In the three months since author Malinda Maynor Lowery’s book Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation (University of North Carolina Press, 2010) was published, Dr. Lowery has had several opportunities to meet with community members and extend the conversations provoked by her book. For our blog, she reflects on the conversations sparked, the feedback she’s received, and her own troubles reconciling decolonization within scholarship.

Troubles Decolonizing a Colonial History
By Malinda Maynor Lowery

Much work in the the field of Native American history has centered on Indians’ relationships with European colonizers and the U.S. government, perhaps rightly so. As historians, we are trained to analyze primarily the written word, words written mostly by colonizers. And while some scholars have done remarkable oral histories and ethnographies of Native communities, a history based on oral sources or indigenous knowledge is not automatically more relevant to Indian communities, just because it avoids the colonizers’ words. Sources don’t by themselves make Indian history more relevant to Indian people. We have to put the information we gather to work, or history forever remains a telling about an other, rather than an authentic rendering of a truth about human nature and societies.

Dr. Lowery shared photos from her book during a lecture at the University of North Carolina-Pembroke in April.

My book, Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South, has been called on to do several kinds of work since its release. Some of it, I feel, genuinely approaches a decolonizing purpose–an affirmation of inherent sovereignty–while some of it reinforces agendas set forth by the colonizer, thus yielding that sovereignty. To paraphrase scholar Kevin Bruyneel (The Third Space of Sovereignty), indigenous peoples claim a retained sovereignty while American law and policy possess a “colonial ambivalence” toward sovereignty that continually compromises our ability to express it. Colonialism thrives on the supposedly fixed boundaries between written and oral, indigenous and European, sovereign and dependent, colonized and colonizer. Indeed, our scholarship often resides within these boundaries as well and strengthens colonialism; but I hope that I can put this book to work in a way that will cross, expose, and disable those boundaries rather than strengthen them.

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Historian and First Peoples author Malinda Maynor Lowery (Lumbee) writes for us about her tribe’s federal recognition struggle and how recent moves by the Lumbee Tribal Council highlight the fact that every tribe, recognized or not, is still a political entity.

Who’s Pulling the Strings in Today’s Lumbee Recognition Process?
By Malinda Maynor Lowery

I’m a big fan of the Godfather (there are a lot of metaphors that explain Indian politics in those movies) and so recent events with Lumbee recognition have reminded me that someone else is always pulling the strings.

My book Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South (University of North Carolina Press 2010) explores federal recognition and identity formation between the 1870s and the 1950s, a critical period when the Lumbees’ formal political organization developed in the presence of brutal pressure from white supremacists at both local and federal levels. My community responded to this pressure by dividing into strategic factions, and each party developed its own way of dealing with the capricious and subjective identity definitions that Congress and the BIA articulated. These identity definitions revolved in part around stereotypes of Indians, but they also involved comparisons to African Americans. We had to convince outsiders that we were not black, and therefore worthy of separate recognition.

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In The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832-1929, historian David A. Chang examines understandings of nation, race, and land among what he calls “America’s historically foundational ‘races,’ ” who he defines as Indians, whites, and blacks. Chang begins by framing his discussion on land and how it can be racialized. This, he writes, had particular implications in the creation of the state of Oklahoma and the identities of those who lived there.

From the introduction:

“’Oklahoma’ means ‘red man’ in the Choctaw language, is run through by a ‘Black Belt,’ and has been claimed by some as ‘white man’s country.’ It has been termed an Indian homeland, a black promised land, and a white heartland. All these competing racial claims to one place seem extraordinary. This book suggests, however, that Oklahoma is really exceptional only because it encapsulates so much American history within its borders, revealing much about how the struggle over land has given shape to the way Americans – indigenous, black, and white – created and gave meaning to races and nations.

Phrases like the ones above mark Oklahoma with a race and tie that race to the land. Race is a way that we imagine differences between people and make hierarchies among them seem right and natural. So racializing a land (marking it with a race) really means tying it to a particular people, whether they be Creek Indians, African Americans, white Americans, or some other group we believe can be identified racially in some way. After all, speaking of “a land” is also a way of speaking of a country or a nation. The title of this book is an attempt to evoke this relationship between land, race, and nationhood. This book considers both the symbolic power people gave land in such terms as ‘homeland,’ ‘Black Belt’ or ‘white man’s country’ and the economic power that land possesses.”

Learn more about The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832-1929 and author David A. Chang at the University of North Carolina Press website.

