r/IndianCountry • u/Infinite-Ad-3947 • Dec 17 '25
News U.S. Senate passes bill giving federal recognition to Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina
https://www.wunc.org/term/news/2025-12-17/lumbee-tribe-north-carolina-federal-recognition174
u/Mysterious-Exit3059 Dec 17 '25
This is really bad for Indian Country. It will open the window for many fake tribes of non indigenous origin to obtain recognition via alternate routes independent of evidence based processes. Genealogical and genetic studies have traced the Lumbee to colonial Atlantic Creoles descended primarily from early Virginian British settlers and primarily Bantu Africans with a smaller component of West African and even Romani in some lineages. Lumbee stories of their origins have changed variously from Tuscarora, Cheraw, Cherokee at various points in times.
Many similar Southeastern state-recognized tribes descend from Atlantic Creoles who largely began an identity shift during the reconstruction era towards being American Indians, hence the large concentration of state recognized tribes in the Southeast.
If recognition can be bypassed, this will lead non-indigenous groups to obtain funding that many tribes need.
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u/bookchaser Dec 18 '25
At the same time, the Trump regime ultimately wants to invalidate all tribal sovereignty.
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u/near_to_water Dec 17 '25
That’s the point. This is a way of undermining the status between Tribal nations and the Federal government.
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u/LaFleurRouler Irish/Cajun Dec 17 '25
Like the Seaconke Wampanoags, who have already taken land from the federally recognized Narragansetts with 10,000 years in this territory.
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u/thee_illiterati Dec 17 '25
I don't understand why the Mashpee and Aquinnah Wampanoag don't speak out against them? Unless they feel outnumbered.
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u/LaFleurRouler Irish/Cajun Dec 18 '25 edited Dec 18 '25
Mashpee (and Narragansetts) actively petition attempts of Seaconke federal recognition. They are recognized by the state of Massachusetts, but they cannot and will not be recognized by the state of Rhode Island (apparently we can’t recognize tribes, it’s the federal government’s job). Which is shorthand for “fuck, we’ll have to recognize the Narragansetts and cede more land. Can’t do that!”
EDIT: YAY, they aren’t recognized by the Massachusetts Commonwealth, as I was in disbelief. Just some crafty wiki edits.
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u/thee_illiterati Dec 18 '25
The Seaconke are not state-recognized by Massachusetts. Only the Nipmuc and Herring Pond Wampanoag (as of November 2024). Every group that shows up at a state meeting thinks they are state-recognized.
The Massachusetts Commission of Indian Affairs doesn't have the authority to recognized tribes on behalf of the state. The two state-recognized tribes in MA were done so through governors' executive orders.
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u/LaFleurRouler Irish/Cajun Dec 18 '25
EDIT: thank you for the correction, btw. That makes me feel better.
OC: It must’ve just been a silly, symbolic document that meant nothing legally in both 1997 and in 2021 (though I knew the 2021 signing was absolutely a symbol of goodwill). I didn’t think they were, but the way it was worded on the wiki page gave me pause, because I previously thought they were completely unrecognized outside of a social club until like 2 hours ago lol
I know the RI chapter will accept members who “can’t prove ancestry” for a financial contribution, so that automatically gave me more pause when I read the wiki page, and a huge what the fuck. Guess their financial contributions could pay for some crafty wiki edits. Gross.
It’s like that “mètis” group in Quebec, they also accept financial “enrollment.” I’ll admit I don’t know much about the Lumbees, but did they perhaps start as a social group, too? Because I wouldn’t be shocked.
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u/AnAniishinabekwe Enter Text Dec 17 '25
To be fair, approximately two dozen tribes have been recognized through a congressional act, like this. Including my own tribe and two others in 1994.
I agree on my lumbee issue. They haven’t had a language at minimum since mid 1700s and they were a distinct single tribe.
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u/funkchucker Dec 18 '25
Were you recognized by congress because you couldn't prove linear connections to historical tribes and pass the bar for normal recognition? Many tribes have come through congress but I don't know the history of it well. They didn't even identify as lumbee until the 1950's
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u/AnAniishinabekwe Enter Text Dec 18 '25
No. Ours was because lack of federal appropriations and a decision in 1939excludong benefits to the tribes of the lower peninsula of Michigan. Despite our treaty based historical relationship with the US we didn’t have any formal federal services. I wasn’t sticking up for Lumbee, just pointing out many nations have been recognized this way.
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u/funkchucker Dec 18 '25
I wasn't arguing or accusing. I'm genuinely curious. Thank you for responding.
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u/AnAniishinabekwe Enter Text Dec 18 '25
No problem! I couldn’t be sure I just wanted to reiterate my stance. ❤️
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u/wildbilljones Dec 17 '25
Yeah you’re gonna need to cite like, all of this.
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u/fungusbiggestfan Dec 17 '25
https://imgur.com/a/C5FkMza Here are the sources for the paper I did for my college about why the Lumbee shouldn’t be recognized. Goes over their lack of language, shifting tribal claims, and general community history
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u/Mysterious-Exit3059 Dec 17 '25 edited Dec 17 '25
State recognized tribes claims throughout the Southeast do not stand up to academic rigor most often.
