sterilization that they didn’t talk about.
Most of the things that we practiced westward in the 1800s and forward were trotted on. Settlers put legal prohibitions on ceremonies. They even tore our children away, placing them in environments that severed their connections to their heritage. They sought to just erase us, not just physically, but spiritually and culturally. It really hurt our communities.
A lot of our men were run out as well. That’s why you saw a migration out of the community going up to Ohio, Michigan, or Indiana. A lot of our people have been spread out and displaced for so long thatthey really don’t have a connection to our home.
So I’m trying to rebuild our community, protecting our history, culture and way of life. We’re one of the eight state recognized tribes. I really have so much high hopes for our community. A lot of people want to mirror the 1930s Indian Reorganization Act governments, but I really don’t think that is where our success should be.
Antoinette: I remember you saying that,y, while you’ve all been in the Hillsborough area for so long, so many people, including law enforcement, don’t knowthat there’s a Native community existing there. Can you share a little bit about that experience?
Crystal: Yeah, here’s a lot of people that really don’t understand because of Hollywood stereotyping, something you see in stories like Tono and The Lone Ranger. Many people think that indigenous people have to have a certain look – olive-looking skin,high cheekbones, really sharp noses, or jet black hair. And, of course, we all have to have teepees or have these war planes bonnets.
That’s how the police department is categorizing our people – by how they look. When I first started to understand data sovereignty for tribes, I asked how they collected data and what data they had in the sheriff’s department. But I still have it in my email from about 10 years ago where they said they don’t collect this data. They categroize usl based on visuals – what they think American Indians look like.
So,, if you haven’t had much life experience of dealing with indigenous people in the state of North Carolina, of course, you’re going to have these stereotypes.
There’re a lot of gaps in data on us. In Alamance Count county, there’s only been about 200 cases of American Indians that have been either arrested or had some type of domestic violence report. I would say that, of at least 10,000 people in the area in the county, they only have 208 cases. Maybe it’s gone up to 300, but we don’t have any data about murders or race or hate crimes, like ones committed by the Klan. I started looking into the old newspapers from the 1900s until the 1980s about mysterious car wrecks that had our people in it. It’st’s just erasing us from these records, and there’s no consistent reporting for any of our American Indian heritage for any data.
We have about 2000 that are enrolled in the tribe, but we have so many more in the community that are not enrolled, who you would even look at and not know that they were Occaneechi because they don’t claim it proudly.
Antoinette: Can you speak a little bit more about how you are the data person for MMIWn, botht for North Carolina and the nation as a whole? And I really respect and admire how you just really continue to push and push the conversation in ways that were uncomfortable for even Native organizations to discuss. How did you get involved in that work?
Crystal: It startedin 2019, when I was working at Corning in Hickory, North Carolina. While I was commuting for work one morning, I saw this lady running and screaming. It kind of just didn’t sit well with me. I looked high and low trying to figure out if there was some type of incident, but none of the papers were forthcoming. They didn’t have as much reporting as they do now. But
One day, on the news, I saw them mention a woman had been trafficked. But she got away on this day. And I was like, “Oh, my God. I actually saw her.” So I looked some more into this trafficking. I found out that she was taken in Durham, but driven to Roxborough and then came to Haw River. And I realized they couldn’t have taken her from the interstate; how would she get from Roxborough to Haw River? They would have to come 49, which is two miles from my house; I live right off of a major highway.
My kids catch the bus right at the end of my driveway. How many times cansomebody kidnap someone from there? And then they’re just gone without a trace.
One of my friends from high school was actually murdered at one of the Buckhorn truck stops. They found her body right in the wooded area at the Buckhorn flea market. And even though she was not American Indian, she did have some Hispanic heritage. Her name was Stephanie Rodriguez. She just vanished without her children; nobody knew where she was. People looked for her for five or six years before they found her body. It made me wonder: how many times have we passed that spot and didn’t even know she was there? And we don’t even know what happened to her.
After those two incidents, I knew we had to do something. I started to ask about the police, looking at the different law enforcement agencies in my county. And what I found out was that there’s no reciprocity between the police agencies. They don’t talk to each other. They don’t have a standard operating procedure for the entire state but their own ones.
What they did have is a missing database, but it only classified people as white, Black, or Hispanic. There’s no mention of American Indians. And this problem exist not just in the United States, but also in Canada and Mexico. It just looks a little bit different in different countries.
There are people murdering these women and just treating them, like they didn’t matter. It was based on what they did with their life or people looking at people as less than. The same feeling that was here in the 1600s is still alive today. They’re still looking at us as less than. That’s when it clicked for me; this was why there was the gap in the data.
Wen I started protesting the pipeline, I lost my job at Corning. So I decided go to school and learn on this issue. I started to really research about the southeast and found out one of the reasons we don’t have as much data on MMIW is for two reasons. One, they’renot many federally recognized jobs here. And two, people don’t think of it as a problem. They kind of gloss over that stuff because it looks different here.
