https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2166-1698
Abstract
Indigenous peoples living in what is now coastal North Carolina gave the name pocosin to a unique type of nonriparian wetland endemic to the region. Their Algonquian dialects are poorly documented in colonial records and have been dormant for centuries; not even contemporary Indigenous peoples in the region speak these particular languages. But for decades, environmental researchers and practitioners have asserted in publications, classrooms, and public-facing materials that pocosin literally translates to “swamp on a hill.” Despite widespread assertions, no evidence exists to support the claim. This article debunks the widely circulated translation and explains, more generally, how even well-intentioned efforts to acknowledge Indigenous peoples and their knowledge systems within Western scientific frameworks may cause harm by undermining those Indigenous peoples’ stewardship of traditional ecological knowledge or by reinforcing other aspects of colonialism. The lessons apply broadly to researchers, practitioners, and institutions that engage with Indigenous peoples and their knowledge systems.
About a decade ago, I was interviewed for a popular nature-based program on North Carolina's public television network. The interview was part of an episode about pocosins, a unique type of wetland endemic to the Coastal Plain region of the southeastern United States. Pocosins are especially abundant in the ancestral territories of the Lumbee, the Indigenous group to which I belong. We are a nation of Native American people who represent the remnants of colonial-era Indigenous communities in and around what is now North Carolina. Our ancestors include the southernmost Algonquian-speaking peoples, in whose dialects the term pocosin originated (Brewer and Reising 1982, Lowery 2018).
As a Lumbee person and an environmental scientist, I was thrilled at the chance to introduce television audiences to these ecologically unique and culturally significant wetlands. But the interview request also gave me an opportunity to reflect critically on a longstanding claim among environmental scientists and practitioners that the word pocosin has a definitive and literal English translation: “swamp on a hill.” I found the claim suspicious because it was not based on any knowledge held by Lumbee people or any other Indigenous group. Instead, I suspected that the translation originated among non-Indigenous people who may have had good intentions but nevertheless promoted unsubstantiated speculation at the expense of authentic Indigenous knowledge.
This article includes the story of how I investigated and confirmed my suspicions about the “swamp on a hill” translation. The larger purpose of the story is to help researchers, practitioners, and students understand that efforts to acknowledge Indigenous peoples and their knowledge systems within Western scientific frameworks may sometimes cause harm—even when these efforts are well intentioned. In particular, the urge to fill gaps (e.g., translating Indigenous terms into English) can promulgate inaccurate information about Indigenous peoples’ languages and cultures, and it can also undermine Indigenous people–led efforts to strengthen our own knowledge bases and exercise our own protocols for knowledge verification. At a time when researchers, practitioners, and institutions regularly affirm the intrinsic value of Indigenous knowledge systems, this story calls for humility to accompany these affirmations.
Pocosin primer
Pocosins—both the landform and the term itself—are not widely known outside of the southeastern United States. Even those familiar with pocosins may not realize that Indigenous peoples stewarded these wetlands since time out of mind and, still, today, view them as culturally significant places. Given the likely unfamiliarity of many readers with these environments, here is a brief primer.
Pocosins are nonriparian wetlands that typically straddle watershed divides on the broad, flat outer section of the Atlantic Coastal Plain (Brinson 1991, Skaggs et al. 1991, Richardson 2003). To call the divides “ridges” would be overly generous; their grades are too subtle (on the order of 0.1%) for ground-level observers to detect any topographic relief. But these minuscule slopes are sufficient to induce hydraulic gradients that drive water away from pocosins in all directions (Skaggs et al. 1991). This phenomenon has two main implications: First, rainfall is the exclusive (or nearly exclusive) hydrologic input to pocosins. Second, pocosins are major water sources for Coastal Plain streams. The tea-color water of many coastal streams emphasizes the latter point; the tint derives from dissolved organic matter accumulated by water as it navigates the gauntlet of litter, humus, and peat found in pocosins and similar Coastal Plain environments (Emanuel 2019).
The organic soils of pocosins can be deep—on the order of a meter (e.g., Christensen et al. 1988). As a result, pocosins can be quite spongy to walk on. My students are often surprised by the instability of their first few steps into one of these wetlands. Surprise becomes entertainment (or apprehension) as tremors emanate from their footsteps and radiate across the landscape.
