One
tribe's long struggle for full recognition
In March 2012, Heather
McMillan Nakai wrote a letter to the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs
asking the agency to verify that she was Indian. She was seeking
a job at the Indian Health Service and wanted to apply with "Indian
preference." Nakai knew this might be difficult: As far as she was
aware, no one from her North Carolina tribe the Lumbee
had ever been granted such preference.
Her birth certificate
says she's Indian, as did her first driver's license. Both of her
parents were required to attend segregated tribal schools in the
1950s and '60s. In Nakai's hometown in Robeson County, N.C., strangers
can look at the dark ringlets in her hair, hear her speak and watch
her eyes widen when she's indignant, and know exactly who her mother
and father are. "Who's your people?" is a common question in Robeson,
allowing locals to pinpoint their place among the generations of
Lumbee who have lived in the area for nearly 300 years.
Yet in the eyes of the
BIA, the Lumbee have never been Indian enough. Responding to Nakai
the following month, tribal government specialist Chandra Joseph
informed her that the Lumbee were not a federally recognized tribe
and therefore couldn't receive any federal benefits, including "Indian
preference." Invoking a 1956 law concerning the status of the Lumbee,
Joseph wrote: "The Lumbee Act precludes the Bureau from extending
any benefits to the Indians of Robeson and adjoining counties."
She enclosed a pamphlet titled "Guide to Tracing Indian Ancestry."
As a staff attorney for
the National Indian Gaming Commission, Nakai understands the intricacies
of documenting native bloodlines. In fact, she had submitted 80
pages of evidence to support her case. The Lumbee are descended
from several Carolina tribes, including the Cheraw, who intermarried
with whites and free African Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Nakai, 38, can trace her family tree back to at least 1900, when
her great-grandfather was listed as Indian on the federal census.
"That's a terrible feeling," she says, "to have somebody say to
you, 'You're so not Indian that you need somebody to send you a
pamphlet.'?"
Lumbees rely on historic
census documents listing the "Indian Population" of specific counties
to enroll members in their tribe. In researching her response, Nakai
realized the same documents could be used to argue that Lumbees
were eligible for federal benefits. She thought hers was a powerful
legal argument. If she could receive Indian preference, then so
could other members of her tribe. "When I'm pushed, I don't run,"
Nakai says. "I want to push back." And so she appealed the bureau's
decision and kept appealing until her case landed in federal
court.
Her battle would force
the Department of the Interior to reexamine its policy toward the
more than 55,000 Lumbee who make up the largest tribe east of the
Mississippi. For more than 60 years, the government has acknowledged
that they are Indians, yet denied them the sovereignty, land and
benefits it grants to other tribes. It's a situation that raises
fundamental questions about identity: What makes someone Native
American? Is it a matter of race, or culture, or some combination
of both? The Lumbee don't fit neatly into any racial categories,
but they have long been living as Indians, cultivating unique traditions
and community. Can a country divided by race ever accept them?
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Clockwise
from top: Osceola Mullin, Earl B. Chavis and Heather McMillan
Nakai
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The Lumbee tribe takes
its name from the Lumber River, which snakes beneath bridges and
spills into swamps in their sandy eastern corner of North Carolina.
The founding families settled along these swamps in the 1700s, fleeing
the war and disease that followed colonization of the coastal Carolinas.
Many Lumbees still have the last names handed down by those families:
Locklear, Chavis, Brooks, Oxendine, Lowry. Some people believe they
are descended from members of Sir Walter Raleigh's "Lost Colony"
of Roanoke who intermarried with indigenous people and fled inland.
But most historians agree there was a Cheraw settlement on the Lumber
River in the mid-18th century, and that several tribes along
with whites and free blacks migrated to the area around that
time. Their descendants now speak a unique Lumbee English dialect;
they cash their checks at the Lumbee Guaranty Bank and enroll their
kids at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, the country's
first state-funded four-year college to serve Native Americans.
The state of North Carolina
recognized the Lumbee as Native Americans in 1885. At the time,
they were labeled "Croatan Indians" one of many names given
to them over the centuries because they are unable to trace their
ancestry to a single Native American tribe. In 1888, the tribe started
its long quest for federal recognition.
Currently, there are
573 federally recognized tribes and more than 200 that are not recognized.
