Are you trying to make sense out of the latest news from the Lumbee Tribe?

According to news reports, the Lumbee Tribal Council has approved a contract with a Nevada-based lobbying firm that will attempt to persuade Congress to grant the tribe full recognition without any restrictions on gambling ventures.

A bill granting recognition but restricting gambling has passed the House of Representatives and has been waiting on action by the Senate.

The shocker in the new contract with Lewin International is a provision that would require the Lumbees to pay Lewin $35 million if Congress grants recognition and permits gambling, unless the tribe votes to set up a gambling operation run by Lewin.

The contract with Lewin has some of the 50,000 or more Lumbees who live in and around Robeson County worried and angry. Just when a compromise recognition bill was finally about to become law, they say that the tribal leadership changed directions, put the recognition effort in jeopardy, and risks the loss of $35 million, a substantial part of the tribe’s assets.

Just when we are trying to make sense of the Lumbee actions and as people start asking questions about the tribe’s history, a new book comes to the rescue. The book is “Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation.” Its author, a Lumbee Indian, is UNC-Chapel Hill Assistant Professor of History Malinda Maynor Lowery.

Although the Lumbees are the largest Native American tribe east of the Mississippi River, they have had to struggle for appropriate recognition and acceptance. Some North Carolinians question whether or not they are “real Indians.” So have agencies of the federal and state government.

But, although there may be disagreements about issues that affect them, the Lumbees have no doubt that they, their families, and the groups of their neighbors and kinsfolk who have lived for hundreds of years in and around the swampy lands that border the Lumbee River are Indian people.

Professor Lowery supports their claim. Her new book lays out in detail how these peoples have worked, plotted, fought, and compromised in order to preserve and enhance their Indian heritage.

To accommodate the white establishment’s notions of Indian governance, the Lumbees tried a series of tribal names – Croatan, Siouan, Cherokee, and Tuscarora. To gain and retain recognition and support from the state, they accommodated themselves to the Jim Crow racial culture of the South. They submitted to studies that evaluated their “Indianess” based on dubious scientific measurements of physical features that supposedly defined race. And in 1956, they had to accept a form of Federal recognition that denied them every benefit given to other Native Americans. 

Lowery believes that the identity of the Lumbee is defined primarily, not by the percentage of Indian blood, but by kinship, mutual recognition, and strong and longstanding connections to the land. With this background, she says, lack of government recognition “did not prevent the Indians in Robeson County from becoming a nation.”

She quotes Lumbee Attorney Arlinda Locklear, the first Native American lawyer to appear before the U.S. Supreme Court, “We have always been independent and self-determining communities…(Sovereignty is) not bestowed by government…”

Nevertheless, the goal of full Federal recognition is one of those things that holds Lumbees together.

But, decisions about the strategy and tactics of securing recognition can divide them.

According to Lowery, Arlinda Locklear has been working on behalf of the Lumbee Tribe since 1983 in the effort to secure Congressional action to recognize the tribe. Reportedly, she worked mostly for free.

Ironically, the Tribal Council’s new contract replaces Locklear with Lewin International.

It is a result that not even Lowery’s wonderful book can make me understand. 



D.G. Martin is hosting his final season of UNC-TV’s North Carolina Bookwatch, which airs at 5 p.m. Sundays. His blog and prior programs can be viewed at www.unctv.org/ncbookwatch. This Sunday’s (May 9) guest is Elizabeth Edwards, author of “Resilience,” a moving memoir of facing tragedy in her life.