Lowery, Malinda Maynor
The Lumbee Indians: An American Struggle
UNC Press (Chapel Hill)
2018
OUR SYNOPSIS: Enrolled member of the Lumbee tribe Malinda Maynor Lowery illuminates the stories of Lumbee people and their communities by amplifying their successful struggle for survival despite settler colonialism. She tracks their movement from ancestral lands mostly near the present North Carolina and South Carolina borders to other regions, most notably Baltimore and Detroit. Throughout this analysis, she employs Lumbee meanings of land and home that prioritize stories and relationships. She foregrounds these stories to overcome the challenges of an archive that does not include Lumbee voices prior to 1865.
BIG QUESTIONS:
How can we modify frameworks of urban history to respectfully accommodate Lumbee meanings of place and home in cities, such as Baltimore, where they live?
How have Lumbee people historically related to African Americans and white Americans?
FEATURE QUOTES:
“Lumbee history teaches us that the United States is a constellation of communities bonded together through success and failure, death and rebirth, family and place. Each of these communities has a right to self-governance, but not at the expense of its neighbors. Our failures teach us that we have a responsibility to be fair. Native people have played integral roles in the struggles to implement the United States’ founding principles and distinct roles in the expansion and defense of their own and the United States’ territory.” (14)
“Lumbees talk about places from the bottom up, driven by relationships and stories, rather than from the top down. The Lumbee homeland is best imagined in many layers, as something to be remembered and felt, rather than as places that can only be seen. Locations on a map—a town, a school, a homestead, a road, a swamp, a river—are just the beginning of what Lumbees mean when they talk about place.” (28)
PRIMARY SOURCES:
Hamilton McMillan, “Sir Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colony,” in *Indians of North Carolina,* (Washington: GPO, 1915), 50, https://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/mcpherson/mcpherson.html.
BALTIMORE CONNECTIONS:
Baltimore is a place where Lumbees historically and presently live.
