The Lumbee Tribe Gains Federal Recognition After a Generations-Long Fight
In Prospect, N.C., a speck of a community where most of the residents were members of the Lumbee Tribe, Ruth Locklear grew up immersed in her people’s struggle to secure the full recognition of the federal government. It was a step that would not only open up the prospect of much-needed federal benefits, but would also come with outside acknowledgment: Despite all the Lumbee had endured, they were still there. Ms. Locklear’s father inherited the fight from his father, who had inherited it from his. Eventually, she took it on herself. She would make trips to Washington, watching as efforts in Congress got close to success but were never close enough. “It becomes a way of life,” Ms. Locklear, 77, said of a fight that seemed endless. Until it didn’t. On Thursday, President Trump signed a bill that extended the federal recognition that the Lumbee Tribe had chased for more than a century. The measure was slipped into the annual defense policy bill, the centerpiece of which was the authorization of $900 billion in military spending. The package, which must be passed each fiscal year, was one of the few vehicles left to get something through an acrimonious Congress. The recognition now enables access to federal support that tribal leaders regard as urgently needed, as much of the community is deeply impoverished and faces dire health outcomes that are some of the worst in North Carolina. “I know with every fiber of my being that our ancestors are smiling down on us today,” John L. Lowery, the tribal chairman, said in a statement on Wednesday after the Senate passed the legislation, the hurdle that tribal leaders saw as the most daunting after past experiences. “Our tribe has finally crossed a barrier that once seemed impossible to overcome.” North Carolina has recognized the tribe since 1885, and Congress passed a law acknowledging the tribe in 1956. But in that legislation, lawmakers declined to make the tribe eligible for federal benefits set aside for Indigenous people — effectively, the tribe argued, making it second-class to hundreds of other formally recognized tribal nations across the United States. But the tribe’s efforts to be recognized have been tangled up in fraught questions of sovereignty and identity. Some of the staunchest opposition that the Lumbee have faced has been from other tribal nations, who have challenged the legitimacy of their historical and genealogical claims. At a Senate Indian Affairs Committee hearing this year, Ben Barnes, chief of the Shawnee Tribe, told lawmakers that “nationhood is not a label to be chosen, but an identity carried through generations of removal, loss and resistance.” The Lumbee Tribe, with its roughly 60,000 enrolled members largely living in southeastern North Carolina, has said that its ancestors were members of tribal nations who came from the Algonquian, Iroquoian and Siouan language families, who coalesced in the swamplands around Robeson County, N.C. Over time, according to researchers, those ancestors intermarried with enslaved Black people and freedmen, as well as English settlers. In the 1940s, they settled on naming themselves the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, after the river that courses through their land. Some have argued that they did not necessarily need the validation of the federal government. They had worked hard to pass down their history, taking pride in founding the institution of higher learning that became the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, and in the so-called Battle of Hayes Pond in 1958, when the Lumbee ran off members of the Ku Klux Klan. But having that recognition can be empowering, others say, especially as members have faced uncertainties over how they fit into the broader patchwork of the country’s Indigenous communities.
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