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.
y 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.”
I know about that area in Maryland" 
.Kittles then talks about these historically light skinned communities of Aframs on the East Coast @ 32:23