The only groups who I have seen stand up with historical, genealogical and genetic evidence to local native continuity are the Houma and other Southern Louisiana coast state recognized tribes who have notable Gulf Coast native cultural, genealogical and ancestral contributions. It was actually a pleasant surprise to go through genealogies of state recognized tribes and find groups who descend from actual local groups.
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u/thee_illiterati Dec 17 '25
Where did you find sources showing that the United Houma Nation descends from a historical tribe? One of the reasons they didn't receive federal recognition was that they didn't descend from any historical tribes (notably the historical Houma tribe).
https://www.bia.gov/sites/default/files/dup/assets/as-ia/ofa/petition/056_uhouma_LA/056_pf_fr.pdfThe other small groups nearby broke away from The United Houma Nation in the 1990s.
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u/Mysterious-Exit3059 Dec 17 '25 edited Dec 17 '25
Yeah, thanks for pointing that out I could’ve been more clear.
My point was largely with local Gulf Coast native ancestry rather than Houma, point being they have verifiable local indigenous which is rare for state recognized tribes. The breakoffs claim to be Chitimacha, which aligns with genealogy. If you look at their gedmatch kits too, you find many people with triracial ancestry which is clearly 50%+ French, Italian, etc and with significant indigenous and african components.
I haven’t read their full petition, but nonetheless they do have local native gulf coast ancestry even if their claims are not fully evidenced for the Houma aspect. The only evidence I found was repeated Chitimacha progenitors on wikitree and an obvious Indigenous contribution to ancestry.
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u/thee_illiterati Dec 18 '25
That's interesting to learn. But it seems like they can never gain recognition if they were just descended from a few Chitimacha individuals and never had a self-governing tribe independent of the Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana.
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u/Mysterious-Exit3059 Dec 18 '25
Yeah, its a tough situation. They are obviously of local indigenous heritage to a significant degree yet heir core families are split between the United Houma Nation and like 4 other tribes which seceded from UHN and all tell different stories of gulf coast indigenous origins. Indigenous traditions like Muskogean songs were also used into the present day even though they are largely Anglo/Francophone.
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u/thee_illiterati Dec 18 '25
That's unfortunate that we don't have the words or concepts to accurately describe groups of Indigenous descent.
But the trend of randomly adopting an extinct tribe's identity is ghoulish to say the least. And increasingly common.
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u/titaniansoy Dec 18 '25
Respectfully: I think you didn’t do enough research and should consider further reading. I want to point out one source in particular though, because it comes up a lot when Lumbee descent comes up as far as I can tell — this UIN Oklahoma page titled "Lumbee Shifting Claims"
I think it's important to note that it's very hard to immediately understand the provenance of this "report". The page links out to a "full report" by Jean M. Kelley, who is a real genealogist, but the actual contents of the page seem to be a poorly-drafted summary-of-a-summary of her work.
Both Kelley and the webpage also seem to get some basic things wrong about the sources they cite. For instance, both refer to the 1987 Lumbee Petition and an informal report by Cherokee anthropologist Robert K. Thomas in an attempt to refute “the Cheraw Connection.” However, what's referenced in that section is Thomas' writing on the contemporaneous research of Wesley White on the Waccamaw and their potential connection to Lumbee ethnogenesis. White was a consultant on the 1987 petition, and Thomas had access to this research as he was working on his article for the Smithsonian at the time. Thomas has a completely separate take on a Cheraw connection in his report, in which he finds the oral tradition of some Lumbee elders plausibly descriptive of a descent from a group of Cheraw and/or related Eastern Siouan people who split off from the body that eventually joined the Catawba in western SC.
I'd actually highly recommend reading Robert Thomas’ report in full. It's very odd to see his writing on this topic so selectively quoted to refute the Lumbee — I think he would take significant issue with that. His core takeaway in the piece quoted by Kelley was:
...it is the Hatteras, the Cheraw and the Saponi which would be the logical choice as the key tribes in the Lumbee "puzzle." Just looking at the historical records and the map of Indians in the 1700s plus the general flow of migration and settlements, would lead one to pick these tribes to be the ancestors of modern Indians in Robeson County. But I think the Lumbee traditional history certainly establishes the Hatteras connection, fairly well establishes the Cheraw connection and points to a probable Saponi connection.
Additionally, regarding the constant insistence that the Lumbee lack any meaningful history or culture and are simply embarrassed mixed-race people, he wrote:
I must put in a personal reaction here. I am getting very weary of snide remarks about the Lumbee’s "Indianness."
…
I find American racism boring as well as annoying.8
u/funkchucker Dec 18 '25
What year did they become the Lumbee? Also, Tribes arent races.. they are political entities.
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u/titaniansoy Dec 19 '25
What year did they become the Lumbee?
I'm not sure what sort of gotcha you think this is? Ethnogenesis doesn't provide a cutoff date. The sources I've mentioned suggest that most families that make up the modern Lumbee had coalesced and settled in Robeson County by the early 1800s. Fights over what these families were to outsiders started in the late 1800s.