This is the Bible Belt. There’s a lot of domestic abuse in the church, but people don’t want to talk about it. They dpdn’t want to talk about how their preachers and pastors arethe biggest aggressors of these types of issues with women. And women didn’t want to talk about it because we’ve been taught that it’s something you dodn’t talk about. You just accept it, not wanting to bring attention to yourself or put shame on your family.
Until we expose these problems, we really don’t know what the problem is. And we don’t have the federal protections because we don’t have any treaties recognized by the United States. All of our treaties are with the king and queens of England, not the American Indians here. We don’t have the legal authority to prosecute violent crimes, like rape or domestic abuse, leaving gaps in justice and prevention.
We have our tribal governments, but they lack any type of legal authority. There’s no reciprocity between the state tribes and the police force because they don’t look at us as the same. And there’s a lot of conflicts between local, state, tribal, and federal systems that hinder effective response and support for our missing murdered women and girls and violent crimes.
Antoinette: Can you share some data?
Crystal: One is the proximity to highways like Interstate 95, Interstate 85 and I-40. These are known as the human trafficking corridors. And high rates of poverty, substance abuse, domestic violence and systemic neglect in our communities increases our risk factors of being trafficked. And then there’s limited victim services for indigenous women, especially in rural areas. There is a lack of state policy. We have not yet passed a comprehensive MMIW task force that states like Washington or Minnesota have.
There’s been resolutions passed, but local initiatives, statewide funding, and accountability mechanisms are missing. When I was working on my dissertation, I found there had been 32 documented cases of MMIW in North Carolina from 1943 to 2022. But I know that there’s a higher number because of the underreporting. North Carolina is actually one of the top 10 states for MMIW in the United States.
Like human trafficking, there are a lot of drug cartelsin the state. We have a lot of Mexican cartels, but also Russian ones. A lot of the Russian cartels are down there at the beach, and they’re working at some of these wing places and things like that. And when you find yourself in a poor economic situation where you can’t provide for your kids, you turn to different types of works.
The one big thing is that a lot of our indigenous people really don’t see the circular nature of how everything works together. They’re just so focused on one thing that they don’t see how many things are interrelated. They don’t see that drug abuse or trauma within their family keeps contributing to more trauma.
A lot of people do the same harmful things that were done to them. They’re doing it as adults to these new groups of children. So we have to stop that circle of harm. But this is also the responsibility of our tribal elected leaders, community grassroots leaders, and spiritual leaders.
I always believe there’s a triangle in the government. Everybody has a piece. No matter how you turn your triangle, everybody has a piece to play in relationship with each other. I often think that we need to go back to consensus in our tribes and do things that way where you get everybody’s buy-in. And if nobody is agreeing or one person doesn’t agree, you have to keep working at it. That is how we build a system of community and accountability; a lot of people don’t want to be held accountable for the actions that they’re doing.
Antoinette: As far as the high rates of MMIW, given the small amount and erasure of the Native American community, what do you think is the root cause?
Crystal: I believe it’s thesystemic poverty. There’s a lot of hate toward us, a lot of people being judged, and a lot of us don’t have a place to turn to.
There’s also a lot of colonialism, this mentality of how Indians are savage if they’re not beingromanticized. There’s also a lot of anti-Blackness in Indigenous communities. And there’s a lack of cultural proficiency and understanding that we are a matrilineal society because of Christianity and colonization. I know that’s really uncomfortable for some people to understand, but sometimes, people use that book to rule us.
There were these four life changers prophecy mentioned in the Bible. And I want to say one was a black book, another was a card, one was a liquid, and the last I can’t remember.But it was these four things that were brought to our communities that would change us.
These changers came and took us off of our path. And it has turned into our people being closedminded and in denial. A lot of denial. They don’t want to take accountability for what’s happening in our community. There’s a lot of broken things that are happening in our communities, but nobody wants to fix it. They want to do this performative activism instead.
While I moved from home with my children, I want them to go back at some point and help our community thrive and succeed.
Antoinette: I know you were responsible for helping to start the MMIW rally in North Carolina. Can you tell us a little bit about how that got started?
Crystal: When I was working on my dissertation, we had have a project to focus on. I chose MMIWI wanted to change the data and the reporting, the gaps in it. So, I actually founded that organization to research and examine the challenges, failures, and violence against Native women. In every class I took, I worked towards creating this nonprofit. We came up with an action plan:a statewide initiative to create a comprehensive, cross-jurisdictional database and task force that would enable proper tracking and proper public reporting of missing and murdered Indigenous women.
Because a lot of intertribal politics, a lot of people do not want to work on that. And I believe it’s because it will start to affect the pockets of some of these politicians. I really hate to say that, but I think it’s true.
It’s gotten contentious now because many people have seen how the game has been played for the last 10 years. They see that, by donating to major political campaigns, they can get into certain positions within the government. So, when you have people calling the shots on the street, but they look different in the government and they’re still calling the shots, it stifles growth.