The Lumbee occupy a unique netherworld between the two. Recognized
tribes are treated as separate nations by the U.S. government; they
also can receive government services, and individual members qualify
for other benefits, such as "Indian preference." Right now, Lumbees
don't receive any of that.
Nakai is trying to secure
individual benefits without undergoing the arduous process of winning
recognition for her entire tribe. (Her case relies on a 1934 federal
law, the Indian Reorganization Act, which grants rights and benefits
to indigenous people who can prove they have "one-half or more Indian
blood.") For Lumbees as a group, meanwhile, their long struggle
to win recognition has been complicated by their history of interracial
marriage even though interracial marriage was common among
southeastern tribes prior to the Civil War. Many powerful western
tribes have "a perception that the Lumbee are really a mixed-race,
mainly African group," says Mark Miller, a history professor at
Southern Utah University who has written extensively about tribal
identity. That "original sin," he says, is a major cause of the
Lumbees' political problems.
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.
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Heather
McMillan Nakai speaks with congressional candidate Dan McCready,
second from right, during the Lumbee Homecoming parade in
Pembroke, N.C.
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By the early 1930s, the
Lumbee had spent several decades trying to persuade Congress to
recognize them as Indians, and now sought to be recognized under
the provisions of the Indian Reorganization Act. In 1936, representatives
of the federal Office of Indian Affairs traveled to Robeson County
to determine the purity of the tribe's "Indian blood." Harvard-trained
anthropologist Carl Seltzer and his colleagues conducted tests on
209 people. They measured skulls, opened people's mouths and examined
the size of their teeth. As Lumbee historian Malinda Maynor Lowery
recounts in her book, "Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South," Seltzer
noted whether each person's hair was "straight," "curly," "frizzy"
or "fine." He scratched women and children on their breastbone to
see if he left a red mark. (In his view, such redness indicated
"mixed blood," according to Lowery.)
Three years after she
filed her first request to the BIA, Nakai was digging through boxes
at the National Archives when she saw the mug shots Seltzer took
of her ancestors, and the looks on the women's faces after they
had been forced to open their shirts and allow a strange man to
scratch their chests. She was devastated. "Just even thinking about
the possibility that I would allow that to happen to my child
it's horrifying," she says.
In the end, Seltzer concluded
that only 22 of the 209 people he tested in Robeson possessed one-half
or more "Indian blood" and thus qualified for some federal benefits.
(In some cases, Seltzer decided that one sibling had the required
"blood quantum" and the other sibling did not.) Once the federal
government offered some individual benefits to the "Original 22,"
they broke off from the Lumbee to form their own political organization.
Their descendants have their own complicated history of pursuing
benefits and recognition.
The rest of the Lumbees
continued fighting for recognition from the federal government.
And in 1956 Congress did pass the Lumbee Act, which acknowledged
the indigenous people of Robeson County as Indians and called them
by the name they had chosen for themselves. But at the time, the
federal government was trying to terminate its relationships with
native people by disbanding tribes and selling their land. The Interior
Department did not want the financial burden of providing services
to a large new tribe, so lawmakers struck an odd political compromise:
They recognized the Lumbee yet prohibited them from receiving any
benefits or services offered to other tribes. Over the next few
decades, the law was interpreted to mean that Lumbees could not
qualify for health, housing or educational benefits offered to other
Native Americans; their land was not protected, their children were
not protected from being adopted out of the tribe, they couldn't
form their own police force, and they weren't consulted when private
companies wanted to build natural gas pipelines on their land.
Above all, the law deprived
tribal members of a clear label they could use to identify themselves
to outsiders. It even confused the government officials charged
with enacting Native American policy people like Chandra
Joseph at the BIA, who insisted in her letter to Nakai that the
Lumbee were not a recognized tribe. If the BIA treats you like you're
not really Indian, it's hard to convince people who haven't closely
studied Indian law that they're wrong. And the constant burden of
explaining and justifying one's identity can take a psychological
toll. Reggie Brewer, a cultural coordinator for the tribe, says
the current Lumbee recognition quest is not about money but respect.
"We know who we are," he says. "We want our children to have that
self-pride, that self-esteem of who they are."
In her hometown, Nakai
rarely had to explain her background. But when she went to summer
camp with other Native American children, they started asking questions
she didn't know how to answer. "Everywhere I went, people would
say, 'Are you mixed? What's your heritage?'?" Nakai recalls. "And
I would look at them blankly."
