Karankawa People

The Karankawas were slandered before they were destroyed. The Handbook of Texas says Anglo-Texans revived old stories of cannibalism to justify massacres, though the practice seems to have ended in the eighteenth century, and that prominent businessmen such as James Power promoted annihilation. Tales of seven-foot giants are disinformation that still circulates. After Juan Cortina's force attacked a band near Rio Grande City in 1858 the people were called extinct, yet survivors kept their culture alive. Today the Karankawa Kadla works to revive the Karankawan language, of which about 500 words are preserved.

What the plaque says

Karankawa People The Karankawas and their ancestors had been occupying the Texas gulf coast for thousands of years when Europeans first arrived in the 16th century. Spanish colonizers documented five major clans, including the Copanos, Coapites, Cujanes, Carancahuas, and Cocos. The land that is now Nueces County hosted one of the largest concentrations of Karankawa people, including townsites of up to 500 people and sacred burial grounds. Expert hunters, they successfully established seasonal migration patterns, following food sources throughout the region. Their diet included fish, shellfish, nuts, roots, berries, prickly pears, venison, bison and smaller animals. Due to the Karankawas' diverse diet, they were taller than most Europeans and Native Americans. Following the establishment of Spanish missions, the Karankawa incorporated those sites into their food circuit. Karankawa technologies included ceramic pots in a distinct style now known as Rockport Pottery, baskets, nets, weirs, traps, bows and arrows and dug-out canoes. They were part of a larger trade network, and shells harvested by the Karankawa have been found hundreds of miles inland. In the nineteenth century, Anglos began permanently settling in the Karankawa's homeland. The reduction of their hunting grounds, along with European disease, illegal encroachment and intentional eradication, reduced the Karankawa population greatly, forcing remnants of the bands to flee to Mexico or assimilate into the surrounding cultures for survival. (1976, 2024)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mirador de la Flor — 6.9 mi
  Corpus Christi's bayfront memorial to Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, the Tejano singer from this city, killed in 1995 at twenty-three, visited by about thirty thousand people a year.
• Art Museum of South Texas — 7.8 mi
  Philip Johnson's 1972 museum on the Corpus Christi bayfront, joined in 2006 by Ricardo Legorreta's Miller Wing, holding more than 2,000 works mostly from Texas and the Americas.
• USS Lexington Museum on the Bay — 8.0 mi
  An Essex-class carrier of 1943 moored off North Beach, the Blue Ghost that Tokyo Rose kept reporting sunk, and the Navy's training carrier for nearly three decades after.
• Texas State Aquarium — 8.0 mi
  A nonprofit aquarium on the tip of Corpus Christi Beach built around the Gulf and the Caribbean, with the largest coastal wildlife rescue center in Texas behind the exhibits.

More markers nearby

• WWII Meeting of Presidents Camacho and Roosevelt — 1.0 mi
• Ward Island — 1.0 mi
• Sunshine Cemetery — 2.3 mi
• Rabbi Sidney A. Wolf — 2.4 mi