The Coharie Tribe has received the Water Conservationist of the Year Award for a four-year, volunteer effort to clear 20 miles of public access to the Coharie River, the first time the prestigious conservation award has gone to a Native American tribe.
The North Carolina Wildlife Federation presented the 56th Annual Governor’s Conservation Achievement Awards last weekend. The Water Conservationist of the Year Award went to the Coharie Tribe for the years-long effort that came to be called the Great Coharie River Initiative.
After hurricanes and decades of neglect closed off access to the Coharie River, a cultural and community touchstone for the Sampson-based tribe, leaders marshalled grant funding, community involvement, academics and scientists to help clear the river for small-scale boat navigation, and reconnect the tribe to its ancestral waters.
Bringing together cultural, historical, and natural assets, the tribe dedicated three years and 5,000 volunteer hours to restore access to the river. Among the many who took notice were those behind the Governor’s Conservation Achievement Awards, the highest natural resource honors given in the state.
Award winners are nominated by the citizens of North Carolina and decided upon by a committee of scientists, environmental educators, and conservation activists. The Coharie Tribe was among 18 conservation winners this year.
In 2015, a volunteer assembly of Coharie Indians along the Upper Great Coharie River started the Great Coharie River Initiative, with the goal of creating a navigable corridor along what initiative coordinator Philip Bell deemed “an almost forgotten waterway that flows through 4,800 acres of prime educational opportunity, potential tourism attraction and economic stimulus that is being underutilized.”
The tribe received permission to open up a navigable corridor through a 9.5 mile section of the big creek, and it went to work along with some assistance from the Friends of Sampson County Waterways (FSCW), for which Bell also serves as vice president.
Growing up, Bell remembered when the rivers were open, and he expressed his desire to see them that way again.
“The river was our recreation department,” Bell has stated. “We didn’t go to town and play on some sports team.”
But then, the beavers took over. Beaver management programs were implemented as a way to ward them off.
”Over time, the river became a beaver haven. It wasn’t being used by the community anymore and what I once knew as being a part of my childhood was no longer a part of anything,” Bell said.
At the outset of the initiative, the local groups joined and cleaned nearly two and half miles of the river. In 2016, a grant was awarded and more equipment was purchased, allowing for another two and a half miles of the river to be cleared. The effort continued on through the years.
In cooperation with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service and the FSCW, debris removal operations were implemented to open more than 20 miles the Great Coharie River. Further assisting in that effort, a Duke Energy Water Resource Fund grant in the amount of $86,500 was recently awarded that will assist in restoration efforts through the upper Great Coharie.
“When you look at your family tree, going back generation after generation, it splits and branches, time and again, into limbs and more limbs and branches and finally ends in that little leaf with your name on it,” said writer T. Edward Nickens, in presenting the Water Conservationist of the Year Award. “When the Coharie Tribe of eastern North Carolina looks at its family tree, however, it sees a river — a river that splits and branches through deep swamp across Sampson County, braiding time and time again, before gathering back its waters whole.
”For the Coharie people, this creek — the Great Coharie River — is its true ancestral mother, the deep spring that has tied its people together across time,” Nickens stated.
At least until a couple of decades ago, he said.
After hurricanes clogged the river with blowdowns and brush, the stream slowed and stagnated, choked with too many beaver dams and too little flow. A river that once stitched together the Coharie people — a river where they fished and played, paddled canoes and saw their children baptized — became a thing to be ignored and even feared.
That is no longer the case.
“Now, 20 miles of access to the Coharie have been restored,” said Nickens. “Volunteers have logged more than 5,000 hours on the water.”
County officials lauded Coharie leaders and others for their continuing work to preserve and protect the waterways, noting their fiscal prudence in obtaining grant funding was “particularly commendable.”
“Each year, the Sampson County Board of Commissioners joins our municipalities in proclaiming November as Native American Heritage Month, particularly recognizing the vibrant culture and traditions of the Coharie Indians which are so richly woven into the fabric of our county’s history,” said Clark Wooten, chairman of the Sampson County Board of Commissioners. “The Coharie Tribe’s environmental stewardship, reflected in projects such as their Great Coharie River Initiative, is not only vital to the conservation of Sampson County’s invaluable natural resources, but to the preservation of the tribe’s history and the history of Sampson County itself.”
The Great Coharie River spans about 43.5 miles. Eventually, Bell said he wants to see the entire area clear, so that anyone who wishes to do so could make their way from Sampson to the coast without leaving the water.
A great deal of progress has already been made.
“Tribal members have brought their children and grandchildren — and their grandmothers and grandfathers — back to the river, time and again,” said Nickens, “to celebrate what we should all celebrate on all our North Carolina streams: the way free-flowing water lifts the spirit, and fills the spirit, and carries the spirit downriver … where there is always another stream in need of care.”