Indigenous Peoples of North Carolina: Lumbee and Meherrin
Published Lumbee Resources
Materials authored by Lewis R. Barton
Materials authored by Thomas E. Ross
Lumbee Regional Development Association, Inc. materials
Materials about Henry Berry Lowry and the Lowry Band
Carolina Indian voice. Pembroke, N.C. : The Carolina Indian Voice, Inc., 1973-2005. ONLINE
- [Lumbee Indians in Robeson County, North Carolina : photographs design by Billy E. Barnes] byCall Number: FFC971.78 B261LPublication Date: 1979
Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South by ISBN: 9780807833681Publication Date: 2010-04-15With more than 50,000 enrolled members, North Carolina's Lumbee Indians are the largest Native American tribe east of the Mississippi River. Malinda Maynor Lowery, a Lumbee herself, describes how, between Reconstruction and the 1950s, the Lumbee crafted and maintained a distinct identity in an era defined by racial segregation in the South and paternalistic policies for Indians throughout the nation. They did so against the backdrop of some of the central issues in American history, including race, class, politics, and citizenship. Lowery argues that "Indian" is a dynamic identity that, for outsiders, sometimes hinged on the presence of "Indian blood" (for federal New Deal policy makers) and sometimes on the absence of "black blood" (for southern white segregationists). Lumbee people themselves have constructed their identity in layers that tie together kin and place, race and class, tribe and nation; however, Indians have not always agreed on how to weave this fabric into a whole. Using photographs, letters, genealogy, federal and state records, and first-person family history, Lowery narrates this compelling conversation between insiders and outsiders, demonstrating how the Lumbee People challenged the boundaries of Indian, southern, and American identities.
Lumbee Indian Histories by ISBN: 0521420458Publication Date: 1993-03-26This book explores the dynamics of the struggle for racial and ethnic identities in the southern United States, focusing on the Lumbee Indians of North Carolina. The book is also a history of American Indian concepts and visions of history, starting with the contemporary period and with the perspectives of the Lumbee Indians, and working backward to the colonial period and to the major groupings of Indian peoples. The book addresses the key question of how differing interpretations of history cause traditionally oppressed peoples to continue their struggle. Lumbee Indian Histories is a part of a larger project, centred at the Max Planck Institut für Geschichte, in Gottingen, Germany, to create new methodological approaches to, and concepts for, an historical anthropology.
The Only Land I Know by ISBN: 0815603606Publication Date: 1996-02-01This is the standard history of the Lumbee Indian people of southwestern North Carolina, the largest Indian community in population east of the Mississippi. Dial and Eliades trace the history of this group through 1974. Among the subjects covered are the Lumbee during the colonial period and the revolutionary War; the Lowrie war; the infamous Lowrie Band of the Civil War; the development of the Lumbee educational system; Lumbee folklore; and the modern Lumbee
Living Indian Histories by ISBN: 0807855065Publication Date: 2003-11-24With more than 40,000 registered members, the Lumbee Indians are the ninth largest tribe in the country and the largest east of the Mississippi River. Despite the tribe's size, the Lumbee lack full federal recognition and their history has been marked by a struggle to articulate an Indian identity against the imposition of non-native definitions of Indianness. Gerald Sider explores the complexities of Lumbee tribal identity, focusing on the tribe's socioeconomic and political history from the 1960s through the 1980s and working back to the colonial roots of present issues and questions, including the relationship between the Lumbee and Tuscarora people of Robeson County, North Carolina. In an extensive preface to this new edition, Sider carries the story forward from the 1980s to the present. Today, both the Lumbee and the reinvigorated Tuscarora are witnessing a major cultural resurgence. At the same time, they are becoming much more dependent upon government programs for their well-being, and socioeconomic inequality among native people is deepening. This new edition explores changing patterns of daily life for native people, their changing relations to social and governmental institutions, and the new tribal institutions that are taking shape in the face of current challenges. An earlier edition of this book was published in 1993 with the title Lumbee Indian Histories: Race, Ethnicity, and Indian Identity in the Southern United States.
The Lumbee Problem by ISBN: 0803261977Publication Date: 2001-09-01How does a group of people who have American Indian ancestry but no records of treaties, reservations, Native language, or peculiarly "Indian" customs come to be accepted--socially and legally--as Indians? Originally published in 1980, The Lumbee Problem traces the political and legal history of the Lumbee Indians of Robeson County, North Carolina, arguing that Lumbee political activities have been powerfully affected by the interplay between their own and others' conceptions of who they are. The book offers insights into the workings of racial ideology and practice in both the past and the present South--and particularly into the nature of Indianness as it is widely experienced among nonreservation Southeastern Indians. Race and ethnicity, as concepts and as elements guiding action, are seen to be at the heart of the matter. By exploring these issues and their implications as they are worked out in the United States, Blu brings much-needed clarity to the question of how such concepts are--or should be--applied across real and perceived cultural borders.
The Lumbee Indians by ISBN: 0899505112Publication Date: 1994-02-01The 100-year struggle by the Lumbee Indians of Robeson County, North Carolina, for federal recognition has been well documented. This tribe has had a long and rich history.The over 1,200 entries here are grouped in 19 broad categories (e.g., education, military service, Lumbee culture, archeological studies, tribal origin). Federal bills, state and federal laws, federal hearings and reports, court cases, newspaper articles, curriculum materials, and resource centers are included in their own sections.