Some Lumbees have red
hair and freckles, others have tight blond curls, and others have
sleek, dark hair and mocha skin. No one is kicked out of the tribe
because of their skin tone and that concept is hard for the
BIA to accept, according to Mary Ann Jacobs, chair of the Department
of American Indian Studies at UNC-Pembroke. "They don't like the
fact that we refuse to put people out who look too white or look
too black. If they're our people, we keep them." Jacobs laughed,
as if the idea of doing anything else were absurd. "We refuse to
give them back. Why should we separate out based on this thing,
this race thing? If we have grown them and they speak Lumbee the
way we speak Lumbee, and they've gone to Lumbee schools and Lumbee
churches and we've fed them and nourished them, they're Lumbee."
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Taylor
Hunt, Brian Keith Bryant and Shirley Dial
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Kaya
Littleturtle, Chloe Hammonds and Reggie Brewer
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On a hot June morning,
Nakai buckled her 4-year-old daughter into the car seat in her Chevy
Tahoe and drove to church. As we entered downtown Lumberton
a cluster of hotels and strip malls off Interstate 95 Nakai
explained that native people never used to live there. Robeson County
is 41?percent Native American, 31 percent white and 24 percent black,
and its neighborhoods have long been divided along racial lines.
The county had five school districts, separating children in the
cities from Indians in the rural areas, until 1989, when Nakai was
9.
Nakai was baptized in
the Lumber River and married her husband in the sanctuary of Smyrna
Baptist. Church is such an essential part of Lumbee culture that
when a Lumbee teenager gets a new boyfriend, her grandparents will
ask him, "Where does your people church?" Families who have "churched"
together for centuries share the same burial grounds, and the elders
want to make sure their children don't marry a distant relative.
When Nakai was accepted
to Dartmouth College, Smyrna's deacons sat on the porch of her grandparents'
house and tried to persuade her grandfather not to let her go. New
Hampshire was too far away for a Lumbee girl to move to, they argued.
Nakai understood that the men were worried about her safety, but
she also knew Dartmouth was an Ivy League institution with a strong
Native American studies program. If she wanted to pursue her dream
of becoming a legal advocate for her people, she had to go. She
earned her bachelor's degree there and attended law school at UCLA.
Many Lumbee parents fear
that if their children live away from home for too long, they won't
come back and will lose their ties to land and family. But Nakai's
elders also faced decades of discrimination within Robeson County,
limiting their hopes for advancement. No matter how hard they worked,
someone would find a way to take their land and force them to become
sharecroppers. Even if they spoke English and went to church like
white men, "they still weren't the same," Nakai says. She was raised
to believe that she constantly had to prove herself. "It's just
ingrained you have to work harder," she says. "Even if you've
been perfect, it won't be enough."
The Lumbee don't have
an official clan system, Nakai says, but children are expected to
live near the land where they were raised. When Nakai and her husband
moved back to Robeson from Rockville, Md., last year, no plot was
available for them to build a house on the dirt road where 35 of
her relatives live. Instead, they moved into a country club development
about half an hour away shocking fellow Lumbees, who asked
Nakai, "They let Indians live there?"
In 2015, Robeson County
had the highest poverty rate in North Carolina, with 32 percent
of its population living below the poverty line. It also had the
highest rate of violent crime. Nakai doesn't think the Lumbee can
fully tackle these problems until their political status is resolved.
Federal recognition would allow them to protect their land and alleviate
the costs of housing and health care in addition to enjoying
the economic boom a casino might bring. "It's like a cloud hanging
over us that most people aren't even aware of," she says. "Right
now, I'm still arguing about whether I exist or not."
Brittany Hunt is also
accustomed to defending her Native American identity. She's a PhD
student in educational research at UNC-Charlotte, hoping to become
a professor who will bring more indigenous perspectives to classes
on race and education. At 27, Hunt has hazel eyes, dark hair and
a smattering of freckles. She smiled broadly when I asked her why
she's so proud of her Lumbee heritage. "I think being Indian is
just the best," she said. But it is "amazing and terrible at the
same time."