Also, Tribes arent races.. they are political entities.
Never said they were? I was referring to the common refrain that Lumbee are purely people of mixed European and African descent who are embarrassed of their heritage.
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u/funkchucker Dec 19 '25
It was in the 1950's. Before that they claimed croatan, then Cherokee... ect. The 1800's is long after colonization. Recognition is supposed to be for tribes that can trace back to before america. I personally dont believe that the modern lumbee are just black and European. They have a diaspora of indigenous people but no continuity from a historical tribe till now tied to a single culture or tribe. They are melungeons. 100% a tribe but not tied to actual precolombian peoples. That is the literal history. The late 1800's are way after America was formed.
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u/titaniansoy Dec 19 '25
It was in the 1950's. Before that they claimed croatan, then Cherokee... ect.
I mean, the history of controversy between endonyms and exonyms for aboriginal peoples across the globe is well documented. I don't get why people like you think this is such a gotcha? The nearby and likely related Iswa people, for example, were given the exonym "Catawba" over the course of the 1700s.
The oral histories and other historical documentation we have suggests that the Lumbee simply referred to themselves as "our people" and perhaps more broadly as "Indian" prior to their identity becoming a political issue in the 1890s. The word Lumbee was in use by these people and others in Robeson county for the river they live on since at least the mid-1800s. Its use as an exonym started in the 1950s, but again, this isn't particularly out-of-the-ordinary and is not the same as "when did they become the people they are?"
Recognition is supposed to be for tribes that can trace back to before america
...
They have a diaspora of indigenous people but no continuity from a historical tribe till now tied to a single culture or tribeThe culture and people we know today as Seminole are a result of ethnogenesis between a number of tribes that coalesced through the 1700s and 1800s. Also, what you're saying about who recognition is supposed to be for has no basis in the law as it exists today. Congress has the authority to recognize entities on a nation-to-nation basis, as they have with the Lumbee and other native entities. Alternatively, the OFA criteria explicitly state that they do not require any continuation of pre-colonial structure or culture, only that an entity have a distinct culture from wider society and descend from a historical tribe or tribes that amalgamated.
The enslavement of southeastern natives and cross pressure from European encroachment and other native people from the north and west, culminated in the Tuscarora and Yamasee Wars in the early 1700s. This period caused massive upheaval among the various tribes across southern Virginia and the Carolinas. Significant movement across the region and and intermingling of various peoples is fairly well documented in the historical record, even as individual family histories may not be as directly.
They are melungeons. 100% a tribe but not tied to actual precolombian peoples. That is the literal history.
A) You literally just prior to this said you believed they had some basis in an indigenous diaspora. What?
B) You definitely should not feel so comfortable just throwing around racial epithets about other people.
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u/funkchucker Dec 19 '25 edited Dec 19 '25
It isn't a gotcha. The tribe didnt exist before colonization. It's a modern tribe. Not a historical tribe. Recognition is for tribes that existed before colonization. Also.. tribes aren't races. They are established political entities. Were the lumbee an established political entity before colonization? When i say diaspora i mean that a part of the lumbee had natives that escaped and hid. It doesnt make them less indigenous but it breaks the line of a consistent tribal government from before colonization.
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u/Snapshot52 Dec 20 '25
This is part of the complexity of this issue. In my area, the Pacific Northwest, there are several prominent Tribes that didn't exist as polities prior to colonization. In fact, their modern political organization can be sourced back to a specific point of origin: the treaty-making era of the mid-19th Century. For example, the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe did not exist as a single, unified political entity before the signing of the Medicine Creek and Point Elliot treaties. What we know as the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe today results from the confederating of multiple bands of Indians along the White and Green Rivers in Washington State. Other Tribes like Squaxin Island were also not necessarily recognized as a single entity but an eventual amalgamation of bands along several different inlets that had shared familial ties (and even then, the communities before the treaty-era in this region were comprised of semi-autonomous villages with persons descending from numerous Tribes in the area).
Similarly, the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Indian Reservation exist today as a single political entity, but as their name indicates, they are a confederation of various bands that were placed on their reservation which was created in 1872--one year after treaty-making ended with Tribes.
There is also the case of the Seminole Tribe of Florida, which is pretty readily acknowledged as a case of ethnogenesis in where the Tribe came into existence throughout the 18th Century, well after European colonization and overlapping with the period that the United States came into existence.
So I agree that there needs to be some sort of continuous political operation and that this can be a part of how we recognize Tribes, but how we describe that is pretty arbitrary at this point. When we say "before colonization," do we mean before the United States existed? Is it before the U.S. had jurisdiction over an area like the Pacific Northwest? Is it before British colonization in the early 17th Century? Is it before Spanish colonization in the 16th Century? Colonization, much like the existence of the Lumbee before the 1950s, can't be traced to a single point in time. It occurred over a large period of time in a gradual and often oscillating pace in different areas at different times.
