The notion of the American "frontier" was popularized by the historian Frederick Jackson Turner. According to Turner, this frontier had been successfully traversed and conquered by 1890. Significantly, the massacre at Wounded Knee would serve as the historical metaphor for the end of that frontier and the defeat of all Indian tribes in the American imagination.
However, if one broadens the concept of a frontier to include the notion of "an inter-group contact situation, that is, any instance of more than momentary contact between two ethnic, cultural or national groups" (Forbes 1968: 203-205) then the southeastern frontier was perceived, traversed, and re-created an infinite number of times in undulating waves of multicultural contact. Southeastern Indians still exist because of their genius for negotiating this ever-changing frontier. Change was not perceived as a threat to these peoples, although it was oftentimes unwanted and violent; it was seen as perhaps the only true constant in their day-to-day lives. Lumbees acted, and perceived ourselves as acting, with forethought and agency in the midst of this cultural exchange. Contrary to most scholarship regarding ethnic and particularly Native American identity, this exchange did not threaten indigenous groups' sense of identity; rather, it strengthened the already diverse cultural base on which that identity was formed, reinforcing an inherited faith, passed down through countless generations, that helped us negotiate uncertainty.
Lumbee experience on the frontier broadens sociologist Fredrik Barth's influential model of boundary maintenance among ethnic groups, which holds that ethnic identity is delineated by the "boundary that defines the group, not the cultural stuff that it encloses" (Barth 1969: 15). Barth argues that the maintenance of social boundaries is not necessarily reliant on a demarcation of territory. Instead, societal processes of exclusion and inclusion, along with self-defined characteristics of what constitutes a particular ethnic group, seem to operate as the most active agents of the ethnic group's persistence. Lumbee identity was in part determined by an awareness of others' presence and others' assumptions about an Indian community.
While differences in cultural attitudes and behavior determine the socio-ethnic boundaries of respective groups, we must remember that indigenous groups delineation of ethnicity in large measure is based on specific ties to a given place. The experience of the Lumbee and other Indian groups belies Barth's position that ethnic identity is not marked by relationship to place. Lumbees' determination of communal identity is negotiated by the process of exclusion and inclusion as well as by the landscape that defines us. Nowhere is this negotiation more evident than in the geographic, historic, racial, and present political landscape of Robeson County.