Hunt's mother fought
for her to attend gifted and talented classes in Robeson County
schools, after the principal told her that no one from her side
of Lumberton would qualify for the program. When Hunt enrolled at
Duke University in Durham, she was the only Lumbee undergraduate
on campus, she says. She quickly learned how to defend her identity.
"I felt like I was on trial for my Indian-ness a lot of times,"
she recalls.
At school Hunt befriended
her black classmates because she felt they had similar experiences
with discrimination. Still, they had trouble accepting her native
identity. Some would point out that Lumbees had black ancestors.
"That's true, but I don't have any family members who identify as
black and I don't identify as being that," she would respond. Others
would insist she was black or call her "light-skinned." And she
would argue, "No, I'm not light-skinned, I'm Lumbee."
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Clockwise
from top: Kerigahn Jacobs, Dean Clark and Richard Jones
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Questions of race and
culture don't just affect whether a tribe can gain recognition as
Native American; they also influence which individuals can feel
at home in or join a particular tribe. In Hunt's view,
cultural traditions shared norms like humor, food, devotion
to land and family are more important aspects of Lumbee identity
than race. Yet she concedes that Lumbee children with one black
parent might not feel accepted by the tribe. "There's a lot of racism
that exists within native tribes," Hunt says, left over from the
days when segregation was used to "divide and conquer" people of
color.
Jacobs, the UNC-Pembroke
professor, points out that many mixed-race children who were raised
as Lumbee moved away from Robeson County and left their Indian identity
behind. "Plenty of people left and became white and left and became
black," she says. But if they came home regularly, kept their ties
to family and community, and identified as Indian, they were considered
Lumbee.
Such racial conundrums
are not unique to the Lumbee. Wealthy members of the Cherokee Nation
once owned slaves, and their African American descendants were treated
as equal citizens of the Oklahoma tribe for decades until
2011, when the tribe stripped thousands of black Indians of their
enrollment rights on the grounds they could not prove their "Indian
blood." (In August 2017, after a lengthy legal battle, a U.S. District
Court restored their citizenship rights.)
Before Native Americans
were forced to prove their identity to the U.S. government, they
formed a sense of identity through kinship if your mother
or father was part of the group, then you were, too. If outsiders
married or were adopted into the group, they became part of that
lineage. But once the federal government began forcing them onto
reservations, redistributing their land and doling out benefits,
they began to care about "blood quantum" that is, how many
direct ancestors were listed as members of their tribe on official
government tallies.
To enroll and receive
benefits from a recognized tribe, members now have to use historical
census documents and "base rolls" to prove that they have some fraction
of Indian ancestry. They submit this information to the tribe, and
each tribe relies on a different fraction to meet their enrollment
standard. "I don't know of a single tribe that doesn't require biological
relationships with ancestors on the base rolls," says Kim TallBear,
an associate professor of native studies at the University of Alberta,
who has written extensively about race, genetics and Native Americans.
"But we do have very active debates on how much culture should matter."
The problem, she says, is that "being the culture police isn't going
to be any easier" than tracing bloodlines. How, after all, do you
evaluate if someone is culturally Indian?
Lumbees focus on both
culture and kinship when enrolling members in their tribe. Applicants
must have at least one ancestor listed as a member of the "Indian
Population" on the 1900 or 1910 Census, and prove that they maintain
current ties to the Lumbee tribe. In the tribe's view, familial
ancestry is not the same as racial ancestry. Government officials
devised the categories of white, black or Indian, and then decided
how much white or black "blood" was acceptable for a person to be
called Indian. Lumbees couldn't always squeeze themselves into those
categories, and, as Malinda Maynor Lowery notes, "we've suffered
mightily for it."
What many tribes fear
particularly those who oppose Lumbee recognition is
losing their identity. They want their members to be able to trace
their ancestry to a single tribe that had a documented, indigenous
culture and customs that are still practiced today. Lumbees can't
do that, because they began mixing with other tribes and races very
early on. Southern Utah University's Miller points out that when
the Lumbee were "discovered" by colonists in the mid-18th century,
they were already farming, wearing European clothing and speaking
English. Some leaders of recognized tribes view this as "you guys
were always assimilating racially and culturally," Miller says.
