Learn more about current Tribes near South Carolina. Not all Tribes have yet been included; more information will be added in the future.
This page is broken into the following categories:
The Lumbee Indians are one of the largest groups living in North Carolina, and their history has been more extensively documented than many other SC Tribes. Their struggles to gain federal and state recognition are instructive for researching and building relationships with SC Tribes who face their own issues in documenting their history and proving themselves “legitimate” or “authentic” Native people. Such recognition has both symbolic and practical value, since it makes Tribes eligible for resources that enable them to support individuals in their community, to build communal resources for the Tribe, and to share their own stories as they see fit. Some scholarly experts are Lumbee including Adolph Dial and Malinda Maynor Lowery. Another nationally recognized Lumbee Indian is Arlinda Locklear, attorney and C of C graduate who was the first Native American woman to appear before the U. S. Supreme Court. CofC awarded her an honorary doctorate in 2012.
Lumbee Indian Histories: Race, Ethnicity, and Indian Identity in the Southern United States by
Sider’s book, which Lowery’s 2010 work builds upon, was updated as Living Indian Histories: Lumbee and Tuscarora People in North Carolina, UNC Press, 2003.
Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South by
“[T]his book focuses on watershed policies known collectively as the Indian New Deal. I examine that era’s role in shaping self-determination, governance, and the ideas about race and identity with which we wrestle today. Robeson County Indians demonstrated that factionalism in the 1930s predated the Indian New Deal and was, in fact, an important component of Indians’ social and political organization. Indian victimization did not produce all political disagreements; many were the product of Indian agency. To conclude that victimization motivates disagreements implicitly denies that Indian people can legitimately disagree and asserts that ‘Indians [are] passive objects responding to white stimuli rather than . . . individuals coping creatively in a variety of ways with the different situations in which they found themselves,’ in the words of historian Robert Berkhofer. Rather than permanently rupture their social fabric, the political disagreements among Robeson County Indians demonstrated a creative response to the disempowerment they faced under segregation and contributed to new markers of identity.”
The Lumbee Indians: an American Struggle by
Lowery is a Lumbee woman, a historian and a documentary filmmaker. This book is part history and part memoir, an “autoethnography” relying on documentary records and the work of previous historians, but also on the memories passed down by the Lumbee Indians, including Lowery’s personal observations and experiences as the Lumbee People sought federal recognition as a tribe, an effort that many other tribes including EBCI (Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians) have opposed.
Herbal Remedies of the Lumbee Indians by
The Lumbee Indian tribe has lived in the coastal plain of North Carolina for centuries, and most Lumbee continue to live in rural areas of Robeson County with access to a number of healing plants and herbs used in the form of teas, poultices, and salves to treat common ailments. This book describes and documents the numerous remedies that the Lumbee have used for centuries and continue to use today as well as recording the words of Lumbee citizens on the meaning and importance of the remedies to cultural continuance.
From the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians' website, "Located in Cherokee, North Carolina, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians were once part of a much larger Cherokee Nation population. However, when the Trail of Tears was mandated, and forced removal and relocation were directed by the US government and then President Andrew Jackson, the Cherokee Tribe became divided into what is known today as the Cherokee Nation and United Kituwah Band, located in Oklahoma, and the Eastern Band, made up of those who remained and rebuilt within North Carolina’s Qualla Boundary (sometimes called the Cherokee Indian Reservation)."
