The Lumbee Indians An American Struggle

• Main Author: Lowery, Malinda Maynor (auth)
• Format: Electronic Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Chapel Hill The University of North Carolina Press 2018
• Subjects: Indigenous peoples; Social & cultural history; Local history; Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography; History of the Americas; American Indians and self-determination; American Indian survival; American Indians in the Colonial Period; American Indians in the American Revolution; American Indian Removal; American Indians in the Civil War; American Indian Resistance; American Indians in Reconstruction; American Indians and segregation; American Indians in World War II; American Indians and civil rights; the War on Drugs; Lumbee Indians of North Carolina; American Indians in the South; the Native South; Southern History since the Civil War; History of the New South; North Carolina history; civil rights in North Carolina; Civil War in North Carolina; Reconstruction in North Carolina; segregation in North Carolina
• Online Access: OAPEN Library: download the publication; OAPEN Library: download the publication; OAPEN Library: description of the publication

Jamestown, 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.