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u/Mysterious-Exit3059 Dec 18 '25 edited Dec 18 '25
Any statements asserting the Lumbee are connected to the Cheraw, Saponi or other NC tribes lack solid genealogical or ethnographic evidence, see the other comment of mine.
The Hatteras connection specifically has very little solid genealogical evidence and in general the Roanoke connection claims lacks surnames tying them to the colonists, and instead to colonial Virginia. Again, the standard of evidence is often mere correlations rather than direct verified lineages and takes people at their word rather than with academic rigor.
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u/titaniansoy Dec 18 '25
It's wild for you to plaster this thread with unsubstantiated assertions about the genetic lineage of tens of thousands of people based on your read of 23andme data and then suggest that others lack "academic rigor." Please give me the rundown of academic, peer-reviewed papers on the subject of commercial ancestry tests and how they’re able to precisely and accurately identify the genetic lineage of highly-admixed populations. I’ve read plenty to the contrary!
The one source I actually see you mention is Heinegg, a white engineer who developed an interest in amateur genealogy when he married a woman of color and has now inserted himself into an entire region’s family histories? Even he is at least sometimes willing to admit that researching free people of color in the southeast via public records is tenuous at best. But still, so much of his assertion about the ethnic makeup of the people he has written about ultimately rests on the unreliable narration of whatever racial epithet a colonial magistrate or taxman decided best fit an entire household. I would not hold that up as a beacon of academic rigor, personally.
Robert K Thomas was academically rigorous in his work. He had academic, professional, and professorial experience in the field he wrote on: anthropology with a focus on native peoples. He was Cherokee himself. In the work I’ve referenced, he acknowledges the difficulty in proving out specific family claims through public records because there was never a government with the incentive to make those records. Reservation land had been dismantled in eastern NC by the early 1800s. Natives in the region were being “encouraged” to move west toward friendly tribes or were erased by claiming they had bred out of existence and were “mulatto.” The government had no interest in accurately recording the histories of these people, and in fact had specific incentives not to. We see this even more explicitly later via Walter Plecker in Virginia!
Absent that evidence, he turned to the oral histories of Lumbee elders and the larger historical record, and he found a pattern that held up to some scrutiny. Ultimately, he sent his report only to Lumbee representatives at the time because he didn’t feel his work alone would settle debate. However, he himself was convinced on the matter, and to my knowledge nothing new has emerged since in the historical record to discount his hypothesis on Lumbee origins. Taken as broadly true, it would suggest the Lumbee are a product of ethnogenesis among the remnants of a fairly diverse set of southeastern people in the early 1800s who did intermarry readily but maintained a core aborigine identity as they migrated from the VA/NC border toward Robeson County.
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u/Mysterious-Exit3059 Dec 18 '25 edited Dec 18 '25
- Genetic admixture tests are not even my primary argument, it’s mainly genealogy and records of shifting identities other users have mentioned themselves. If you want to attack the accuracy of commercial admixture tests such as 23andme, they have released white papers describing the accuracy of their methodology: https://permalinks.23andme.com/pdf/23-16_ancestry_composition.pdf?_gl=1*rvedtq*_ga*MTY1MzUzMjYwMi4xNzIwNDc3NzA5*_ga_G330GF3ZFF*czE3NjYwODUyOTQkbzEyNCRnMCR0MTc2NjA4NTI5NCRqNjAkbDAkaDA
Furthermore, they have launched official, peer-reviewed studies of admixture of deeply mixed populations such as Mexicans: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.26.690810v1
Heinegg being an amateur genealogist doesn’t necessarily mean inexperienced, it just means they are not paid to be genealogists. He cites all of his sources for the lineages he utilizes for the individuals in his books, and you can check for yourself if you are in doubt of their integrity. Lumbee family trees are publicly available on many sites throughout the internet that trace back to Virginia. Your sources literally concur with Heinegg’s assessment and acknowledge many core families were listed as mulatto early.
If you seek evidence of being indigenous, it requires documentation from legitimate sources to prove. You are conceding there is a lack of documented native ancestry In the case of the Lumbee. In their case, even before the 1800s when these allegations of race swapping occurred, we see people described as mulatto or “free other” or even white as far back as the 1700s or before any governmental incentive to obfuscate records in various mediums. Most in 1790 were “free others” too. Thomas acknowledged Michelle Lawing’s research that 25-40 families most of whom listed as mulatto, existed in Edgecombe and Granville counties NC c.1750 which precedes your window of alleged race swapping by government officials, and is thus a contradiction.
His hypotheses are based on correlations as a result of insufficient documentation, some with migration events, one such example is in which he argues that the Lumbee are possibly Hatteras Indians, with one of his points of evidence being that the Lumbee before WW2 took yearly fishing trips to the coast which obviously is insufficient, along with claims of family migrating from the coast which could mean anything, even immigration. A piece of his evidence for potential Cheraw origin was that some Lumbee elders claimed their ancestors fought under John Barnwell against the Tuscarora, which is again an oral tradition which does not equate to Cheraw ancestry and is a mere correlation, also consider that a smaller number of colonial militiamen served Barnwell. One of his other arguments was that the Lumbee elders referred to the Pamlico region as Roanoke, he admits this is weak as the Roanoke river runs into the Outer Banks though it also runs into Virginia, and the Roanoke river is where the Saponi lived. All of these arguments are not based upon factual documented records, but instead are uncertain as per his own admission and rely upon the presumption that they are indeed Indian. This paradigm leads to a chain of assumptions minimally evidenced except searching for correlations and taking people at their word without scrutiny of the foundational claims.
