Talk:Lumbee

Disputed Origins

Let's honestly present the dispute over Lumbee origins. The 1790 census pretty conclusively shows that the "Lumbee" are originally descended from mixed race unions of European colonists and African slaves. The theory of Indian origin was created after the Civil War when the North Carolina authorities were trying to stop violence between the "coloreds" of Robeson County and the Klan. It is likely that a few scattered Indians joined the colored settlements of Robeson County, but the "Lumbee" are not a tribe. In fact, the "Lumbee" name was made up in the 1950s.

Language research seems to collaborate that the pronaunciation of Lumbee English has roots in a Native American language. See for example Torbert “Tracing Native American language history through consonant cluster reduction: the case of Lumbee English” or Wolfram, Walt, Becky Childs, and Benjamin Torbert. “Tracing language history through consonant cluster reduction: comparative evidence from isolated dialects.”. A reviews of both papers is available here. The papers shows how generation differences (Lumbees have come into full contact with mainstream American English only recently) in consonant cluster reduction (CCR) indicate that Lumbee English is evolving their CCR in a pattern typical for other Native American languages towards that of standard English. Some influence of African American dialects is possible but deemed unlikely by the authors. Wadoli Itse 20:01, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

Dispute? What makes anyone think that there is a dispute? Lumbees certainly don't dispute their own existence. I'd like to know though, what makes the person with the "origins" query an authority on Lumbee authenticity? Here's an example: "Lumbee" was not "made up" in the 1950s as he/she claims. A white Robesonian waxed unevenly eloquent in a song about the "Lumbee River" published almost one hundred years earlier though. Of course, the white Robesonian minstrel could have invented the term "Lumbee." There is always that possibility. Or, perhaps he mispronounced "Lumbee," for "Lumber" as someone irresponsibly speculated that Lumbees had done at some earlier point in this article's patching together. But then, the Carolinas are bogged down in water -- pocosins, swamps, creeks, rivers, you name it. And wouldn't you know it, many of the rivers end with "ee" -- Peedee, Santee, Wateree, . . . oh, and Lumbee.

Then too, there certainly is nothing "conclusive" about census enumeration, both back in the day and now. I can remember the day when JFK was assassinated, the March on Washington, the Trail of Tears II, and the takeover of the BIA building in Washington DC, but I've only appeared on one federal census. Does this mean that I do not exist, or that I am only 6 years old? I was born and raised in the U.S. At birth, I was racially classified one way, and yet another classification was ascribed to me when I entered grade school five years later. My driver's license and social security card tell yet another story. So much for "conclusive" racial classification. Please refer to any one of a number of citations provided in the "references" section that address the historical complexity of racial classification in what is now the U.S.

I've even submitted a more historically accurate framework that historians and anthropologists use to effectively elucidate the historical processes that make the 16th, 17th, and 18th century Southeastern Native landscape in general, and ancestral Lumbees in particular more appreciable-- that of ethnogenesis. Moreover, I substantially added to a list of references, having found only five citations ostensibly intended to verify any and all claims that were being made in the body of the article. And yet, though all of this is much more than the person who posed the query has offered, this doesn't seem to be enough. Hmm. Those pesky double standards.

Well, how about the theory of origins offered by Hamilton McMillan. If McMillan's theory was a fiction, it was McMillan who chose to disseminate it in the 1880s. Nor was McMillan the first to endorse this theory, truth be told. Rest assured, none of the proponents of a "Lost Colony" theory who published their ruminations on the topic before McMillan were Native. And yes, ancestral Lumbees certainly used the "origins" theory to carve out a better political situation for themselves. But then, if you really want to address the creation and manipulation of "invented" traditions, why not take on the "discovery" of the "New World," "the first Thanksgiving," the Americas as "virgin land" and "wilderness," or one of the most popular of American fictions, "manifest destiny"?

On the other hand, many of the oral histories recounted by Indian families in the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries have been verified by anthropologists, historians, and linguists. Even those anthropologists who were largely informed by the racialized science of eugenics and who came to Robeson County in the 1930s concluded that they performed their analysis in an Indian community. Mind you, some friends you just don't want to have. But even these "objectively trained" scientists that "origin" types love to cite believed that they were dealing with Indians. Throughout the 1930s, the head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, John Collier, the Collier administration, and one of the anthropologist that Collier sent to Robeson County, Ella Deloria, who just happened to be Standing Rock Sioux (is that Indian enough?) believed that they were dealing with Indians. Ella was not the only Deloria to visit Robeson County. Her nephew, the Native intellectual, scholar, lawyer, theologian, activist, and author of "When Custer Died For Your Sins," Vine Deloria, Jr., was a regular and beloved visitor to the homeland of the Lumbee in Robeson County.

