Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation (review)

Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation is a book that offers a unique analysis of the relationship between Jim Crow segregation and Lumbee Indian struggles for self-determination in Robeson County, North Carolina. Part autoethnography, part insider oral family history, and part critical analysis of the historical and anthropological records, Malinda Maynor Lowery's book questions how historians have understood the term "Indian" and explores the implications that these interpretations (and the observations used to support them) held for how the Lumbee people have been documented and recognized. The larger issue of this book is a perennial one for American Indian studies: how consistent are policy-based definitions of being and belonging with American Indian cultural rules for determining affiliation? This question seems to be central to Lowery's analysis because it illuminates the inconsistencies between the racial lenses (e.g., "colored" and "tri-racial isolates") through which academics and policy makers have recognized the Lumbee and the kinship-based cultural practices through which the people have identified themselves and their own. Through a thorough discussion of these inconsistencies, readers are afforded insight into how factions among the Lumbee adapted to the "Indian blood" requirements of the Indian New Deal as a strategy for securing their identity as Indians within the black-white racial binary of Robeson County.

Seven intriguing chapters follow a brief introduction on the diversity and origins of the Lumbee people (e.g., Keyauwee, Cheraw, etc.). Chapter 1 engages Lumbee agency in navigating and negotiating the boundaries of racial segregation in order to maintain an American Indian social identity. Such efforts included alliances forged with white Democrats and dissociation from African Americans, since local whites sought to group Indians and blacks together after 1900 (84). Lowery is careful, however, to remind the reader that such voluntary acts of segregation were not inherently how the Lumbee dealt with African Americans, but an adaptive behavior to white racial attitudes, in order to reinforce the notion that the Lumbee were a distinct race from African Americans. This point is made explicitly clear in her subsequent discussion of "The Lowery War" and other strong multiracial alliances between Indians, blacks, and whites.

Chapter 3 examines the inconsistencies between insider and outsider assessments of being and belonging that developed as the Lumbee adapted to Jim Crow. Lowery questions the misplaced fixity with which some anthropologists (e.g., Swanton and Mooney) and historians assumed that tribally identified American Indians could not also be of blended ancestries (e.g., African, European, etc.). Within the context of this discussion, Lowery illuminates the ideological and political alliances with Southern whites: for example, supporting white supremacy (Cherokee) versus avoiding affiliations with white politicians and proving up to the Office of Indian Affairs as "real" Indians (Siouan). These alliances caused the Lumbee to be recognized by the different tribal names that they have had over time—Croatan, Cherokee, Siouan, and Lumbee—although frequently the names were inconsistent with the diverse ways that the people viewed themselves (85). Through this discussion, the reader is presented with how this lack of consensus on identity, both internally and externally, has been the basis upon which federal recognition has been denied, yet it led to the establishment of community-based Indian schools, churches, and business and the ability of Lumbee to vote, at a time when African Americans were being disenfranchised.

Chapter 7 and a brief concluding section examine the salience of a rather poignant question in Lumbee lives: what is the relationship between Lumbee identity and U.S. citizenship? This exploratory survey tackles how the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924—particularly its salience to Lumbee life—and World War II not only shaped Lumbee feelings about community and country but also approaches to recognition: perform assimilation or perform primitivism. By situating these practices in relationship to the desires of town and rural factions...