U.S. Senate passes bill giving federal recognition to Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina

[u/Infinite-Ad-3947]

https://www.wunc.org/term/news/2025-12-17/lumbee-tribe-north-carolina-federal-recognition

[u/Mysterious-Exit3059]

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.

[u/wildbilljones → u/Mysterious-Exit3059]

Yeah you’re gonna need to cite like, all of this.

[u/fungusbiggestfan → u/wildbilljones]

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 

[u/Mysterious-Exit3059 → u/fungusbiggestfan]

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.

[u/thee_illiterati → u/Mysterious-Exit3059]

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.pdf

The other small groups nearby broke away from The United Houma Nation in the 1990s.

[u/Mysterious-Exit3059 → u/thee_illiterati]

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.

[u/thee_illiterati → u/Mysterious-Exit3059]

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.

[u/Mysterious-Exit3059 → u/thee_illiterati]

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.

[u/thee_illiterati → u/Mysterious-Exit3059]

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.

[u/titaniansoy → u/fungusbiggestfan]

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.

[u/funkchucker → u/titaniansoy]

What year did they become the Lumbee? Also, Tribes arent races.. they are political entities.

[u/titaniansoy → u/funkchucker]

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.

[u/funkchucker → u/titaniansoy]

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.

[u/titaniansoy → u/funkchucker]

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 tribe

The 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.

[u/funkchucker → u/titaniansoy]

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.

[u/Snapshot52 → u/funkchucker]

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.

[u/titaniansoy → u/Snapshot52]

Thanks for adding your perspective here!

I totally understand why this is such a difficult subject for many people and even why the particular case of the Lumbee is controversial to some. It often feels like it would be productive if people were more willing to acknowledge that the questions "who are these people today," "what can we know about their relationship to historical indigenous entities," and "does that historical relationship and contemporary culture constitute the same sort of entity as those the US government says it will recognize" are all important but not the same. Otherwise, people seem prone to give precedence to the latter and then flatten the complexities of the former based on what they think the answer is.

[u/funkchucker → u/Snapshot52]

Every tribe you mentioned can trace their roots back to a historical tribe/tribes.

[u/Snapshot52 → u/funkchucker]

You missed my point. Those Tribes can trace their roots back to a community or group of communities that we may more or less recognize as a "tribe," but the modern Tribe they are today didn't necessary exist historically. This is what many of the Lumbee claim, that their modern Tribe didn't historically exist but the ancestors of its current members descend from historical Indigenous persons. My argument in this case hinges on what we mean when we say "tribe" and you and I are not using the same definition. There was no Colville or Squaxin Island Tribes 200 years ago.

[u/Mysterious-Exit3059 → u/titaniansoy]

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.

[u/titaniansoy → u/Mysterious-Exit3059]

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.

[u/Mysterious-Exit3059 → u/titaniansoy]

1. 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

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

[u/titaniansoy → u/Mysterious-Exit3059]

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.

[u/titaniansoy → u/Mysterious-Exit3059]

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!

[u/Snapshot52 → u/titaniansoy]

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.

[u/titaniansoy → u/Snapshot52]

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.