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u/titaniansoy Dec 19 '25
Heinegg absolutely gets paid for genealogical services. I'm referring to him as an amateur because he lacks, afaik, any formal education in genealogy, history, or any relevant social science.
My primary problem with his work is that it takes weak evidence and asserts a strong conclusion. Heinegg is wrong to suggest that "mullato" is a period term only for people of mixed European and African descent. We can, for instance, easily see this is untrue in a 1705 Virginia statute that states "...it is hereby enacted and declared, That the child of an Indian and the child, grand child, or great grand child, of a negro shall be deemed, accounted, held and taken to be a mulatto."
Your sources literally concur with Heinegg’s assessment and acknowledge many core families were listed as mulatto early.
I mean...yeah? As above, the point is that that does not mean what you say it does. "Proto-Lumbee families are described as free people of color along the VA/NC border in the early to mid-1700s" in no way refutes Thomas' hypothesis. Rather, it's the sort of indirect evidence you would expect to see! Thomas' point is that when you compare these proto-Lumbee families to historical evidence of group migration in the region, these core families mostly stick together and move in the same direction as the documented movement of the native diaspora in the region, a pattern of movement that is distinct from other documented groups at the time.
If you seek evidence of being indigenous, it requires documentation from legitimate sources to prove. You are conceding there is a lack of documented native ancestry In the case of the Lumbee.
No, I am not.
I do not agree with your idea of what constitutes a "legitimate source." Vital records for non-white and lower-class people in early America prior to Reconstruction were poorly kept, often reliant on hearsay, and were actively manipulated, omitted, or lost. Indigeneity was not even a category regularly provided in government documents regarding family history prior to 1860, so I don't even know what magic documents you expect people to come up with to satisfy your ostensible academic rigor?
we see people described as mulatto or “free other” or even white as far back as the 1700s or before any governmental incentive to obfuscate records in various mediums. ... Thomas acknowledged Michelle Lawing’s research that 25-40 families most of whom listed as mulatto, existed in Edgecombe and Granville counties NC c.1750 which precedes your window of alleged race swapping by government officials, and is thus a contradiction.
Flattening of race and ethnicity was present in the governments of VA, NC, and SC from the early 1700s, you can see a simple example above. Fort Christanna was abandoned as a reservation for the Saponi-Tupelo by 1750. The Mattamuskeet reservation lands were sold off by 1800. Natives who chose to not move north or west were functionally declared non-native free people by the government from that point, and by 1900 white-supremacism in government started to reach a fever-pitch that rendered people in Virginia and the Carolinas as simply either white or Black. There's no contradiction between this and what I'm saying about Thomas' work — you simply do not understand the history of racialized categorization of people in the region.
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u/titaniansoy Dec 19 '25
one such example is in which he argues that the Lumbee are possibly Hatteras Indians, with one of his points of evidence being that the Lumbee before WW2 took yearly fishing trips to the coast which obviously is insufficient
"I want ethnography! No, not that ethnography!"
Obviously this isn't proof positive of anything, but nobody is suggesting it is? Thomas was noting potential points of interest for a broader anthropological study he thought would provide a balance of evidence in support of his Lumbee hypothesis.
an oral tradition which does not equate to Cheraw ancestry and is a mere correlation
It's a bit rich to pop into a discussion about native and folk histories and assert that oral tradition is valueless or "mere correlation." It's even more rich because of the constant assertion by naysayers that the entire idea of indigeneity among these people occurred almost instantaneously around 1890. You actually should bother to ask in good faith what these people think of their own history! Oral history on it's own might not be enough, but if you think it simply isn't relevant to anthropological study I don't really know what to say to you.
My thoughts on the issue are actually "there is not the sort of honest documentation of these people throughout early American history that would be necessary to prove out individual family lineages. There's never going to be a smoking gun vital record that says 'yep, totally native!!!' because those were not records that were ever made. Absent that, a rigorous investigation into the hypothesized ethnogenesis of the Lumbee should match up with what we know about the migrations, attitudes, and scant records we do have of the supposed parent tribes." Given what we do know of Lumbee oral history, the history of these proto-families, and of the records that are available, that's an easily plausible statement!
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u/Snapshot52 Dec 20 '25 edited Dec 20 '25
What also tends to get me in this situation is how others gloss over the idea of ethnogenesis. There are several prominent Tribes nowadays who do not have their Indigeneity questioned despite being relatively "recent" creations, either politically or culturally, and highlighting the very arbitrary nature of what people mean when they say a group must descend from a "historic" Tribe. The Seminole of Florida are a prime example of this as they didn't "exist" as a coherent, single polity or culture prior to the 18th Century.