In theory, DNA tests
to determine a person's overall Native American heritage could solve
some of these quandaries, but both TallBear and Lowery say such
tests are irrelevant to most tribes. When Lumbees contact her, alarmed
that biological tests don't reveal their native DNA, Lowery reminds
them that the companies doing the testing don't have base samples
of their ancestors' DNA. "People are allowed to be African American
in this society and not have 100 percent African DNA," Lowery says.
"Are the Lumbee being held to a different standard?"
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Lumbees
swim in the Lumber River, from which the tribe takes its name.
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Eight
decades after it was conducted, the Seltzer study continues to haunt
Lumbees. The BIA still cites it: In a June 2012 letter to Nakai,
Eastern Regional Director Franklin Keel told her one of the reasons
she didn't qualify for "Indian preference" was because she was not
among those "Original 22." "Right now," Nakai said of the BIA, "they
are sitting somewhere, trying to figure out how to make an argument
that says that I am not an Indian under the law because no one ran
a pencil through my hair without it getting tangled." (Spokeswoman
Nedra Darling says the BIA cannot comment on matters that are still
being adjudicated by the agency.)
There are two ways for
a tribe to become recognized: by an act of Congress or by petitioning
the BIA for acknowledgment. In 1987, when Nakai was 7, the Lumbee
prepared a lengthy petition for the BIA, only to have it rejected
two years later. Since then, at least 27 bills to fully recognize
and extend federal benefits to the Lumbee have been introduced in
Congress. The closest they've come to success was in 2010. President
Barack Obama had courted the Lumbee vote en route to winning North
Carolina narrowly in 2008, and a recognition bill passed the House
with the support of his administration. But it died in the Senate
after news broke that Lumbee tribal leaders hired a gaming consultant
company to lobby for them even though the bill promised no
casino would be built on their land.
Indeed, gaming is a major
hurdle to Lumbee recognition. The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians
operates a casino in the mountains of western North Carolina, and
its profits provide individual members of the tribe with $8,000
to $10,000 in annual payments, Miller writes in his book "Claiming
Tribal Identity." No other tribe has a casino in the state. In 2009,
the Eastern Band, along with other powerful southeastern tribes,
used its casino profits to lobby against Lumbee recognition, according
to Miller. (Lynne Harlan, public relations manager for the Eastern
Band, declined to comment for this story.)
That year, the Congressional
Budget Office estimated it would cost $786 million over a four-year
period to extend federal benefits to the Lumbee. Other recognized
tribes balked at that number; they don't want their share of BIA
funding to shrink. As Principal Chief Richard Sneed argued in the
Cherokee One Feather newspaper last September, Lumbee recognition
"has some staggering implications" for the Eastern Band's economy.
"The increase in competition for federal funding will grow exponentially
if the Lumbee and their estimated 50,000 members gain recognition,"
he wrote. "This will impact our housing and roads money among other
federal funds which are dwindling with the proposed budget."
BIA officials have stoked
such fears by holding meetings with powerful tribes in western states
and warning that their federal funds will be "significantly lessened
if the large Lumbee tribe secures status," Miller writes. For their
part, the Lumbee have no casino profits to use in their lobbying
efforts.
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Stinston
Revels, Nola Graham and Bryce Locklear, and Mickey Revels
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Azalea
Thomas, Austin Brayboy and Jerlene Maynor
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And yet, a glimmer of
hope arrived in December 2016, when the then-solicitor of the Interior
Department admitted that Nakai was right sort of. In a 19-page
opinion, Hilary Tompkins wrote that the Lumbee Act did not disqualify
all individual Lumbees from federal benefits. The BIA was wrong
to automatically reject Nakai's request for Indian preference simply
because she was Lumbee, Tompkins wrote, and must reconsider her
application. She went on to say that the Lumbee tribe could apply
for federal recognition from the BIA, and if recognition was granted,
they would qualify for all the benefits offered to other tribes.
For Nakai, this was a
small victory: She had changed the government's stance toward her
tribe. But she still hadn't won her case. She now had to supply
even more documentation to the BIA, showing that she has "one-half
degree or more of Indian blood." As of July 2018, her case was still
pending.
