One tribe’s long struggle for full recognition
Canada Goose Coats On Sale In March 2012, Heather McMillan Nakai wrote a letter to the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs asking the agency to verify that she was canada goose outlet Indian. canada goose outlet black friday She was seeking a job at the Indian Health Service and wanted to apply with „Indian preference.” Nakai knew this might be difficult: As far as she was aware, no one from her North Carolina tribe the Lumbee had ever been granted such preference. Canada Goose Coats On Sale
canada goose uk black friday Her birth certificate says she’s Indian, as did her first driver’s license. Both of her parents were required to attend segregated tribal schools in the 1950s and ’60s. Responding to Nakai the following month, tribal government specialist Chandra Joseph informed her that the Lumbee were not a canada goose outlet in usa federally recognized tribe and therefore couldn’t receive any federal benefits, including „Indian preference.” Invoking a 1956 law concerning the status of the Lumbee, Joseph wrote: „The Lumbee Act precludes the Bureau from extending any benefits canada goose outlet new york city to the Indians of Robeson and adjoining counties.” She enclosed a pamphlet titled „Guide to Tracing Indian Ancestry.” canada goose uk black friday
canada goose coats on sale As a staff attorney for the National Indian Gaming Commission, Nakai understands the intricacies of documenting native bloodlines. In fact, she had submitted 80 pages of evidence to support her case. The Lumbee are descended from several Carolina tribes, including the Cheraw, who intermarried with whites and free African Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries. Nakai, 38, can trace her family tree back to at least 1900, when her great grandfather was listed as Indian on the federal census. „That’s a terrible feeling,” she says, „to have somebody say to you, ‘You’re so not Indian that you need somebody to send you a pamphlet.'” canada goose coats on sale
cheap Canada Goose Lumbees canada goose jacket outlet rely on historic census documents listing the „Indian Population” of specific counties to enroll members in their tribe. In researching her response, Nakai realized the same documents could be used to argue that Lumbees were eligible for federal benefits. She thought hers was a powerful legal argument. If she could receive Indian preference, then so could other members of her tribe. „When I’m pushed, I don’t run,” Nakai says. „I want to push back.” And so she appealed the bureau’s decision and kept appealing canada goose outlet shop until her case landed in federal court. cheap Canada Goose
Canada Goose Jackets Her battle would force the Department of the Interior to reexamine its policy toward the more than 55,000 Lumbee who make up the largest tribe east of the Mississippi. For more than 60 years, the government has acknowledged that they are Indians, yet denied them the sovereignty, land and benefits it grants to other tribes. It’s a situation that raises fundamental questions about identity: What makes someone Native American? Is it a matter of race, or culture, or some combination of both? The Lumbee don’t fit neatly into any racial categories, but they have long been living as Indians, cultivating unique traditions and community. Can a country divided by race ever accept them?Heather McMillan Nakai Canada Goose Jackets
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buy canada goose jacket The Lumbee tribe takes its name from the Lumber River, canada goose outlet canada which snakes beneath bridges and spills into swamps in their sandy eastern corner of North Carolina. The founding families settled along these swamps in the 1700s, fleeing the war and disease that followed colonization of the coastal Carolinas. Many Lumbees still have the last names handed down by those families: Locklear, Chavis, Brooks, Oxendine, Lowry. Some people believe they are descended from members of Sir Walter Raleigh’s „Lost Colony” of Roanoke who intermarried with indigenous people and fled inland. But most historians agree there was a Cheraw settlement on the Lumber River in the mid 18th century, and that several tribes along with whites and free blacks migrated to the area around that time. Their descendants now speak a unique Lumbee English dialect; they cash their checks at the Lumbee Guaranty Bank and enroll their kids at canada goose outlet reviews the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, the country’s first state funded four year college to serve Native Americans. buy canada goose jacket
canada goose The state of North Carolina recognized the Lumbee as Native Americans in 1885. At the time, they were labeled „Croatan Indians” one of many names given to them over the centuries because they are unable to trace their ancestry to a single Native American tribe. In 1888, the tribe started its long quest for federal recognition. canada goose
Currently, there are 573 federally recognized tribes and more than 200 that are not recognized. The Lumbee occupy a unique netherworld between the two. government; they also can receive government services, and individual members qualify for other benefits, such as „Indian preference.” Right now, Lumbees don’t receive any of that.