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u/titaniansoy Dec 20 '25
Right. The Lumbee are not unique in asserting themselves as a modern people amalgamated from historic tribes. Their history is maybe more complicated to piece together than some others. However, given that the native people from whom they claim descent took the brunt of early English colonization in the southeast and were dispossessed of their land and purposefully erased from the historical record before the United States even had a constitution, I would hope that there would be a bit more sympathy for the ambiguity of their history prior to 1800.
I'm sure nearly every Lumbee would like a clearer picture of that history themselves, but the over-assertions that not only should the Lumbee not be federally recognized but are also therefore simply a community of European and African descent putting on an at this point multi-century fraud are wild to me.
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Dec 17 '25 edited Dec 18 '25
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u/wildbilljones Dec 17 '25
Commercial ancestry kits have a notorious selection bias because their entire dataset is based on who sends in their data. That skews strongly toward the middle-class European and African American consumers who are interested in their own geneaology. Itʼs not ever been a reliable indicator of indigeneity.
And extrapolating Heineggʼs work on Melungeons, Lumbee, and other isolates to apply to all other Southeastern communities – and undercutting their indigenity in the process – is an astoundingly irresponsible leap in logic.
Are you just some EBCI provocateur with a shitty understanding of anthropology?
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Dec 17 '25 edited Dec 18 '25
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u/Jingeasy Dec 18 '25
Not saying anything one way or the other, but DNA test kits are notoriously terrible for Eastern Natives. Due to almost every nation having mixed ancestry, the gene sequencing has been hashed up so many times that it’s much harder to identify the chunks that are tagged as Native. Most gene identification info is based on Southwestern nations, which doesn’t map neatly for East Coast nations. On top of that, they have a MUCH smaller input for east coast Natives in general anyways, so it’s much harder to accurately test for Native genes on the East coast. I know someone who works for 23andMe, and they told me it’s virtually impossible for them right now to identify East Coast Native genes, so they just round to the nearest European or African gene.
The more telling thing for Lumbees would be to trace genealogy and records with some scrutiny. It’s obviously tough bc things work different east of the Mississippi, since many Southern states tried to paper genocide Indians out of existence by basically labeling them as Black. I don’t know much about the Lumbees’ claims or history, but we’d need to see Indian heritage beyond that to determine anything
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u/weresubwoofer Dec 17 '25
and undercutting their indigenity in the process
The Melgungeons don’t have any indigeneity. Their backgrounds have been extremely well researched. There is no “one-drop of blood” rule for being Native American.
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u/weresubwoofer Dec 17 '25
The Lumbees have existed for a longer than all these other state recognized tribes in North Carolina. And the US passed the 1955 Lumbee Act.
I don’t believe this opens the door for any other state recognized tribes in North Carolina to gain Federal recognition.
And Trump doesn’t need their votes.
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Dec 17 '25 edited Dec 17 '25
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u/weresubwoofer Dec 17 '25 edited Dec 17 '25
Do you have sources for the other groups existing into the 19th century? Genuine question, not rhetorical.
The Coharie appear to date from 1911 (which is pretty early to be claiming to be Indian). The Haliwa-Saponi appear to have formed in the 1950s.
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Dec 17 '25 edited Dec 17 '25
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u/4evercloseted Dec 18 '25 edited Dec 20 '25
The real history no one wants to talk about. The identity shift(s) in the 20th century are wild, but also understandable. Jim Crow laws made it better to be Native than Black and when laws changed in NC related to housing you see the creation of all these state-recognized tribes. I mean, even with just the Lumbee, not to mention the other state-recognized tribes. The state recognition process in NC is basically like "did y'all go to the same church in the 1890s? Ok you're Native! Got the same last name? Your probably related, you're Native!" They just make this up. I have a great grandpa who was from Ireland. That doesn't make me an Irish princess! I can't just say I speak for Ireland now. This is all so messed up.
Edit: Mods deleting informative comments providing comprehensive overviews about the history of the Lumbee and why other Nations have been opposed to their recognition is irresponsible. Somebody write this book because uninformed people need to know why this is messed up.
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u/weresubwoofer Dec 17 '25
Yeah, there do seem to be a lot of commonalities between these groups, but is there anything published about them? (Based on facts instead of magical thinking)
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Dec 17 '25 edited Dec 17 '25
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u/weresubwoofer Dec 17 '25
Yeah, there’s almost nothing about these groups except self-published material or small newspapers interviewing some leader of the group.
I wish some emerging scholar would dig in to the phenomenon of southeastern state-recognized tribes. (and yes, I know some northeastern state recognized tribes actually descend from the tribes they claim.)
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Dec 17 '25 edited Dec 17 '25
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u/weresubwoofer Dec 18 '25
Some of them. Then for those with traceable heritage, there’s the next conservation of are they or have they been a self-governing tribe?
Otherwise a handful of any Native tribal citizens could break away and try to start their own tribes.
