The Lumbees

Henry Berry’s People, the Lumbee

Introduction

Over 50,000 strong, the Lumbee are the largest tribe east of the Mississippi River. Thanks to their numbers, North Carolina is home to the nation’s largest Native American population east of the Mississippi. Lumbees are descendants of the many tribes that lived in North Carolina prior to the arrival of Columbus, including the Cheraw, Tuscarora, Saponi, and Hattaras Indians. The earliest victims of devastating diseases and warfare, the ancestors of the Lumbee survived by adopting some outsiders and by moving around to be with other tribes in the same situation. The only language these different tribes had in common was probably the English they had learned from missionaries and traders, which accounts for the disappearance of our Native languages today.

Culture

Lumbee culture is marked by strong family relationships, seen especially in the respectful exchange between youth and elders and in knowledge of the tribe’s genealogy, which many people in the community can recount from memory. It is also marked by a strong relationship to special places, such as the river, the swamps, churches, and cemeteries. These places are not just appreciated from afar, but Lumbee people interact with them on a daily basis and love them as they love their family members. Lumbees have a special devotion to their churches—Baptist, Methodist, Pentecostal Holiness and others—and to their religious music. Lumbee religion, although firmly attached to Christian scripture and ritual, contains many echoes of our traditional spiritual practice. Today, many community members have re-connected to those traditions and practice them alongside their Christian traditions. The community also has vibrant healing practices, and healers will use herbs, roots, plants, and other techniques to augment the treatments given by the many tribal members who have obtained advanced degrees in health care.

Removal

Unlike some other Indians in the Southeast, the Lumbee owned their land as individuals, rather than in common, which helped them avoid the Removal that so tragically affected the Cherokee and other tribes. But the Lumbees suffered a kind of Removal of their own—slaveholders in the South, threatened by the Lumbees’ status as free people, reclassified them legally as “Free Persons of Color,” driving much of their culture underground. In the meantime, their family networks grew even tighter and elders continued to pass on traditions and stories while trying to avoid persecution by local authorities.

A Sovereign Nation

Henry Berry Lowrie and the Lowrie gang helped reverse this legal definition by defending Indians’ rights and making it possible for all Robeson County residents to vote and get an education. The Lumbees were the first tribe in the United States to run their own school system, which they founded in 1885. That school is now the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, an affiliate institution of the University of North Carolina. Lumbees have a long record of patriotic military service, participating in the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and all of the major conflicts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

In 1956, Congress recognized the tribe as Lumbee Indians. But due to a prevailing attitude that favored terminating all relations between the federal government and Indian tribes, the Lumbee were excluded from federal services. Lumbees received national attention in 1958, when a group of five hundred men, many of them World War II veterans, stopped the Ku Klux Klan from holding a rally and threatening Lumbee families. “In the spirit of Henry Berry Lowrie,” elder Welton Lowry said, the Lumbees continued to fight injustice at every opportunity and protect their rights to live in peace.

The twentieth century also witnessed the formation of a democratically elected, representative tribal government that delivers services to Lumbee people and has diligently pursued the amendment of the 1956 Lumbee Act to restore the tribe’s place among the United States’ fully-recognized Indian tribes.

For more information about Lumbee history, culture, and tribal government, please visit the “Resources” page.