How Scuffletown Became Indian Country: Political Change and Transformations in Indian identity in Robeson County, North Carolina, 1865-1956

Posted in Anthropology, Dissertations, History, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States on 2012-05-02 04:30Z by Steven

How Scuffletown Became Indian Country: Political Change and Transformations in Indian identity in Robeson County, North Carolina, 1865-1956

University of Washington
2008
267 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3328369
ISBN: 9780549817246

Anna Bailey

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

According to census reports, there were no Indians in Robeson County, North Carolina in the decades leading up to the Civil War. But as the war ended and Reconstruction began, a community, known today as the Lumbee Indians, moved from the category of mulatto into the category of Indian. My dissertation charts the emergence and evolution of Lumbee Indian identity. I argue that Lumbee identity was continually transformed in the midst of political struggles from the end of the Civil War through the post-World War II era. From the end of the Civil War to the 1930s, Lumbee identity was forged in the regional crucible of Reconstruction and Jim Crow politics and articulated through the local institutions of Indian-only churches and schools in Robeson County. Beginning in the 1930s and through the post-World War II era, national developments molded expressions of Lumbee Indian identity. The Great Depression, the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, and the onset of World War II shifted the markers of Lumbee identity from churches, schools, and kinship networks to nationally recognized indices of Indianness such as measurements of Indian blood quantum, line of tribal descent, and recognizably Indian cultural traditions. By highlighting the change in Lumbee identity from a regional entity to a nationally inflected construct, this dissertation illuminates the interconnection between the contours of Lumbee identity and the shifting political landscape in Robeson County from the end of the Civil War through the World War II era.

Table of Contents

  • List of Figures
  • List of Tables
  • Introduction
  • Chapter One: How an Outlaw became an Indian: Henry Berry Lowry and the Conservative Press, 1865-1872
  • Chapter Two: Separating Out: The Emergence of Croatan Indian Identity, 1872-1900
  • Chapter Three: “It is the center to which we should cling”: The Indian School System in Robeson County during Jim Crow, 1900-1930
  • Chapter Four: National Events in Robeson County: The Great Depression, Indian Reorganization Act and Anthropometry, 1930-1940
  • Chapter Five: “You’re the Lumbee Problem”: Social Scientist and Cultural Expressions of Indian Identity in the 1940s and Beyond
  • Conclusion
  • Bibliography

Purchase the dissertation here.

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