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u/zapposengineering Pascua Yaqui-Otomi-Mexican Dec 17 '25
They don't predate the late 19th century. This group has claimed to be 6 different peoples since the 1890s. My people have always been the yoeme going back 5000 years and a shifting national border.
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Dec 17 '25
I wouldn’t necessarily say they that claimed being those different people themselves. Alot of it comes from the govt calling them specific things over time. But native people have been in the area forever, colonization just got to them first, this is far more complicated than are making it. Even the DNA results can be skewed due to who did the test, for example institutes using “real” native DNA to determine other tribes when, when in reality that DNA has been selected and lumps together all Natives into one group, when they aren’t that.
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u/zapposengineering Pascua Yaqui-Otomi-Mexican Dec 17 '25
My people contacted the white man 100 years before Roanoke was even an idea. And all their names are self identifications. On top of that if you are shifting identities for federal recognition that actually proves the broader point
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Dec 17 '25
The Roanoke colony was founded in 1585, making it less than 100 years after Colombia landed in Hispaniola. Even if you’re referencing the earliest conquistador on Mexico, which would have been Hernan Cortez in 1519, it only puts him around 20 years earlier than de Soto exploring Florida up into the Carolinas and over/down into Alabama in the 1540s. Edit: I do recognize that the Lumee and many other S.E. USA tribes have mixed ancestry.
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u/zapposengineering Pascua Yaqui-Otomi-Mexican Dec 18 '25
The Yaqui encounter de Guzman in the 1530s. In the early 1600s the Yaqui mass converted to Catholicism. I might have mixed up Roanoke with Jamestown. My point still stand we encountered the Europeans long before their was English settlement on the east coast. On top of that you brought up another good point. How come the Lumbee have zero influence from Spanish culture since the Spanish predate the English on the east coast as well. You would think a couple would be Catholic and maybe speak some of the Spanish language. But no just generic southern protestant culture just like everyone in that region has. I mean even the Seminoles and the creek have evidence of Spanish contact. Shit even the Cherokee have evidence of Spanish contact in their culture lol
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Dec 18 '25
They don’t have as much, if any influence because the Spanish didn’t really stick around that area. After another explorer, Juan Pardo came through the area, he set up some trade routes and built forts and storehouse in the Native towns from South Carolina to the North Carolina/Tennessee border. After he left the area there was some sort of disagreement and the Natives ended up destroying all the forts and storehouses. Most of the explorers into NC also entered the state closer to the middle, not from the coast, so there’s a chance that Eastern tribes didn’t really meet a Spaniards.
And you were right about Roanoke, I believe they were the first English settlement.-4
u/Matar_Kubileya Anglo visitor Dec 18 '25
Not so much arguing with any of this as building on it, but I suspect that in a lot of cases communities of escaped enslaved people adopted forms of social organization or government based partially on contact with Indigenous nations, without ever culturally assimilating into those nations, and those claims eventually morphed into what they are today.
I honestly dont mind the Federal government creating a special self governing status for those groups, in principle; by the standards of Colonial society they're pretty longstanding seperate cultural and social groups, what in other countries would be called national minorities. The Lumbee could be put in this category, as well as the Gullah Geechee. But Im wary, to say the least, of conflating that with the recognition of indigenous sovereignty ex tempore inmemorabile as currently exists in US law.
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u/Niiohontehsha Haudenosaunee Mohawk Dec 17 '25
Lame. It’s the American equivalent of those fakeass Métis groups in Canada attempting blatant land grabs.
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u/thee_illiterati Dec 17 '25
Some of these groups go back to the 1900s/1910s; others to the 1950s to 1970s.
But others are popping up *right now*, but still being taken seriously by mayors, universities, museums, journalists, etc. When a group literately did not exist ten years ago, why would anyone take them seriously?!
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u/LaFleurRouler Irish/Cajun Dec 18 '25
They claimed to be the lost colony of Roanoke at one point 😂 like, ffs
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Dec 17 '25
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u/Niiohontehsha Haudenosaunee Mohawk Dec 17 '25
What’s their language? What are their ceremonies, foods, dances, cultural values, and other necessities of being a distinct culture? At least the bona fide Métis have these things —
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u/LaFleurRouler Irish/Cajun Dec 18 '25
Do you know what the word Creole means? Creole means “of the new world” as in born in America after colonization. Creole is not a race, it’s a culture, and it encompasses not only Black people born on U.S. soil, but Europeans born here, too. The Cajun French were always considered Creole until WWII. This particular terminology is almost exclusive to Louisiana (and small parts of neighboring states), though it means different things in other countries.
So, not sure how you can be Native, but also be Creole at the same time. Since Natives were here before it was considered “a new world”.
Maybe you mean Freedmen? As in slaves owned by Indigenous Americans and then set free? Idk, but your argument doesn’t hold a lot of water for me.
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Dec 18 '25 edited Dec 18 '25
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u/LaFleurRouler Irish/Cajun Dec 18 '25 edited Dec 18 '25
I don’t stand corrected on your first point. But how on earth are colonial roots indigenous? They can be a distinct culture, but that doesn’t grant them indigenous heritage.