The Lumbee Indians by ISBN: 9781469646374Publication Date: 2018-09-10Jamestown, the Lost Colony of Roanoke, and Plymouth Rock are central to America's mythic origin stories. Then, we are told, the main characters--the "friendly" Native Americans who met the settlers--disappeared. But the history of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina demands that we tell a different story. As the largest tribe east of the Mississippi and one of the largest in the country, the Lumbees have survived in their original homelands, maintaining a distinct identity as Indians in a biracial South. In this passionately written, sweeping work of history, Malinda Maynor Lowery narrates the Lumbees' extraordinary story as never before. The Lumbees' journey as a people sheds new light on America's defining moments, from the first encounters with Europeans to the present day. How and why did the Lumbees both fight to establish the United States and resist the encroachments of its government? How have they not just survived, but thrived, through Civil War, Jim Crow, the civil rights movement, and the war on drugs, to ultimately establish their own constitutional government in the twenty-first century? Their fight for full federal acknowledgment continues to this day, while the Lumbee people's struggle for justice and self-determination continues to transform our view of the American experience. Readers of this book will never see Native American history the same way.
Archival Resources
Helen Maynor Scheirbeck Papers, 1939-2008 (bulk 1960-1990)
Helen Maynor Scheirbeck (1935-2010) was a Lumbee Indian political scientist, educator, and community organizer born in Lumberton, N.C. Scheirbeck both led and served as a consultant to governmental and non-governmental organizations related to American Indian tribal recognition, education, and community development, including the National Congress of American Indians; the Rural and Indian Divisions of the Wisconsin Community Action Programs; the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare; the John Hay Whitney Foundation; the American Indian Policy Review Commission; the National Commission for the International Year of the Child; the White House Conference on Children and Youth; the associated Lumbee Regional Development Association, Indian Information Program, and United Indians of America; the Save the Children Federation; the North Carolina Indian Cultural Center; Head Start programs serving American Indian and Alaskan Natives; and the National Museum of the American Indian. Scheirbeck's father, Judge Lacy W. Maynor (1904-1972), was one of the first American Indian judges in North Carolina, and was an advocate for Lumbee Indian rights, education, and federal recognition, a leader in the National Congress of American Indians, and a public opponent of the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina. The collection consists chiefly of professional correspondence, research files, administrative files, grant proposals, legislative reports, clippings, speeches, and academic writings created or collected by Helen Maynor Scheirbeck during her career with governmental and non-governmental organizations dedicated to American Indian interests. Materials document American Indian education and social welfare policy development, cultural institutions and organizations, and community development, as well as federal recognition of the Lumbee, Menominee and other tribes. There are also correspondence, clippings, printed items, speech notes, drafts, and an audio recording of Scheirbeck's father, Judge Lacy W. Maynor, that document his judicial career and civic activities.
Jesse E. Oxendine Papers, 1860s-2015
The Jesse E. Oxendine Papers, 1860s-2015, consist of letters, scrapbooks, photographs, and other materials of Jesse E. Oxendine (1926-2017), a Lumbee Indian from Pembroke, N.C. Letters, 1944-1954, were written by family and friends from Pembroke, Charlotte, Detroit, and Richmond, chiefly during Oxendine's World War II military service. Other topics include boy scout troop 27 in Pembroke; the history of the 82nd Airborne, 325th Glider Infantry Regiment, including their participation in the liberation of Wobbelin concentration camp near Ludwigslust, Germany; Holocaust education; Cherokee Indian Normal School and Pembroke State University; Pembroke local history during the 1940s; Civil War and Reconstruction era recipes and home concoctions; the W. M. Lowry General Merchandise Store; and a 1958 incident in which Lumbee Indians expelled the Ku Klux Klan from Maxton, N.C.
Malinda Maynor Lowery Collection, 1990s-2004
Collection of historian and documentary film producer Malinda Maynor Lowery, a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. Malinda Maynor Lowery has focused much of her academic and filmmaking career on questions pertaining to Native culture, identity, and migration. The collection contains papers, ephemera, photographs, and audiovisual materials related to some of Lowery's documentary film projects on these subjects, including work completed while she was a student at Harvard University and Stanford University, as well as the films Real Indian (1996), Sounds of Faith (1997), and In the Light of Reverence (2001). Papers include tape logs, release forms, transcripts, press kits, and other materials related to the production and distribution of select documentary projects by Lowery. Audiovisual materials, which make up the bulk of the collection, consist mostly of production elements of Real Indian (1996), Sounds of Faith (1997), and various student projects by Lowery, including original picture and sound elements, workprints, edited masters, and video viewing copies. The collection also contains photographs and audio recordings related to Malinda Maynor Lowery's husband, Willie French Lowery (1944-2012), a Lumbee musician and activist from Robeson County, N.C.
Theses and Dissertations
Honors Essays, Master's Theses and PhD Dissertations on the subject of Lumbee.
Meherrin Resources
The Meherrin people live near the North Carolina and Virginia border, in Hertford, Gates, North Hampton and Bertie Counties.
Meherrin people refer to themselves as Kauwets'a:ka, meaning "People of the Water." "We are an Iroquois nation- close relatives of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) with whom we share deep historical and cultural ties."
Websites and Additional Resources
UNC Pembroke and the Museum of the Southeast American Indian
Stilling, Glenn Ellen. The Lumbee Indians: An Annotated Bibliography Online.