The much more recent research of linguists and linguistic anthropologists is fascinating and extremely revealing. Those who are wedded to the notion of sole descent from African slaves and English colonials will be disappointed by their findings however. NC State, and Walt Wolfram in particular has lead research into the "origins" of Lumbee English. Those who have carried out their research on language transference and use pretty much agree that the pattern typical for speakers of other Native American languages who adopt English is replicated in Robeson County by Lumbee speakers who speak a dialect distinct from both whites and blacks. This is not to say that Africans and Scots-Irish migrants (Lowery, Oxendine, for example are not English names) did not intermarry with Indians in North Carolina. They did. But then, the Lumbee have never denied this either.

What has been denied Lumbees, not by the state of North Carolina, nor increasingly by other Indians who have had the chance to interact with Lumbees, nor the majority of academics, Native and non-Native alike who have focused their research on Lumbees or other Indian groups in the Southeast, is authenticity by those few individuals who wield the question of "origins" as a weapon of a much touted, if rarely achieved "objectivity." Not coincidentally, Indians situated east of the Mississippi are their primary target. There are those who hurl the racialized and detribalizing question of "origins" at non-State and/or non-federally recognized California Indian tribal nations as well. They are similarly charged with being peoples without "origins," and thus, fraudulent descendents of, in their case, whites and Mexicans, or more puzzling still, Indians. The ancestors of their particular oral traditions had long since been pronounced "extinct." They continue to be assailed by those who claim as "conclusive," multiple "extinction," and/or "vanishing" narratives generated by colonial administrations established to advance the settlement of non-Native peoples and document the erasure of Native peoples.

The Lumbee have chosen to meet their complex history as a Native people head on. For almost two decades, historians, linguists, sociologists, archaeologists, and anthropologists from UNC-Pembroke, UNC-Chapel-Hill, Duke, NC State, New York University, and Harvard University have worked cooperatively with the Lumbee on various aspects of their historical and contemporary experience. But more significantly, the Lumbee as well as other Native peoples feel there are far more important and urgent issues that need to be dealt with, such as land claims, water rights, fishing rights, religious freedom, the protection of sacred places, repatriation, and a host of others. Certainly, there are many Lumbees at the forefront of efforts that address these issues. Yet, how is it that I never see "origin" folks advocating for and fighting on behalf of Native peoples on any one of these issues that are far more relevent to the welfare of Native peoples the world over? Granted, this is a forum for those who opt to submit what they claim to know about a particular issue to an online encyclopedia. But then, having responded to your query, how about an answer to mine? Oh, and one more question: Who are you, and more critically still, what qualifies you to make pronouncements on, and question the authenticity of a people you seem to know so very little about?

Cheers,

LumbeeRiver 01:32, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

Wow! Thanks LumbeeRiver and Wadoli Itse for helping me to figure out why these demands for accountability viz-a-vis questions of authenticity trouble me so much. And, LumbeeRiver is correct to question the qualifications of someone who fails to meet their own criteria of accountability; someone who submits spurious claims and unverifiable information. Usually, people like this don't come from academic backgrounds, and even if they do, they fail to remember that well-contextualized, citable scholarship is necessary in an online encyclopedia entry. The statement, "the 1790 census pretty conclusively shows. . ." is an excellent case in point. LumbeeRiver apprehends the issue of racial classification in four concise sections, "History," "Post-Contact Rupture," "The Question of Origins," and "Ethnogenesis," AND provides extensive citations-- unusual in the vast majority of Wikipedia articles. Did the person who initiated this discussion not read these sections first? Perhaps he/she did not understand these sections or their purpose? Or, perhaps, she or he understood all too well what it was that LumbeeRiver was doing? Something has to account for the query above and the number of irresponsible statements he/she makes that are clearly borne out of ignorance. For those of us who actually earned doctorates in areas like history, law, philosophy, linguistics, archaeology, sociology, or political science, and better yet, happen to specialize in the histories of given Native peoples or other ethnic groups, the specious statements made above are downright infuriating as well as insulting.