“Chang explores how Indians and white Americans used race and nation to control access to land and dispossess those defined as ‘other.’ His ambitious and groundbreaking book is deeply researched, broadly engaged with important debates, and thoroughly convincing.”
–Claudio Saunt, author of
Black, White, and Indian:
Race and the Unmaking of an American Family

Indians, since their first encounter with Europeans, have been more defined by others than by themselves, according to Kevin Gover, Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. Gover will deliver the Third Annual William C. Canby Jr. lecture, “Will the White Man’s Indian Ever Die?” this week at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University.

“It is the human inclination to dominate that is so troublesome,” Gover said. “And defining another, well, I can’t imagine a more complete domination, at least psychologically.”

The talk is the keynote for the conference, “Repatriation at 20: A Gathering on Native Self-Determination and Human Rights,” which will continue at the College from 8:30 to 5 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 29.

The gathering is intended to commemorate and acknowledge the significance of repatriation to Native sovereignty, self-determination and human rights.  This is not a conference celebrating laws, such as the 1989 National Museum of the American Indian Act or the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). Rather, this is a gathering intended to elicit the core principles of cultural survival that led to the enactment of these laws. This gathering will evaluate the implementation of the laws, from the perspective of the peoples and communities that they were designed to serve.  Speakers intend to focus on the agency of Native peoples in sustaining the cultural and political rights at the center of repatriation law.

The lecture, presented by the College of Law’s Indian Legal Program, will start at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 28, in the Great Hall of Armstrong Hall on ASU’s Tempe campus. Free tickets are available at http://community.law.asu.edu/event/REPATat20. The lecture will be available live online at: http://online.asu.edu/events/canby/canby.htm.

Kevin Gover wrote the forward to The Land Has Memory from The University of North Carolina Press. The book offers essays by Smithsonian staff and others involved in the museum’s creation. The essays examine Indigenous peoples’ long and varied relationship to the land in the Americas and the ways that relationship is depicted at the museum.

We are pleased to announce our initiative’s first books. This spring, our publishing partners will have not one, but five books, that will proudly carry the First Peoples logo. As with the field of Indigenous studies, the books cover a broad and multidisciplinary range of topics. They represent the robust and new directions scholarship in Indigenous studies is taking today.

Anetso, the Cherokee Ball Game: At the Center of Ceremony and Identity
By Michael J. Zogry • Available June 2010 • University of North Carolina Press
Based on his work in the field and in the archives, Michael J. Zogry argues that members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Nation continue to perform selected aspects of their cultural identity by engaging in anetso, a centuries-old Cherokee ball game still played today.

Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation
By Malinda Maynor Lowery • Available April 2010 • University of North Carolina Press
With more than 50,000 enrolled members, North Carolina’s Lumbee Indians are the largest Native American tribe east of the Mississippi River. Malinda Maynor Lowery, a Lumbee herself, describes how, between Reconstruction and the 1950s, the Lumbee crafted and maintained a distinct identity in an era defined by racial segregation in the South and paternalistic policies for Indians throughout the nation.

Oregon and the Collapse of Illahee: U.S. Empire and the Transformation of an Indigenous World, 1792-1859
By Gray H. Whaley • Available May 2010 • University of North Carolina Press
Modern western Oregon was a crucial site of imperial competition in North America during the formative decades of the United States. In this book, Gray Whaley examines relations among newcomers and between newcomers and Native peoples—focusing on political sovereignty, religion, trade, sexuality, and the land—from initial encounters to Oregon’s statehood.

Ritual and Remembrance in the Ecuadorian Andes
By Rachel Corr •  Available February 2010 • University of Arizona Press
In this book Rachel Corr provides a knowledgeable account of the Salasacan religion and rituals and their respective histories. Based on eighteen years of fieldwork in Salasaca and extensive research in Church archives—including never-before-published documents—Corr’s book illuminates how Salasacan culture adapted to Catholic traditions and recentered, reinterpreted, and even reshaped them to serve similarly motivated Salasacan practices.

We are an Indian Nation: A History of the Hualapai People
By Jeffrey P. Shepherd • Available April 2010 • University of Arizona Press
This book focuses on the historical construction of the Hualapai Nation in the face of modern American colonialism. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and participant observation, Jeffrey Shepherd describes how thirteen bands of extended families known as the Pai confronted American colonialism and in the process recast themselves as a modern Indigenous nation.

We will feature each of these titles and their authors in future posts.