{"id":11247,"date":"2011-01-04T04:19:08","date_gmt":"2011-01-04T04:19:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=11247"},"modified":"2011-07-17T20:14:43","modified_gmt":"2011-07-17T20:14:43","slug":"telling-our-own-stories-lumbee-history-and-the-federal-acknowledgment-process","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=11247","title":{"rendered":"Telling Our Own Stories: Lumbee History and the Federal Acknowledgment Process"},"content":{"rendered":"

Telling Our Own Stories: Lumbee History and the Federal Acknowledgment Process<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The American Indian Quarterly<\/a>
\nVolume 33, Number 4<\/a>, Fall 2009
\npages 499-522
\nE-ISSN: 1534-1828, Print ISSN: 0095-182X<\/p>\n

Malinda Maynor Lowery<\/a><\/strong>, Assistant Professor of History
\nUniversity of North Carolina, Chapel Hill<\/em><\/p>\n

Being part of and writing about the Lumbee<\/a> community means that history always emerges into the present, offering both opportunities and challenges for my scholarship and my sense of belonging. I was born in Robeson County, North Carolina<\/a>, a place that Lumbees refer to as \u201cthe Holy Land,\u201d \u201cGod\u2019s Country,\u201d or, mostly, \u201chome,\u201d regardless of where they actually reside. My parents raised me two hours away in the city of Durham<\/a>, making me an \u201curban Indian\u201d (or as my cousins used to say, a \u201cDurham rat\u201d). I have a Lumbee family; both of my parents are Lumbees, and all of my relatives are Lumbees\u2014I\u2019m just a Lum, I\u2019m Indian. This is how I talk about myself, using terms and categories of knowledge (like \u201chome\u201d and \u201cLum\u201d) that have specific meanings to me and to other Lumbees but may mean nothing special to anyone else. Stories and places spring from these categories and become history.<\/p>\n

I was drawn to researching and writing about my People\u2019s history in part because the opportunity to tell our own story was too rare for me to pass up. Outsiders, people who do not belong to the group, have told our stories for us, often characterizing us as a \u201ctri-racial isolate<\/a>,\u201d \u201cblack Indians,\u201d or \u201cmulti-somethings.\u201d Lumbees seem to have a particular reputation for multiracial ancestry. Perhaps our seemingly anomalous position in the South raises the question\u2014as nonwhites, the argument goes, whites must have classed Lumbees socially with African Americans; therefore, Lumbees must have married African Americans extensively because they could not have married anyone who was white. At the heart of these arguments are two converging assumptions: one, that ancestry and cultural identity are <\/strong>consanguineous<\/strong><\/a> rather than subject to the changing contexts of human relations, and two, that white supremacy is a timeless norm rather than a social structure designed to ensure the dominance of a certain group.<\/strong> Race has been linked to blood and ancestry…<\/p>\n

Read or purchase the article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Telling Our Own Stories: Lumbee History and the Federal Acknowledgment Process The American Indian Quarterly Volume 33, Number 4, Fall 2009 pages 499-522 E-ISSN: 1534-1828, Print ISSN: 0095-182X Malinda Maynor Lowery, Assistant Professor of History University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Being part of and writing about the Lumbee community means that history always emerges […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1649,12,459,8,3015,5113,20],"tags":[877,5029,5030,1616,879,920,4559],"class_list":["post-11247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-articles","category-history","category-media-archive","category-native-americans","category-triracial","category-usa","tag-lumbee","tag-malinda-lowery","tag-malinda-m-lowery","tag-malinda-maynor-lowery","tag-north-carolina","tag-the-american-indian-quarterly","tag-tri-racial-isolates"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11247"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11247\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}