His or her brand of arrogance is the more egregious when it comes from someone who demands a call for "honesty" even as they create a "dispute" where none exists. The Lumbee are well known in academic circles and in Indian Country as an American Indian tribe, and yet as LumbeeRiver points out, most, if not all the American Indian tribes WEST of the Mississippi have fairly good, pretty neutral Wikipedia entries. None of us should, be we academics or not, suddenly lose the obligation to submit encyclopedic academic entries outside his or her field without being able to verify our claims. In going back to archived entries, "Bogdon," "Pokey5945," and "ProfBanks," are all guilty of making similar spurious statements without providing citations by current mainstream scholars who've actually gone to the trouble of conducting painstaking primary source research that they unfortunately see fit to cannibalize, misinterpret, misquote, and spin into a delegitimizing narrative. LumbeeRiver and Wadoli Itse have been more than accountable, both in their article entries and in their responses to this discussion page. Neither they nor the Lumbee have anything to prove.

ZIGGYC

140.247.74.102 00:14, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

Famous Lumbee

Have you all ever heard of Tatanka...he wrestled in the WWF back in the 1990's...his real name is Chris Chavis.

I am moving the following to the discussion section until a more detailed account of famous Lumbee can be compiled. It is sort of irrelevant in such a short stub-like article:

"An example of a Lumbee who has made himself known in 'show business' is Anybody Killa, (Native Rapper for Psychopathic Rapper, both solo and a part of the sub-group project, Dark Lotus)".

Perhaps it would be better to more fully explain the Lumbee, those of you experts out there, than simply name one or two. --Tuttobene 02:22, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I'm trying...I started and will tell other Lumbees to contribute. Biggest name of Lumbee descent: Heather Locklear. Though Lumbees don't always consider her "one of them"--mcm

Kelvin Sampson, head coach of the University of Oklahoma men's basketball team, is a Lumbee. He guided the Sooners to an appearance in the Final Four of the men's NCAA basketball tournament in 2002. --libertysooner

DNA

With modern advances in DNA and genealogy, would it not be possible to take samples from present day Lumbee and Lost Colony relatives from European family trees? By doing this the controversy might be settled, or only extended.

Here is a link to a recent story on the approach of using DNA and genealogy together:[1]

Samples from the Lumbee should be easy enough. Does anyone know if there are any identified relatives of the lost colony, that could be traced for a sample?

--68.255.239.192 22:12, 7 May 2005 (UTC)

Good idea. Best I could find was a link on archaelogy findings http://www.lost-colony.com/Buxtoncrew.html I did change the article a bit since it said there was no evidence while even the article on Roanoke Island mentions the evidence... mcm

discrepancy regarding the klansmen description

There is a discrepancy regarding the klansmen description on this page and that on the page for 1958. One says there was 5,000 klansman, the other that there were a handful.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958: January 18 - Armed Lumbee Native Americans chased off an estimated 5,000 Klansmen and supporters at the town of Maxton, North Carolina.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumbee: On January 18, 1958, armed Lumbee Native Americans chased off a handful of Klansmen and supporters led by grand wizard Catfish Cole at the town of Maxton, North Carolina.

cleaning up a little

I hope no one minds if I just clean up the prose a little. I wont change or add information at the moment, though I hope to come back and do that too eventually. --Elizabeth of North Carolina 02:41, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

Lumbee v. KKK battle

User:Tom by the Lumbee River, what is your source on the KKK and Lumbee numbers (and how heavily each side was armed) and the name of the KKK leader? Wadoli Itse 19:33, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

Article Overlooks a Broad Corpus of Contrary Sources

This article is clearly biased towards the "Lumbee" position. Researchers should make reference to articles such as: Houghton, Richard H., III. “The Lumbee: ‘not a tribe.’ ” The Nation 257.21 (20 December 1993): 750 (Houghton was Counsel on Native American Affairs of the US House of Representatives from 1989 to 1994). For a full, academic treatment of the argument that the "Lumbee" do not qualify for federal recognition, see the dissenting views in: "U.S. Congress, House Committee on Natural Resources," Report Together with Dissenting Views to Accompany H.R. 334, 103rd Cong., 1st sess., 14 October 1993, H. Rpt. 290."