When Natosha Norwood Carmine was growing up in Millsboro, she can’t remember ever having heard conversations about being Native American or a Nanticoke. Decades later, she’s the chief of the Nanticokes, having first been elected head of the tribal association in 2015.
We’re walking in the gentle surf along Lewes Beach early on a quiet morning. “We were a river people,” Carmine said, explaining how the tribe was centered along what was later named the Indian River near Millsboro.
I ask her what she sees as she looks out over the bay beach.
“Peace. Calming. Refreshment. Clearing the mind. Water taking you up the state of Delaware.” She pauses. “To me, this is us.”
The beach in Rehoboth, in contrast, makes her think of ‘the elders’ and a time not to be proud of. That was when the state closed the three Native American one-room schools (her grandmother taught in one of them), and concerned parents sent their children to the Indian school in distant Lawrence, Kansas, carrying “a cardboard suitcase with everything they owned.” She remembers her father selling pecks of tomatoes to townsfolk, because “My mother couldn’t go in the restaurants.”
Carmine is the first woman to head the tribe. She hadn’t realized or even thought about that until reporters started calling and asking how it felt to be the first female chief. Her response: “Compared to what?”
The indigenous people ‘discovered’ by Capt. John Smith in his 1608 exploration called themselves Kuskarawaok; they would later be known to colonists by their Algonquin language word as Nantaquak, “people of the tidewaters.” They were one of the largest tribes on the Eastern Shore, 200 warriors and their families.
The language became extinct in the mid-1800s with the death of the last fluent speaker, but per Thomas Jefferson’s order in…
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