The strange history of the tribe courted by Donald Trump

For almost a century and a half, the federal government denied the Lumbee, the largest tribe east of the Mississippi, recognition. Now, nearly everyone in Washington is trying to give it to them. “I love the Lumbee tribe,” President Donald Trump said on his third full day in office, as he signed a memorandum ordering the secretary of the interior to, within 90 days, submit a plan to help the Lumbee gain full federal recognition. 

The president isn’t the only one showing the Lumbee love. Last October, while campaigning on behalf of Kamala Harris in North Carolina, Bill Clinton made a swing through Pembroke, the seat of the tribal government. Donald Trump junior was nearby holding a rally filled with “Lumbees for Trump” signs. During the campaign both presidential candidates called John Lowery, the Lumbee tribal chairman, to promise full federal recognition. Also last year, the House of Representatives passed the Lumbee Fairness Act, which would extend recognition to the tribe, 311 to 96, only to see it stall in the Senate.

The Lumbee have been accustomed to living in this federal limbo, which has been their state for more than half a century. In 1956 President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Lumbee Act, a measure that recognised the tribe as American Indians while also excluding them from federal money and the other privileges that most tribes have. Lacking full recognition, the Lumbee are still not able to get access to federal Indian health care, to put land in a reservation-like trust or to build a casino.

The main reason for this is the tribe’s unusual history. There is no record of the Lumbee having spoken any language other than English. Your correspondent, whose great-great-great-grandmother was a Lumbee, grew up being told this was because the tribe was the remnant of Sir Walter Raleigh’s “lost colony”. A more plausible explanation is that the tribe’s origin lies in multiple tribes escaping violence and disease in early encounters with English colonists. These different groups fled to the swamplands of North Carolina where they spoke English as a lingua franca.

Compounding the origin question is the fact that the Lumbee had trouble agreeing on what their name was. Outsiders branded them the Siouan, the Tuscarora, the Croatan and the Cherokee Indians of Robeson County. It was not until 1953 that most settled on the name Lumbee. “The naming issue has continued to plague us,” said David E. Wilkins, a Lumbee tribe member and University of Richmond professor.

Today the biggest sceptics of Lumbee recognition are other Indians. Last October the National Congress of American Indians was forced to apologise when they found participants distributing cards warning Lumbee recognition would endanger the status of other tribes. Pretendian Watch, a self-appointed policer of those pretending to be Indians, called the Lumbee “a made up tribe who is actively stealing Tuscarora culture”.

The Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians (EBCI), North Carolina’s only fully recognised tribe, have become the Lumbee’s main adversary, repeatedly arguing that they are not real Indians. “The Lumbee have failed to meet the criteria to prove their claim of being a legitimate Native Nation and are relying on the sympathy of legislators to gain federal recognition,” the EBCI‘s principal chief, Michell Hicks, said in January. His attacks have earned him a reprimand from the state’s Commission of Indian Affairs, which said his claims were “shameful, counterproductive” and also “baseless and have been disproved on numerous occasions”. This rivalry goes back decades. In 1974 the EBCI’s then principal chief, John Crowe, threatened Vine Deloria, an Indian activist, saying that many Cherokee wanted to “bury your heart and other assorted pieces of anatomy at Wounded Knee” for his support of Lumbee recognition.

The Cherokee point to questions about the Lumbee’s identity, but the reason they resist recognising the tribe is money. If given full recognition, the Lumbee, whose land lies beside I-95, one of America’s busiest highways, would probably build a casino and siphon off money from Cherokee gaming revenues. Of course, questioning a tribe’s Indianness as a means to thwart an inconvenient casino is a strategy others have tried before. “They don’t look like Indians to me,” then casino mogul Donald Trump said in his 1993 testimony before Congress, explaining why he thought the Pequot should not be allowed to build a casino near his own.

Although the 90-day deadline passed in April, the Department of the Interior has still not issued its report. Representatives have reintroduced the Lumbee Fairness Act. But over the past 130 years, 29 similar bills have been introduced in Congress. Eight of them passed the House but failed in the Senate. Mr Wilkins, the historian, suggests this time might be different. But then he shrugged and said, “I am not holding my breath. Otherwise, I would have turned blue many years ago.”