Lumbee

With 55,000 members, the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina is the largest Native American group east of the Mississippi River. Despite their numbers and recognition as Native Americans by North Carolina in 1885, the Lumbee have so far been unsuccessful in gaining federal recognition and have struggled to assert their identity as American Indians. Nevertheless, Lumbee population numbers are the reason North Carolina is in the top 10 states for Native American population.

Most Lumbee reside in southeastern North Carolina in the counties of Robeson, Hoke, Cumberland, and Scotland and neighboring counties in North and South Carolina. With a population of more than 49,000, Robeson County has the largest number of Lumbee, with the Lumbee, at 38.6 percent, being the largest single ethnic group in the county, surpassing both whites, at 33.1 percent, and blacks, at 24.9 percent.

The most probable origin of the Lumbee can be found among the small, coastal Carolina Indian groups devastated by war and new European diseases. By the late 17th century, these populations had declined considerably. During the Tuscarora War (1711–15), some of the surviving groups fled south seeking refuge among the Cheraws, who are probably the main ancestral Lumbee group. After further population decline, some surviving Cheraws, remnants of still other small Indian groups, whites, and African Americans became the basis of the contemporary Lumbee Indians. Because of the number of ancestral Indian groups, all speaking different Indian languages, English, with a distinctive Lumbee inflection, became the language of the Lumbee.

The lack of a surviving Indian language is one of several characteristics, along with the lack of reservation lands and a native religion, pointed to by skeptics who claim the Lumbee are not Native Americans but merely a generally nonwhite, “tri-racial isolate” like the Melungeons of Tennessee and Kentucky. (Recent DNA testing of the Melungeons documents an ancestry that is largely European and African, with very little Native American.)

Ancestry, however, is both genetic and cultural. Many Cherokees, for example, have more European than Native American ancestry. Most American Indians have struggled with the issue of [Page 1380]genetic ancestry, or “blood degree.” The Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma has done away with blood degree altogether and includes anyone descended from an individual listed on a particular roll, no matter how little Cherokee ancestry. By contrast, the Utes of Utah have raised their blood degree minimum to five-eighths (the equivalent of having one full-blood parent in addition to one parent who is at least one-quarter blood degree).