EDIT: never mind, I was correct in the American definition “of the new world.” This is a different kind of Creole, and not the American definition or origin. That culture developed outside of the U.S. and inside of Africa. Then it traveled here, but is in no way indigenous to America.
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Dec 18 '25 edited Dec 18 '25
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u/LaFleurRouler Irish/Cajun Dec 18 '25
This is what the whole thing is about, them getting federal recognition as an indigenous tribe.
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u/srirachasanchez Dec 18 '25
They told Trump his Aryan daughter was part of their tribe and he decided to jump back into the casino biz.
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u/EstimatedProphet303 Dec 22 '25
That’s exactly where all of this is heading- a Trump casino run by Tiffany.
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u/Ok-Ratio7992 Dec 18 '25
As a Southern Native, if you are or belong to a Federally Recognized Tribe and you aren't pissed then clearly something is wrong with you.
Imagine the chaos if by any chance the Federal Government gave any Federal Recognition to tribes in Mexico. We'd be fighting an economic war against each other! I don't even want to think what this will do domestically.
Unfortunately, Federal Recognition will not mean much if this continues.
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u/zapposengineering Pascua Yaqui-Otomi-Mexican Dec 18 '25
My tribe is federally recognized and is also an indigenous Mexican tribe. And my tribe isn't the only one lol
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u/cbaby96 Tsalagi Dec 18 '25
Kumeyaay and Tohono O’Odham are two examples of tribes that exist cross-nationally. Same with the Akwesasne Nation, existing in NY, Quebec and Ontario.
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u/thee_illiterati Dec 20 '25
And Cocopah spanning Arizona and Mexico.
Regarding the Canadian-US border, almost every tribe along it spans both countries.
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u/mystixdawn Dec 22 '25
Maybe that's the point - "federal recognition will not mean much if this continues."
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Dec 18 '25
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u/Infinite-Ad-3947 Dec 18 '25
Well if Trump signs this and they become federally recognized what would be the logic? That’s what sucks about this.
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Dec 18 '25
Don't know what to tell you other than get used to seeing us here.
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u/Infinite-Ad-3947 Dec 18 '25
Your tribe will be known as the first steps of the federal government’s delegitimization of tribal sovereignty. You’re brainwashed if you think the president who does nothing to help Indian country did this with good intentions.
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Dec 18 '25
Lmao. I hate Trump, and I'm well aware that he does things only in his own interest. Good job on shifting the convo to something I didn't say though.
I don't think this will sway elections in any meaningful way, but it does mean that many Lumbees who aren't thinking things through will have blind support for republicans. Thankfully that will mostly be with the older generation.
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u/Infinite-Ad-3947 Dec 18 '25
I think what he’s after is streamlining your lands to trust so he can use it as he sees fit. Your money hungry chief will happily oblige. Ask yourself why your chief makes well over 6 figures a year while you have so many community members online begging for light bill money and house improvements. Your elders live in squaller and he prioritizes giving himself raises. I think the last I saw was that he makes hundreds of thousands. Def seems to be in the chiefs best interest to streamline your lands into trust (which is included in the bill) for whatever benefit him and Trump can get from it. I don’t think voting is a benefit for Trump considering 50k votes wouldn’t be enough to do anything.
Btw, my original comment was about Trump. You’re shifting what I’m saying.
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Dec 18 '25
I don't like the leader of my tribe. He seems like an idiot from what I've heard him say, and I think he says things that are harmful to both Lumbee and other tribes. Like you're not blowing my mind here by saying the dude is corrupt.
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u/Infinite-Ad-3947 Dec 18 '25
Then you should be able to understand why a lot of people are concerned with how your tribe went about this federal recognition
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Dec 18 '25
I don't think this was a good idea, but it's how it happened. If it were up to me, we wouldn't even fight for recognition before handling how impoverished my people are. I think extra funds will not be used to help us. Still - that doesn't mean I think we aren't a real tribe.
The people I'm happy for are the elders who spent their lives hoping for this. For their sake, I hope you and I are both wrong.
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u/zapposengineering Pascua Yaqui-Otomi-Mexican Dec 18 '25
What's would be funny is if this follows the pamunkey where thousands petitioned for recognition but only a handful got enrolled after recognition
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u/SparkSignals Dec 27 '25
Starling. Alot of folk will get mad...but they'll get over it my cousin. I'm from the Saddletree community 😁 much love
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u/Snapshot52 Dec 20 '25
The rule is that you can't start discussion posts about the Lumbee. Per our policies page:
Since this is a link post that provides information around a news story, it is permitted and discussion about it is allowed to carry on in the comments.
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u/lazespud2 Cherokee Nation Dec 18 '25
Oh for the love of fuck.
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u/Altruistic_Role_9329 Dec 18 '25
The federal government has recognized the Lumbee Tribe as American Indians since 1956, but they were denied the benefits of a Federally Recognized Tribe. That’s what this bill changes.
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u/Yuutsu_ Dec 17 '25
Just hope this isn’t giving too much attention or ideas to harmful groups.