Antoinette: What are some of the things that you found in your research about the MMIW and the bad actors in this?
Crystal: I’ve found that there’s a community mistrust. When I interviewed people about missing and murdered indigenous women, I found out that there was a huge distrust among the community when it came to police. The police are not culturally grounded. They don’t understand what it means when our people go missing. They’ll come up and say something silly like, “oh, you know, well, that’s how everybody is. That’s just Sarah being Sarah on this day.”
They say that not knowing that there could be something wrong.
We have also seen a lot of corruption in the police. Many abuse their power. We’ve uncovered a few things, such as policemen picking up girls who are prostitutes and raping them in their police cars. They drop them off on the other side of town and threaten to murder their family if they tell anyone what happened. We’ve seen sheriffs hook up with these women, too.
There’re a few American Indian civil rights leaders that stood up for the right things. But we saw them gunned down and murdered back in the 1980s, like Julian Pierce. You see a lot of people that want to speak out. There was one thing that really got me was I started working really hard to getthe FBI and Department of Justice on their community hate forums. I worked with a guy who was tasked to come up to North Carolina and have a hate crimes forum and get the federal government lined up to come into the community to talk about hate crimes.
But I see certain DAs, police officers, and police chiefs saying “You’re out to get my political career and we’re not going to have this hate crimes forum because we don’t want to talk about it.” And I’ve seen them later in life advance up their political career. I have been warned to not go down to some of these places because you don’t want to end up going down the highway on the wrong side, you know, and then get murdered.
It just taxes your spirit and soul. You want to think that these people are good, especially the police, especially because we’ve been so brainwashed to think police are out here to protect the people. But the police are actually out here to protect property. They’re not here to protect the people. So you get disenfranchised with the police.
But you see people in your community signing up to bedetention officers or police officers and have them drink the Kool-Aid. And then you see these police officers wigging out,beating up on women or murdering innocent civilians – people at the wrong place at the wrong time. These people in power have this hidden racism. It’s just horrible. It’s hard to talk to the police because they’re really not trying to do anything.
Antoinette: I read about Tarnished Badge and saw over 30 corrupt officers in Robertson County and Lumberton Police, the Robertson County Sheriff’s Department, and the Lumberton Police Department all get charged with crimes that range from trying to blow up a witness’s home and trying to steal cable.
Antoinette: What are some of the victories you’ve seen in this work?
Crystal: There was the solving of the murder of Sarah Graham. I had been working on her case for years, just looking up information, reaching out to people, trying to figure it out. And we saw the solving of her murder. But most of these murders are not going to be solved because they have rape kits that sit on the shelf for two and three years. You see a lot of just people pushing it under the rug, misclassifying murders as just deaths.
Antoinette: Serious causes of death. I was like, what is that? Are you serious? It’s okay. I mean, do I need to be a coroner in Robinson County? It doesn’t take a medical degree to see that someone did not choke themselves or choke themselves and put themselves in a trash can.
So that part was a real challenge and there hasn’t been a whole lot of accountability there. But I think that your work has brought attention to that. I know that you’re probably part of the catalyst for the governor doing the proclamation.
Crystal: Yeah.
Antoinette: And does that still happen? I know it was Cooper, the first governor, who did a proclamation.
Crystal: He was the first governor to do that. But I will say that i hast become trendy. People were just going through the motions and every May 5th, they have this proclamation. But nobody is actively out searching for people. You know, we’ve gotten calls from many families. It’s where we will go out and go to the family’s home and then look at their last known location and go out looking for them.
A lot of people don’t understand. It goes back to what indigenous means to people. Who is looked at as an American Indian? What are they classified as? And you have tribal governments who can’t even own or manage their own data, their own databases for who’s in their tribe. They don’t even know because they take it so lightly. pPeople don’t look at it as being a way to keep your people together because they have been materialized and capitalized and it always revolves around money.
Antoinette: As you pursue your law degree, do you foresee yourself doing any work with a law degree in this area?
Crystal: I remember being in sixth grade and thinking I wanted to go to Duke University Law School. Initially, I wanted to be a prosecutor, butthe more that I have worked in the government, the more I realized I don’t want to do that. I don’t know if I want to be a defense attorney. But I really want to go out and help people solve their murders.
I want to be like Dick Van Dyke on diagnosis murder to try to figure out what happened with the case. Where did it go wrong? Can we help save somebody else? What were the circumstances that led up to their death or missing? And then, I really want to see the case through. Again, it all goes back to accountability and having your community holding people accountable. The community is where you learn your values
You can have some type of punishment and hold people accountable, but not totally dismiss them. They may not come back to the community, but you’re not just going to do harm to them because whatever is wrong with them, unless they are serial killers. They have to learn from their mistakes and again, hold them accountable, so t they’re not going to have an offspring or teach this behavior to somebody else.
Antoinette: Crystal, thank you for what you’re doing. And we thank you on behalf of Women Advance and the Southern Oral History Program.
Crystal: Thanks, Antoinette.
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