Water tables fluctuate dramatically in pocosin soils. Shallow groundwater rises and falls seasonally and during hurricanes or other large storms (O'Doherty 2013, Armstrong et al. 2022, Welch 2022). These soils have a tremendous capacity to store rainfall, and the combination of small hydraulic gradients and retentive soil characteristics causes water to seep slowly into receiving streams. As a result, intact pocosins can dampen hydrologic extremes on Coastal Plain rivers—a role that is increasingly important as climate change intensifies storms in the Southeast (Emanuel 2018).
Pocosin vegetation is a cacophony of evergreen shrubs and scrubby pines, many of which are adapted to periodic, low-intensity fire. Historically, some fires were ignited by lightning, but others were set by Indigenous people who, for millennia, burned large swaths of the Coastal Plain to attract game and to foster the growth of food and medicinal plants (Fowler and Konopik 2007).
Indigenous fire management of the Coastal Plain declined precipitously between 300 and 400 years ago as European diseases and colonial warfare swept through the region and left the survivors with little agency or ability to continue the practice. The loss of Indigenous stewardship, together with Euro-American policies of wildfire suppression, left pocosins unburned for centuries, during which they grew into dense, vine-laced shrublands—a new type of ecosystem that bore the marks of colonialism (Emanuel 2024).
During the early twentieth century, foresters began to drain and clearcut pocosins, converting many of them into commercial timber plantations (Campbell and Hughes 1991). The surviving pocosins, now dense with unburned leaf litter and vegetation, became highly flammable landscapes, especially during prolonged dry spells. Catastrophic wildfires swept through many pocosins, sometimes consuming their organic soils down to the water table (Reardon et al. 2007).
Despite these changes, Lumbee people and our Indigenous neighbors on the Coastal Plain still acknowledge our ancestral ties to pocosins. Many of us lament centuries of separation from cultural burning and unfulfilled stewardship responsibilities; we anticipate a time in the future when our relationships with these landscapes will be restored (Emanuel 2024).
Translation debunked
In preparing for the television interview, I realized that I was comfortable discussing pocosins with a lay audience, but I still decided to revisit the research literature on these wetlands. In addition to brushing up on facts and figures, I hoped to trace the origin of the claim that pocosin literally meant “swamp on a hill.” I had never found time to dig deeper into the assertion, and the likelihood that it would come up during the interview provided motivation.
I was not sure then (and still am not sure) where I first heard the purported translation, but it was likely in a classroom. Perhaps it was during an undergraduate lecture. Or, because I grew up in North Carolina, where pocosins are abundant, I may have heard the claim during grade school. At any rate, teachers and college professors had treated the translation as common knowledge for as long as I could remember. I found the translation in textbooks, encyclopedias, field guides, and journal articles. State and federal agencies repeated the claim, authoritatively and without attribution, on websites and in outreach material (figure 1).
Examples of translation collected from public-facing materials published by state agencies (North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, North Carolina Department of Transportation, South Carolina Department of Natural Resources), regional entities (Albemarle–Pamlico National Estuarine Partnership), and federal agencies (Environmental Protection Agency, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Fish and Wildlife Service, Forest Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). See supplement S1 for exact sources.
I understood swamp on a hill to be a useful mnemonic; the phrase was memorable and evoked key characteristics of pocosins—wetlands astride watershed divides. During my first few years as a faculty member, I even taught the translation to my students. However, I gradually became suspicious and stopped using it altogether on the basis of a few observations. First, the translation was unfamiliar among Lumbees and other Indigenous peoples in the region. I had never heard it in the Lumbee household where I grew up, and the translation was never mentioned in my extended family or the larger Lumbee community—despite the abundance of pocosins in our homelands. Second, the phrase never came up in my work with neighboring Indigenous communities on the Coastal Plain. I viewed the absence of “swamp on a hill” from both the traditions and contemporary discourse of Indigenous peoples as a red flag.
There were other warning signs. The precision of the translation was unusual; the Algonquian dialects in which pocosin originated had been dormant for centuries. The original speakers of these dialects, Carolina Algonquian peoples, bore the brunt of the colonial military incursions and diseases that swept through the region as early as the 1500s (Oberg 2020). Severely diminished by war and disease, the surviving Carolina Algonquian communities gradually adopted English, and their dialects became dormant. And even though two Carolina Algonquian men, Wanchese and Manteo, developed an orthography of their language during a 1584–1585 sojourn in London with English scholar Thomas Hariot, little of their work survives (Lowery 2018). What remains does not mention pocosin, swamp on a hill, or similar phrases.
