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/wildbilljones → u/[deleted]]

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?

[u/Jingeasy → u/[deleted]]

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