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The Croatan, Cheraw language was most commonly referred to as 'Lumbee'.
It was an Algonquian language often called Croatan, but the ancestors of the modern-day Lumbee also included speakers of several other languages, including Tuscarora and Cheraw languages about which little is known today.
English was used extensively among the Lumbee, both as a practical linguage and also as a first language (due to intermarriage with English colonists).
The unique dialect of English spoken by the Lumbee Indians, called "Lumbee English," is still in use today.
Descendants of the native tribe who took in the lost colony of Roanoke, the Lumbee (or Croatan) have been denied federal status as a tribe because of their high degree of mixed blood.
They are recognized by the state of North Carolina, however, and are 40,000 people strong, making them one of the largest Native American groups remaining in the eastern US.
The History of the Lumbee
The Lumbee don't entirely understand why people persist in calling the Roanoke colony the "Lost Colony," since they left an explicit note telling where they were going (Croatan, the lands of some friendly Cheraw Indians) and since the descendents of the Croatan Cheraw were found some 50 years later speaking English, practicing Christianity, and sporting about 75% of the last names the colonists had brought with them.
By all accounts, though, those descendents--who called themselves "Lumbee" Indians, after the river running through their traditional lands--were mixed-race, so mixed-race they were not sent to Oklahoma with the other Native Americans of North Carolina in the 1820's and 30's.
The Native American Zorro
North Carolina was not the most pleasant place to live in the 19th century if your skin was dark, though, and increasing violence against Lumbees and free mulattos set the stage for the Lumbee folk hero Henry Berry Lowrie in the 1860's.
Called the "Indian Robin Hood" by some, Lowrie, enraged by the assault and murder of his family, spent the next decade wreaking vigilante justice on those who harassed Indians and stealing supplies to give to the disenfranchised.
He was never caught, and his legend--brave, proud, dangerous when provoked, and above all else free--remains a powerful tribal metaphor.