Capt. Joe Berry, right, and longtime mate William K. “Billy” Brown, show off a wahoo in this 1955 photo from the Aycock Brown Papers. Photo: Courtesy of the Outer Banks History Center, State Archives of North Carolina
Editor’s note: Some outdated racial terms that today are considered insensitive or offensive are used in this story, not out of disrespect but solely because of their appearance on official records.
Growing up, she was urged to not speak of her Indigenous roots.
“In our family, we were told not to talk about it,” recalled Marilyn Berry Morrison, chief of the Roanoke-Hatteras Tribe of the Algonquian Indians of North Carolina.
This fear, which “has been embedded” from generation to generation, is often still found among local Roanoke-Hatteras descendants today.
“We have active tribal members who don’t want to put in their paperwork to make them an official tribal member,” Morrison said.
Centuries of fear of forcible removals, government-sanctioned land-stealing and even government-sanctioned murder took its toll.
“Many years ago, if you claimed to be Indian or Native American, you were killed, OK? So that fear has trickled on down through generations,” Morrison explained. “Even having President Theodore Roosevelt say that ‘a good Indian is a dead Indian’… it really had a tremendous impact on being called Native American. And that is who we are.”
She has become an outspoken advocate of the tribe and believes others will follow suit.
“I believe in time we’ll get rid of that (fear) once they accept who they are…