Around 1700, a group of people known as the Mattamuskeet, or Machapunga, resided in Hyde and eastern Beaufort Counties and numbered approximately thirty warriors. In response to European encroachment, the Mattamuskeet allied with coastal tribes including the Tuscarora, the Corree, and the Woccon against the British colonists in a conflict known as the Tuscarora War (1711-1713). The war devastated the tribes and resulted in the Mattamuskeet's forced removal to a 36-square-mile reservation along Lake Mattamuskeet in Hyde County. Economic hardship and population decline forced the Mattamuskeet to begin selling tracts of reservation land in 1731. A final sale in 1761 officially ended the reservation era for the tribe. That year, according to the colonial government, the Mattamuskeet's numbers had fallen to just six families.

Without land or political sway, the Mattamuskeet began to disappear from the written record. Some moved away from Hyde County. Those few who remained struggled to maintain a group identity. In the 1800s, white Hyde County planters wielded apprenticeships as a tool to systemically break up American Indian families and assimilate Indian children. As a result, the descendants of the Mattamuskeet became broadly classed as "free persons of color." By the 1900s some people of color in Hyde County referred to themselves not as Mattamuskeet, but as Pungo River Indians. As of 2024, no federal or state-recognized American Indian tribe claims descent from the Mattamuskeet Indians. Still, some descendants of this community remain in the area today.

For more information and links to resources, please see our editorial statement on American Indian terminology.