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LUMBEE CULTURE
Who are the Lumbee
The 40,000+ members of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina reside primarily in Robeson, Hoke,Cumberland and Scotland counties. The Lumbee Tribe is the largest tribe in North Carolina, the largest tribe east of the Mississippi River and the ninth largest in the nation. The Lumbee take their name from the Lumbee River which winds its way through Robeson County. Pembroke, North Carolina is the economic, cultural and political center of the tribe.
The ancestors of the Lumbee were mainly Cheraw and related Siouan-speaking Indians who have lived in the area of what is now Robeson County since the 1700s. The Lumbee people have been recognized by the state of North Carolina since 1885, and at the same time established a separate school system that would benefit tribal members. In 1887, the state established the Croatan Normal Indian School, which is today The University of North Carolina at Pembroke. In 1956 a bill was passed by the United States Congress which recognized the Lumbee as Indian, but denied the tribe full status as a federally recognized Indian tribe. Federal recognition for the tribe is currently being sought through federal legislation. For more information regarding Lumbee Federal Recognition, click here.
Lumbee Tribe & BIA
When Congress passed the Lumbee Act in 1956, it recognized the Lumbee as Indian but withheld the full benefits
of federal recognition from the tribe. It also precluded the tribe from
participating in the Bureau of Indian Affairs' (BIA) administrative acknowledgement
process for federal recognition. BIA policy states that the petitioning
group cannot be "subject to congressional legislation terminating
or forbidding the Federal relationship". The Solicitor for the Department
of the Interior concluded that the Act is legislation forbidding/terminating
the federal relationship.
The tribe now has two options to receive federal recognition. First, there
could be a congressional amendment to the Lumbee Act of 1956 that would
allow the tribe to participate in the BIA administrative process for federal
recognition. However, if this avenue is pursued, the Lumbee will be the
only tribe to go through the congressional legislative process as well
as the BIA administrative process. The other option would be special congressional
legislation granting full benefits of federal recognition to the tribe.
The Ysleta del Sur Pueblo of Texas and Pascua Yaqui Tribe of Arizona were
subject to legislation similar to the Lumbee Act and have received federal
recognition through special Congressional legislation
Modern
Female Lumbee traditional regalia is a Southern style dress worn with pine cone patchwork attached to an apron and a matching shawl. The Pine Cone Patchwork was inspired by a quilt made by Henry Berry Lowry's daughter, and is distinctly Lumbee in design. The patchwork design was initially created for Natasha Wagner, a former Miss Indian USA by Hayes A. Locklear and has since become a staple in area pow wow's.
Lumbee Homecoming is a tradition among the tribe that has been held annually since 1970. Homecoming is especially important in that it brings together members of families, many from great distances, for a weeklong celebration of Lumbee culture. Festivities include a parade, a pow wow, pageants, and other cultural events.
The ethnographer Frank Speck researched the use of gourds by Lumbee in the 1930's, and compared their use with that of other American Indian tribes.
Mary Margaret Steedly wrote her Master's thesis in 1979 on the folk medical system used by a Lumbee healer, Vernon Cooper. She found that Cooper's healing practice combined homeopathy, fundamentalist Christian faith healing, traditional Indian herbal medicine, and some elements of non-Native curing techniques. She also described the system as a unique expression of the tribe's social and cultural setting.
In 1977 and 1978, Edward M. Croom spent 2 years documenting plant remedies among the Lumbee. He interviewed 25 Lumbee elders who learned plant remedies from their family and friends as a normal part of childhood. Croom also compared Lumbee use of medicinal plants to other American Indian cultures and found numerous similarities.
Religion
The earliest Native American church in Robeson County was documented as being the Saddletree Meeting House in 1792. In the late 1800's, most Lumbees were either Methodist or Baptist. In 1875, Mary Norment wrote that:
…[T]he Methodist denomination had a circuit in the county [and] the ministers of that denomination preached regularly to [the Lumbee], and seemed to outsiders to take an unusual interest in their spiritual welfare…The Baptist denomination also sent their ministers in among them to impart spiritual instruction to their benighted minds.
In the 1880's, a group of Lumbees decided to form an entirely Indian
Methodist Conference, and in 1900 the Lumbee Methodist Conference was
formed. In "The Only Land I Know", Adolph Dial and David Eliades
state:
The reason for the formation of the Lumbee Methodist Conference was to bring self-determination to the Lumbee people, to create an organization in which the Lumbees made the decisions from top to bottom. At their organizational meeting on October 26, 1900, they stated that their purpose was to organize a "Conference for the Indian descent".
In January 1881, representatives from three Baptist churches met at Burnt Swamp Baptist Church, chose officers, approved a constitution and a name: The Burnt Swamp Missionary Baptist Association. Over the next twenty years the association grew to a total of eighteen churches. The association placed great emphasis on the concepts of orthodoxy, education, and the dangers of alcohol.
Presently, the Lumbee churches are grouped into four categories: The Burnt Swamp Baptist Association, the North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church, the Lumber River Holiness Methodist Conference, and non-affiliated.
Lumbee churches share a fundamental Christian outlook, and almost all ministers in the churches are members of the Lumbee tribe. It has been noted that "[s]ince the late war between the States, [the Lumbee] have shut the doors of their churches against all ministers of the white race and installed in their places in the pulpit persons of their own race" (Mary Norment, 1875).
Language
According to Wolfram, et al, Cheraw language, from the Eastern Siouan language family, was the earliest language spoken in and around present-day Robeson County. It is also noted that the Lumbee were probably familiar with all three language families present in the Carolinas (Eastern Siouan, Algonquian, and Iroquoian), and that they "emerged as a conglomerate group from a multilingual ancestral language situation" (Fine in the World: Lumbee Language in Time and Place, Wolfram et al).
The first English settlements were located along the Atlantic coast in the area of Virginia and North Carolina. Therefore, those tribes inhabiting those areas would be the first to lose their native language. As a result, rapid transition from their native language to English would have been only natural for the Lumbee tribe. In order to communicate with the settlers, the Lumbee were forced to abandon their language in favor of English for trade purposes.
In 1936, D'Arcy McNickle, from the United States Office of Indian Affairs came to Robeson County to collect affidavits from Lumbee people registering as Indian under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. McNickle stated, "…there are reasons for believing that until comparatively recently some remnant of language still persisted among these people". Reverend Dawley Maynor gave one example of a surviving phrase: epta tewa newasin, which roughly translates to "Jesus I love you". Rev. Maynor was born in 1902, and learned the phrase from his great-grandmother Susan Dial.
The following is a quote by Hugh Brayboy in his application for registration as Indian under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934:
My grandmother [Clarissa Chavis] did say that when the white men came here, they prevailed on the Indians to throw away their language and take up theirs so that they could understand them when they traded. My grandmother said that she heard her father talk the Indian language and often my grandmother would have to go and do the trading because her father wouldn't know whether the traders were saying fifty or seventy-five cents.
In another application for registration as Indian, Duncan L. Locklear noted that:
The language which the old Indians spoke was unlike any language used by the white people. The white people made fun of their speech and said it sounded like the sound of hoot owls and screech owls and they shamed them into giving up their native speech and adopting that of the white people.
When speaking of his grandparents, Randall and Ruth Locklear, in his application for registration, George Locklear said the following:
…he [Randall] claimed to be a full blood Indian and I can remember him speaking some Indian language, I don't know which one and singing Indian songs. None of us understood the Indian words he used but he would tell us what they meant. … Ruth could understand Indian language.
Smithsonian Files
Indian Man, “Tribe: Croatan”,
By Gill, 1911
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