Canada Goose Parka Nakai is trying to secure individual benefits without undergoing the arduous process of winning recognition for her entire tribe. (Her case relies on a 1934 federal law, the Indian Reorganization Act, which grants rights and benefits to indigenous people who can prove they have „one half or more Indian blood.”) For Lumbees as a group, meanwhile, their long struggle to win recognition has been complicated by their history of interracial marriage even though interracial marriage was common among southeastern tribes prior to the Civil War. canada goose black friday sale Many powerful western tribes have „a perception that the Lumbee are really a mixed race, mainly African group,” says Mark Miller, a history professor at Southern Utah University who has written extensively about tribal identity. That „original sin,” he says, is a major cause of the Lumbees’ political problems. Canada Goose Parka
cheap canada goose uk In the Jim Crow South, white ancestry was acceptable for indigenous people, but black blood was not. When the United States was dividing up reservations and providing land „allotments” to Indians, a government commission told the Mississippi Choctaw that „where any person held a strain canada goose outlet parka of Negro blood, the servile blood contaminated and polluted the Indian canada goose factory outlet blood.” Many Native Americans internalized these racial politics and adopted them as a means of survival. After North Carolina established a separate school system for Indians in Robeson County in the late 1880s, some Lumbees fought to exclude a child whose mother was Indian and whose father was black. cheap canada goose uk
canada goose uk shop In their segregated corner of North Carolina, Lumbees enjoyed more power and privileges than their black neighbors, but this was not the case for Native Americans in every state. In Virginia in the 1920s, Indians were required to classify themselves as „colored,” whereas Oklahoma considered Indians to be white canada goose outlet nyc http://www.canadagoosecanadaoutlet.com prompting Creek Indians to reject tribal members with black ancestry. canada goose uk shop
By the early 1930s, the canada goose outlet uk Lumbee had spent several decades trying to persuade Congress to recognize them as Indians, and now sought to be recognized under the provisions of the Indian Reorganization Act. In 1936, representatives of the federal Office of Indian Affairs traveled to Robeson County to determine the purity canada goose outlet of the tribe’s „Indian blood.” Harvard trained anthropologist Carl Seltzer and his colleagues conducted tests on 209 people. They measured skulls, opened people’s mouths and examined the size of their teeth. As Lumbee historian Malinda Maynor Lowery recounts in her book, „Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South,”Seltzer noted whether each person’s hair was „straight,” „curly,” „frizzy” or „fine.” He scratched women and children on their breastbone to see if he left a red mark. (In his view, such redness indicated „mixed blood,” according to Lowery.)
canada goose clearance Three years after she filed her first request to the BIA, Nakai was digging through boxes at the National Archives when she saw official canada goose outlet the mug shots Seltzer took of her ancestors, and the looks on the women’s faces after they had been forced to open their shirts and allow a strange man to scratch their chests. She was devastated. „Just even thinking about the possibility that I would allow that to happen to my child it’s horrifying,” she says. canada goose clearance
In the end, Seltzer concluded that only 22 of the 209 people he tested in Robeson possessed one half or more „Indian blood” and thus qualified for some federal benefits. (In some cases, Seltzer decided that one sibling had the required „blood quantum” and the other sibling did not.) Once the federal government offered some individual benefits to the „Original 22,” they broke goose outlet canada off from the Lumbee to form their own political organization. And in 1956 Congress did pass the Lumbee Act, which acknowledged the indigenous people of Robeson County as Indians and called them by the name they had chosen for themselves. But at the time, the federal government was trying to terminate its relationships with native people by disbanding tribes and selling their land. The Interior Departmentdid not want the financial burden of providing services to a large new tribe, so lawmakers struck an odd political compromise: They recognized the Lumbee yet prohibited them from receiving any benefits or services offered to other tribes. Over the next few decades, the law was interpreted to mean that Lumbees could not qualify for health, housing or educational benefits offered to other Native Americans; their land was not protected, their children were not protected from being adopted out of the tribe, they couldn’t form their own police force, canada goose outlet online uk and they weren’t consulted when private companies wanted to build natural gas pipelines on their land.
Canada Goose sale Above all, the law deprived tribal members canada goose outlet jackets of a clear label they could use to identify themselves to outsiders. It even confused the government officials charged with enacting Native American policy people like Chandra Joseph at the BIA, who insisted in her letter to Nakai that the Lumbee were not a recognized tribe. If the BIA treats you like you’re not really Indian, it’s hard to canada goose outlet online convince people who haven’t closely studied Indian law that they’re wrong. And the constant burden of explaining and justifying one’s canada goose outlet store uk identity can take a psychological toll., a cultural coordinator for the tribe, says the current Lumbee recognition quest is not about money but respect. canada goose outlet sale „We know who we are,” he says. „We want our children to have that self pride, that self esteem of who they are.” Canada Goose sale
canada goose uk outlet In her hometown, Nakai rarely had to explain her background. But when she went to summer camp with other Native American children, they started asking questions she didn’t know how to answer. „Everywhere I went, people would say, ‘Are you mixed? What’s your heritage?'” Nakai recalls. „And I would look at them blankly.” canada goose uk outlet
canada goose clearance sale Some Lumbees have red hair and freckles, others have tight blond curls, and others have sleek, dark hair and mocha skin. No one is kicked out of the tribe because of their skin tone and that concept is hard for the BIA to accept, according to Mary Ann Jacobs, chair of the Department of American Indian Studies at UNC Pembroke. „They don’t like the fact that we refuse to put people out who look too white or look too black. If they’re our people, we keep them.” Jacobs laughed, as if the idea of doing anything else were absurd. „We canada goose outlet toronto factory refuse to give them back. Why should we separate out based on this thing, this race thing? If we have grown them and they speak Lumbee the way we speak Lumbee, and they’ve gone to Lumbee schools and Lumbee churches and we’ve fed them and canada goose outlet uk sale nourished them, they’re Lumbee.” canada goose clearance sale.