I found another warning sign in the translation's occasional accompaniment by claims that pocosin is an “old Indian word.” Indigenous peoples in the United States have diverse lived experiences, but it is safe to say that most of us recognize “old Indian words” as introductions to either racist jokes or utter nonsense. Although published literature has shifted toward more descriptive wording (e.g., substituting Native American or even Carolina Algonquian for Indian), I had encountered swamp on a hill paired with old Indian word often enough to raise my suspicions about the veracity of the claim.
In spite of these warning signs, I turned to the research literature with an open mind, eager to learn how environmental researchers and practitioners had discovered such a precise translation from long dormant and poorly documented dialects. After scanning dozens of articles, book chapters, and theses on pocosins, I found that the literature generally attributed the translation—either directly or through a chain of citations—to an 1899 study published in American Anthropologist by linguist William Wallace Tooker (Tooker 1899). I had never encountered Tooker's work, but on the basis of the title of the study, “The Adopted Algonquian Term ‘Poquosin,’” I thought I had hit pay dirt. I requested the bound journal volume from the campus library and awaited my prize.
When the dusty volume arrived, I immediately spotted a major problem: Nowhere did Tooker state or even imply that pocosin meant “swamp on a hill.” Instead, the linguist concluded that pocosin was one of many similar words for wetlands found throughout the Algonquian-speaking world. These words included common names (e.g., pokeloken), as well as proper names (e.g., Poaetquessing, Poxabog, Pocasset) that all shared, in his view, a common root. Tooker also cited examples, stretching back centuries, of settlers adopting the word pocosin to describe a certain type of wetland. He noted that William Byrd's surveying party found itself “up to the knees in mud” while traversing a “miry Pocoson” on the Virginia–North Carolina border in 1728. He also pointed out that George Washington's 1763 compost recipe called for “black mould taken out of the pocoson on the creek side.”
Tooker speculated on the origin of pocosin, but he never attempted a precise translation. Overall, his work revealed that settlers had no name in their own language for a particular landform, and so they adopted the term used by Indigenous peoples. Simply put, a pocosin is a type of wetland that still goes by that name today. Tooker's work did not negate the fact that pocosins occupy subtly higher ground on watershed divides, nor did it foreclose the possibility that Indigenous peoples observed this subtlety. But the fact that Tooker's work does not mention “swamp on a hill” means that for decades, researchers have erroneously cited his study as evidence of this translation.
To be fair, I was not the first person to notice the misattribution of “swamp on a hill” to Tooker. Conservationist and writer David Lee observed the discrepancy decades before I learned about it. During my deep dive into the literature, I encountered a 1986 article in American Birds, the National Audubon Society's field journal, in which Lee observed that Tooker was widely credited as the source of the translation, despite never having made such a claim (Lee 1986). Unfortunately, the observation was embedded in an article about bird habitats, where it apparently escaped the noticed of many wetland researchers—myself included, up to that moment.
This collective body of evidence convinced me that the “swamp on a hill” translation was not based on any factual account of Indigenous peoples’ languages or ideas about pocosins. I suspected but did not know for sure that the phrase had been fabricated by non-Indigenous people. To my ears, swamp on a hill sounded very much like the stereotypical monosyllabic cadence long used to portray Indigenous characters in movies and television. That connection was speculative, but it certainly fit the longstanding pattern of non-Indigenous people and institutions appropriating stereotypes of Indigenous cultures for their own purposes (Deloria 1998). Given all of these signs, I concluded that the translation was bunk. In the years following the television interview (which was a lovely experience, by the way), I have continued to search for evidence to support the translation. I even reviewed Tooker's unpublished personal papers and notes for clues. To date, nothing has surfaced to support the translation.
Coming to terms with terms
Honestly, I regret that the claim seems to be untrue. If it were authentic, the translation would provide a small but important glimpse into ways that my ancestors conceptualized their world prior to colonization. Such insight could expand the body of ancestral knowledge held by Lumbee people and other survivors of early colonization along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. In many cases, these knowledge bases are both sparse and fragile; adding to them is serious business that deserves careful work. Citation errors and guesswork taken as fact not only reflect poorly on researchers; these practices also undermine efforts by Indigenous peoples to strengthen their traditional knowledge and to improve their understanding of relationships between Indigenous and colonial knowledge systems.
