Lumbee
The Lumbee are a mixed-race community primarily located in Robeson County, North Carolina, which claims to be descended from myriad indigenous tribes who once inhabited the region.
Every named era found elsewhere in pre-European-contact North Carolina is also present in the archaeological record of Robeson County (artifacts from Paleo-Indian, Archaic, Woodland, and Mississippian cultures).
[citation needed] A 1772 proclamation by the governor of North Carolina, Arthur Dobbs — derived from a report by his agent, Colonel Rutherford, head of a Bladen County militia — listed the names of inhabitants who took part in a "Mob Raitously Assembled together,"[14] apparently defying the efforts of colonial officials to collect taxes.
Hamilton McMillan wrote that Lumbee ancestor James Lowrie had received sizable land grants early in the century, and, by 1738, possessed combined estates of more than 2,000 acres (810 ha).
According to James Campisi, an anthropologist retained by the Lumbee tribe to aid their petition for federal recognition, the area "is located in the heart of the so-called old field of the Cheraw documented in land records between 1737 and 1739.
[citation needed] In 1790, other men with surnames since associated with Lumbee-identified descendants, such as Barnes, Braveboy (or Brayboy), Bullard, Chavers (Chavis), Cumbo, Hammonds, Lowrie (Lowry/Lowery), Oxendine, Strickland, and Wilkins, were listed as inhabitants of the Fayetteville District; they were all "Free Persons of Color" in the first federal census.
This was one of a series of laws passed by North Carolina whites from 1826 to the 1850s which the historian John Hope Franklin characterized as the "Free Negro Code", creating restrictions on that class.
[27][28][29] Despite the widespread sympathies among the Indian community for the plight of the participants in this guerilla warfare, nearly 150 Lumbee ancestors voluntarily enlisted in the Confederate Infantry, including the nephew-in-law of Henry Berry Lowry described below.
Henry Berry Lowrie and several of his relatives took to the swamps where Indians resorted to "lying out" to avoid being rounded up by the Home Guard and forced to work as impressed laborers.
[31] The Lowrie gang, as it became known, resorted to crime and conducting personal feuds, committing robberies and murders against white Robeson County residents and skirmishing with the Confederate Home Guard.
In North Carolina, the law effectively recognized only whites and free persons of color regardless of race; therefore people of mixed or Native ancestry had no other option than to attend black schools established for and in which most students were the children of freedmen.
[39] In 1899, North Carolina Congressman John D. Bellamy introduced the first bill in Congress to appropriate federal funds to educate the Indian children of Robeson County.
"[43] During the 1950s, the Lumbee made nationwide news when they came into conflict with the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist terrorist organization, then headed by Grand Dragon James W. "Catfish" Cole.
Cole began a campaign of harassment against the Lumbee, claiming they were "mongrels and half-breeds" whose "race mixing" threatened to upset the established order of the segregated Jim Crow South.
[citation needed] From 1913 to 1932, North Carolina legislators introduced bills in Congress to change the name of the people to Cherokee and gain federal recognition, but did not succeed.
In his report, submitted to the Senate on January 4, 1915, he wrote: While these Indians are essentially an agricultural people, I believe them to be as capable of learning the mechanical trades as the average white youth.
He wrote: The evidence available thus seems to indicate that the Indians of Robeson County who have been called Croatan and Cherokee are descended mainly from certain Siouan tribes of which the most prominent were the Cheraw and Keyauwee, but they probably included as well remnants of the Eno, and Shakori, and very likely some of the coastal groups such as the Waccamaw and Cape Fears.
Although there is some reason to think that the Keyauwee tribe actually contributed more blood to the Robeson County Indians than any other, the name is not widely known, whereas that of the Cheraw has been familiar to historians, geographers and ethnologists in one form or another since the time of De Soto and has a firm position in the cartography of the region.
"[citation needed] Swanton speculated that the group were more likely descended in part from Cheraw and other eastern Siouan tribes, as these were the predominant Native American peoples historically in that area.
Some of the North Carolina delegation separately recommended an amendment to the 1956 Act that would enable the Lumbee to apply to the Department of Interior under the regular administrative process for recognition.
[57] Lumbee Tribal Chairman Jimmy Goins appeared before the United States Senate Committee on Indian Affairs in September 2007 to lobby for federal recognition of the tribe.
[75][76] In 1888, Hamilton McMillan proposed the Native inhabitants of Robeson County were descendants of England's "Lost Colony of Roanoke", who intermarried with what he described as the "Croatan Indians.
"[77][page needed] The Roanoke colony disappeared during a difficult winter, but the colonists reportedly left the word "Croatan" carved into a tree, hence the name MacMillan gave to the proto Lumbee.
Citing "oral traditions," Oxendine suggested that the Lumbee were the descendants of Cherokee warriors who fought with the British under Colonel John Barnwell of South Carolina in the Tuscarora campaign of 1711–1713.
By the 1770s, remnant Indians from the once distinct tribal communities of the Cheraw, Keyauwee, Hatteras, Waxhaw, Sugaree, Eno and Shakori gathered along the Lumbee River, near the border that now divides North and South Carolina.
[citation needed] Some of these Indians moved further southward to join with the few surviving Catawba, but the majority settled near the pines, web of wetlands, and river that bear the name of the Lumbee.
Lowery argues that Cheraw, Saponi, Hatteras, Tuscarora and Cape Fear Indians settled in the area during the 18th and 19th centuries and adopted English as a lingua franca.
Linguists have speculated that the ancestors of the Lumbees had been native peoples who had originally spoken the Cheraw dialect of the Eastern Siouan language prior to adopting English sometime before the early 1700s.
Lumbee dialect also makes use of several unique words and phrases: chauld ('embarrassed'); on the swamp ('in the neighborhood'); juvember (sling shot); and bog (a serving of chicken and rice).
The 1987 Lumbee Petition states that, "[w]ith so many prominent leaders it is easy to understand how the lodges could maintain order and, at the same time, protect the tribal members from organized violence from whites in the area".
