How The Lumbee (Re)Made History
One case in which changing history books is not just a right-wing conspiracy
Recently, an executive order brought something nearer that I thought would never happen for the people of my region in Eastern NC… federal recognition. I never thought it would happen because there is so much publicly available information that challenges their plight that it seemed they’d be bogged down forever with debunking. The absence of these people in the earliest explorations and maps accounting for tribes, settlements and families. The property, slave, military and census records documenting the people of colonial NC. The Eastern Band of Cherokee plight to standardize recognition. The DNA Project was abruptly halted. The colonial dress, traditions and language is that of the entire region or created in the 20th century. There are also lesser-known aspects that I thought presented a clear challenge that someone other than me would one day discover. For example, as a quilter, the traditional quilt technique is easily recognizable as the same one widely credited to the women of Gee’s Bend whose ancestors were slaves in NC. But the most blatant challenge that I thought surely presented a problem was a book written in 1875 that was literally rewritten, republished and referenced by scholars.
I discovered this book while researching my own family. Both of my grandmothers were born in Robeson, NC. One is dark-skinned with naturally shiny dark curly hair. The other is light skinned with naturally shiny loosely curled hair. I went to “Indian Education” in elementary school and junior high; this was a class to teach children with native ancestry all about their history… using books… like the one I’m about tell you about. I really did not grasp anything at the time; I just thought it odd that all the “Indian Education” teachers looked white.
Having grown up with my dark-skinned mother and her sisters, I took notice that outside of my family, my complexion and hair was a hot topic with boys and girls. It was not unusual for people who did not know my father to tell me, “You have indian in you”, almost like it was a privilege I inherited. People in the Cape Fear region of NC just assume that if you have a light complexion that either you have native warrior blood or one of your maternal ancestors was brutally taken advantage of. The truth of my family, I found, was a lot less dramatic.
To figure out the truth, I used many resources including the census, NC archives, newspapers, DNA and books. One book titled Lowrie History of 1875 by Mary Norment was invaluable, but it has a strange history that initially was unbelievable. As I was researching my great, great, great, grandfather William Chavis (born 1863), I came across a William Chavis who was a part of the Henry Berry Lowrie’s gang. Mary Norment wrote of her husband’s murder by Henry Berry Lowrie, Lowrie’s other crimes and his associates including a William Chavis. I wanted to know if this William Chavis was perhaps my ancestor’s William’s father who had also disappeared and who was also fascinated with munitions. Prior to Norment’s murder, Lowrie, Chavis and a few typical surnames were somewhat of a menace to the state of NC but they were not a mystery. They were not white, but they were free and seemed to challenge their county and even the state at every turn. Some owned property, owned guns, and most (educated or not) did not always conform to colonial society’s expected subservient behavior of non-white people. They came by way of Virginia, spread throughout NC and SC, and the largest group settled in swampy, undeveloped, and undesirable Robeson County where a bunch of mostly poor white people lived. The white families were Scottish to be exact and the few who did own slaves, like the McNeills, ran the towns, their businesses and slaves, in a laissez-faire fashion. Prior to their arrival, in the 1700s, there are no books, newspapers or stories mentioning natives except to joyously declare that there are none. The only living representatives of natives by the 1800s were largely mixed with white people hailing from the mountains who had a caramel mixed complexion, dark hair and slim oval, angularly shaped face. And they were on a mission to stay native. They too had a difficult time because they looked vastly different from the traditional natives of North and South America. By Mary’s time, the traditionally dark brown natives of all of Eastern NC had been wiped out for centuries so NC Easterners identified the phenotypical caramel color, the slick black hair and in some instances the attitude of native-identifying, mixed Western NC public figures with being native. And because of the laissez-faire co-mingling in the Cape Fear region, there were thousands of mixed black and white people with a similar appearance to the region’s conception of what natives physically looked like in the 1800s. It was only through surnames, court records and newspapers that people communicated family origin stories. By the mid 1800s, some origin stories had changed, verifiable thru census and newspapers, to circumvent laws, social unrest and political threats like impending war. When Mary published her book in 1875, a lot of people in Eastern NC identifying as native, organized heads of church as “elders”, formed schools and taught their children and their children’s children to repeat their family origin story. They went on to establish tribal traditions and businesses. But just as many mixed people didn’t; they identified as black and continued to live in the area. In her book, Lowrie History of 1875, Mary Norment, white, wrote her perspective and attempted to convey a typical sentiment within our community of that time. But in 1909, the Lumbee Publishing Company purchased the rights to Mary's book, revised and republished it. When comparing and contrasting the versions, the realization is jarring. The LPC replaced instances of the words "mulatto" and "negro" with the word "indian" or removed them altogether. The original version is not purchasable. The republished, revised book has since been used in schools like here at NC State and around the world like here at Internet Archives. The “Publishers” as they called themselves in the revised book, rewrote intellectual property and a historical account. Anyone who points to the revised book as a resource loses credibility. But I found the original (and of course downloaded it for safe keeping) here: Mary Norment's original book at the North Carolina Digital Collections. Only the original book, in my opinion, should be referenced.
Why is this concerning? For starters, changing an author’s creative and very personal product for any reason and promoting it as authentic should be repulsive in society at large. Teaching students using rewritten, inauthentic accounts is hardly education… it’s miseducation. And why damage your people’s credibility by literally putting words in someone else’s mouth? But most importantly, beneath and masked by all of the tribalism are the lives of many families who are the absolute epitome of what it means to be all and omni-American. Our families ruthlessly out hustled the extremisms of their time to live self-sufficiently and that is an origin story worthy of telling.
Did I find native blood? I did. More fascinating though is that all of my DNA had been confined to this very slim corridor from Henrico County VA since 1608 to Robeson County NC since the 1700s where they mostly remain today, with the only exception being my mother’s father hailing from Chicago by way of Mississippi (not the diversification I really want in my genes, but I’ll take it. Sorry not sorry Mississippians out there - smile).