Clearly, the claim about “swamp on a hill” falls short of colonial standards of scholarly evidence. But the translation also fails to meet standards used by Indigenous communities to verify knowledge claims. Exact methods vary from one community to another, but most involve metadata to describe the chain of custody by which knowledge is passed from one generation to another (Emanuel and Bird 2022). This critically important custody chain is entirely missing from the “swamp on a hill” translation. Given the ability of Indigenous people to verify knowledge claims according to their own methods and protocols, it is troubling that, for decades, no one in the scientific or management community has consulted in any meaningful way with Indigenous people about the veracity of the translation. Even if researchers and practitioners had good intentions, the lack of consultation, together with the practice of treating guesswork as common knowledge, suggests ignorance of (or disregard for) Indigenous protocols for authenticating claims about their own languages, cultures, and lifeways.
Notably, the story about “swamp on a hill” runs counter to recent moves by non-Indigenous researchers, professional societies, government agencies, and other institutions to affirm the value of Indigenous knowledge systems. If these affirmations really are made in good faith, individuals and institutions must adhere to the accountability standards and protocols created by Indigenous peoples to steward their own knowledge systems.
I am not suggesting that non-Indigenous people disengage from working with Indigenous knowledge systems. On the contrary, given the important roles that Indigenous knowledge plays in environmental stewardship, sustainability, and human well-being (Wildcat 2010), it would be irresponsible to disregard this information. But effective engagement with Indigenous knowledge begins with respect for the protocols and sensitivities that accompany Indigenous systems of thought and practice.
Lessons
The “swamp on a hill” story teaches that respect for Indigenous knowledge systems includes a willingness to acknowledge that researchers and practitioners cannot translate every word, account for every blank space on a map, or fill every knowledge gap about Indigenous peoples. This kind of humility is important, because it creates space to consider how and why situations arise in which people feel compelled to invent translations for Indigenous terms. Such humility also invites reflection on the fact that pocosin and many other Indigenous place names are treated as exotic terms by people who now live and work in the exact places where these words emerged and were used—for centuries—as part of everyday speech. These situations arise, of course, because colonialism erases and supplants Indigenous peoples and their knowledge systems. The urge to fill every gap is often well intentioned, but it reinforces the erasing power of colonialism and bypasses opportunities to practice humility in the face of uncertainty. The “swamp on a hill” story conveys this important lesson.
Lumbees and other first-contact Indigenous peoples have spent centuries coming to grips with a humility of our own—a humility that accompanies our inability to call many of our culturally important places by their proper names because of the erasing power of colonialism. Non-Indigenous people and institutions should acknowledge this delicate situation and make way for Indigenous people–led efforts to fill knowledge gaps on their own terms. Doing so can lead to more robust forms of environmental science and management that give due respect to Indigenous knowledge claims and Indigenous standards for evaluating such claims.
Indigenous people also have lessons to learn from the “swamp on a hill” story. Unless we are diligent, we risk perpetuating cycles of misinformation about our cultures or about the cultures of other groups. I was part of this cycle myself, having spread the “swamp on a hill” story among my earliest students. Perhaps I even worsened the problem by endorsing the story as an Indigenous scholar. When Indigenous people encounter suspect knowledge claims, we have a responsibility to test these claims using the standards and protocols of our own knowledge systems and, if necessary, using the toolkits of our colonial disciplines. If either approach raises suspicions, then we should dive deeper to sort verified information from guesswork. Even if our actions reopen knowledge gaps, we must break these cycles of misinformation by modeling the humility we expect to see from non-Indigenous researchers and practitioners.
Acknowledgments
This article expands on a brief footnote in my book On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice (Emanuel 2024). The Environmental Artist in Residence Program at the Wildacres Retreat provided time and space to research and write the first draft. Marcelo Ardón (North Carolina State University), Emily Bernhardt (Duke University), and Lydia Jennings (Arizona State University) provided valuable feedback on early drafts.
Author contributions
Ryan E. Emanuel (Conceptualization, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing).
Biographical narrative
Ryan E. Emanuel ([email protected]) is affiliated with the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He is an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina.
Author Biography
Ryan E. Emanuel ([email protected]) is affiliated with the Nicholas School of the Environment, at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina, in the United States; he is also an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina.
