Lumbee Tribe of NC featured in Washington Post

A couple of days ago, the Washington Post printed an article that detailed the struggles of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, the largest tribe east of the Mississippi River and based in Robeson County, North Carolina, to obtain recognition from the federal government and the efforts of one tribal member to change that.

The article, which details the history of the Lumbee struggle, is very thorough and does a great job of outlining many of the struggles that the tribe has faced in gaining recognition. The article also does a great job of touching on the unique situation that the tribe faced in Jim Crow era North Carolina where they were neither white or black but rather an "other," a status that was exploited as a means of racial division by local white politicians. I want to highlight a particular quote that I think does a great job of outlining the dilemma of Native people in 19th-early 20th century North Carolina:

In the Jim Crow South, white ancestry was acceptable for indigenous people, but black blood was not. When the United States was dividing up reservations and providing land “allotments” to Indians, a government commission told the Mississippi Choctaw that “where any person held a strain of Negro blood, the servile blood contaminated and polluted the Indian blood.” Many Native Americans internalized these racial politics and adopted them as a means of survival. After North Carolina established a separate school system for Indians in Robeson County in the late 1880s, some Lumbees fought to exclude a child whose mother was Indian and whose father was black. 

In their segregated corner of North Carolina, Lumbees enjoyed more power and privileges than their black neighbors, but this was not the case for Native Americans in every state. In Virginia in the 1920s, Indians were required to classify themselves as “colored,” whereas Oklahoma considered Indians to be white — prompting Creek Indians to reject tribal members with black ancestry.

I have previously covered Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924 (referenced in this quote) and its implications for Native people.

In North Carolina, the Lumbee were in a particularly precarious position. After seeing them join with local African Americans to fight the Confederate Home Guard during (and even after) the Civil War, local whites needed to find a way to drive a wedge between the Native and African American communities in order to maintain their own place in the power structure. Historically, whites in Robeson County are a distinct minority, comprising under a third of the population. They were keenly aware of this fact and the fact that they would be relatively defenseless in another violent uprising. By working to divide the minority populations in the county, they lessened the likelihood of another fight and cemented themselves into power.

The phrase "means of survival" is important in this quote and to the strategy of local white politicians. Many tribes, particularly in the South, had to acquiesce to the racial views of white supremacists in order to ensure that their sovereignty and distinct identity were recognized by broader society. The ability of Southeastern tribes to run their own schools and educate their children was often subject to the whims of white politicians and as Virginia showed, recognition of Native identity could often be erased by an act of the state legislature.

Malinda Maynor Lowery's book "Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South" does a fantastic job of discussing this issue and how Lumbees fit into the racial framework of the time period.

This article also serves as another reason for working to solve the rural lawyer shortage.  We need lawyers who are willing to go into these communities and work with tribes to help them assert their rights and the inherent sovereignty that they possess.