Meanwhile, the Lumbee
are hoping Congress will grant them recognition. In the summer of
2017, two Republicans from North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr
and Rep. Robert Pittenger introduced bills to give the Lumbee
full federal recognition. Pittenger, whose district includes Lumbee
territory, cited the millions of dollars of damage done to homes,
schools and businesses in Robeson County during Hurricane Matthew
in 2016. He argued that some of the damage could have been prevented
if the Lumbee had better access to emergency funds reserved for
federally recognized tribes in advance of the storm. "The Lumbee
tribe is not asking for special treatment," Pittenger said. "They
are asking for parity and consistency in the way that the federal
government views them."
When tribal chairman
Harvey Godwin Jr. testified before a House subcommittee in September
2017, he noted that recognition would "greatly aid" economic development
in his rural part of North Carolina. "We would be able to create
a police force to address the violent crime and drug problems riddling
our community," he said. "We could build schools for our children
that teach our culture and our history." (Godwin did not return
requests for comment for this story.)
Yet officials who oppose
Lumbee recognition have argued that the relatively prosperous tribe
which at one point claimed to have more PhDs than any other
Native American group should not rely on federal assistance.
In 1988, Ross Swimmer, a former principal chief of the Cherokee
Nation and then-assistant secretary for Indian Affairs, told Congress
that providing BIA services to "a sophisticated, well-educated"
tribe would create a "pocket of paternalism" in Robeson County.
Gaming presents its own
complications. Pittenger's recognition bill prohibits gaming on
Lumbee land, but Burr's would allow it. Arlinda Locklear, a prominent
Lumbee attorney in Washington who represented the tribe in its 2009
recognition quest, says the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians still
poses a formidable impediment to the bill. The "Eastern Band of
Cherokee has money and we do not," she says. "Their ability to lobby
on this bill far exceeds the Lumbee ability to match that."
Solicitor Tompkins's
opinion could also hurt the bill's chance of passing. Until now,
the Lumbee could argue they had no choice but to go through Congress,
because the BIA refused to recognize their tribe. But now that Tompkins
has made clear that they can petition the BIA for recognition, Congress
may think a law is unnecessary. "It really kind of makes it harder,
rather than easier, for us to get the legislation through," Locklear
says.
Nakai, however, remains
determined to win her battle with the BIA. She wants to make sure
future generations of Lumbee don't have to argue with the government
over their "blood quantum." She and her husband moved back to Robeson
County last year so their daughter could grow up knowing more about
her heritage. "Everywhere she goes, people reaffirm not just who
she is, but her place in her tribe and in her community," Nakai
says.
Strangers who meet the
4-year-old at church or school can identify "her people." They can
look in her brown eyes and see the generations that came before
her. "That's what it feels like to be Indian," Nakai says. "To be
Lumbee is to know that, come what may, you have a place that you
belong."
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Clockwise
from top: Jamie K. Oxedine, Mychalene Deese and Mary Deese,
and Nancy Locklear
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On the first weekend
in July, Nakai took her daughter to the 50th annual Lumbee Homecoming
parade. More than 20,000 people would be attending. Lumbee Homecoming
started in 1968. Many Lumbees had begun moving to cities in search
of factory jobs, but they still came home to visit their families
during the summer. The festival was a way to celebrate their return
and foster pride in their heritage. The week-long event included
the Miss Lumbee beauty pageant, a golf tournament, a play about
Lumbee history and a powwow. Vendors were selling jewelry and handmade
pottery, along with T-shirts that said "Make America Native Again."
Among those marching
in the parade were North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper. At one point,
a small group of people marched by carrying a banner that read,
"Full Federal Recognition Now!" They were campaigning with Dan McCready,
the Democratic candidate for the 9th Congressional District, which
includes Robeson County. Pittenger lost the Republican primary in
May, and Democrats now hope to flip the House seat, which has been
held by the GOP for more than five decades.
When the festivities
paused to allow a train to pass through downtown Pembroke, Nakai
walked over to introduce herself to McCready. Amid the roar of the
crowd, McCready made clear he would advocate for the Lumbee. "We'd
love to talk about that," he told Nakai.
Nakai looked at him,
taking in his eagerness to please. She's devoted six years of her
life to a legal battle that no politician has ever won. Her people
have been disappointed by government officials for more than 130
years. Yes, she would be happy to meet with one of McCready's staffers
but first she had a parade to attend. "I've got some ideas,"
she said, and walked back to join her people.
Lisa Rab is a writer
in Charlotte whose work has appeared in Mother Jones, Harper's and
Politico Magazine.
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