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Reviewed by:
  • Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation
  • Carolyn A. Liebler
Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation By Malinda Maynor Lowery University of North Carolina Press. 2010. 339 pages. $21.95 paper.

Who is an American Indian? And what counts as a tribe? Questions of individual and collective identity have burdened American Indians for centuries, and many of these questions remain unresolved. Malinda Maynor Lowery takes a social historian's look at the collective identity experiences of her own people, the Lumbee of Robeson County, North Carolina. In this dense book, she traces the complex interplay between the groups' sense of themselves as American Indians and their efforts to convince others that they are American Indians as individuals and are also a collectivity that should be called a "tribe." In the context of Southern segregation and economic strain, recognition from outsiders has been crucial for securing and controlling resources.

Focusing on the first half of the 20th century, Lowery provides an in-depth analysis of the effects of Jim Crow segregation and federal policies on the self-presentation of tribal members. The byzantine history of identity claims by this group of people is [End Page 1078] particularly interesting. On the one hand, many in the group do not fit physical or cultural stereotypes. They have never made a treaty with the U.S. government, and they do not have an indigenous language. For reasons like this, the tribe has never gained full federal recognition despite more than a century of efforts by community members. On the other hand, they see themselves as an American Indian tribe, lived as Indian under Jim Crow segregation, and have been acknowledged as Indian by white and black locals as well as the state of North Carolina. This contradictory set of circumstances makes this a fascinating case to study.

Lowery, a historian, primarily bases her extensive research on archival sources. However, as a member of the Lumbee tribe, she clearly feels deeply connected to the topic and intersperses family stories and photos in the text. She has also used her personal connections to gain access to others in the community who have shared their own family stories and memories of who did what and why. This combination of sources is unusual in scholarly writing, but in the end her insider view seems appropriate given that American Indian history has so often been studied by, and written by, outsiders.

Using her insider knowledge to bolster her confidence in the claim, Lowery argues that individuals in the group use a person's kinship connections, the specific settlement in which they live, and whether they went to an Indian school to decide whether the person should be considered part of the group. Thousands of people fit these criteria and are considered Indian in the local community. This definition of "who is Indian" is controversial, however, because it leaves out aspects of Indianness that were important to the Office of Indian Affairs, including phenotype, indigenous language use and indigenous culture. Lowery provides an extensive discussion of how various factions of the group approached the daunting project of gaining federal recognition while retaining state recognition, the endorsement of white supremacists, and control of Indian schools. A savvy reader will recognize this as a strong contribution to scholarship on the social construction of race.

The exact history of the indigenous founders of this group is unknown and thus the debate about the group's origins has been a long and heated one, both within the group and among outsiders. Lowery traces the convoluted history of how the people received and defended names for their tribe, each name representing a different version of who the people are and how they got there. Over the years covered in the book, the tribe was variously called Croatan, Siouian, Cherokee, Robeson County Indians, Lumbee and Tuscarora, among other names. Croatan, Siouian and Cherokee were each recommended by a different outsider, based on the outsider's historical or anthropological research. The other names move away from the historical roots of the tribe and emphasize their current location...

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