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| The Trail of Tears |
During the early 1830s a policy of Indian removal was initiated under Andrew Jackson's administration. For tribes like the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Seminole and Creek (known as the "five civilized tribes"), this period was marked by the signing of coerced treaties, relinquishing of ancestral lands, and tragic removal. More than 4,000 Cherokee women, children and men died during the forced march known as the "Trail of Tears." The majority of Southeastern tribes and recalcitrant members of the "five civilized tribes" remained on or near their ancestral lands, however. Covetous eyes did not rest upon the land of the Lumbee. Because our lands lay in the southeastern portion of North Carolina, and were marked by an elaborate network of swamps and streams - and thus were considered inhospitable- the U.S. never attempted to negotiate a treaty with the Lumbee for removal.
A sense of agency, of self-sufficiency, of genius in its most essential sense, of experience beyond mere survival is rarely if ever credited to Indians in the interpretations of American history. While this interpretive lack is understandable in that the official dissemination, codification, and transmission of Native experience in U.S. history has traditionally lain in "outside" hands, its neglect, distortion and downright omission is nonetheless reprehensible. The notion that Native peoples are somehow separate from the history of the United States is all too common. Research into the history and continuing presence of southeastern Native peoples who interrelated and continue to interrelate with people of various European ethnicities and those of African descent would do well to dispel the myth of a racial, cultural, and historical barrier between these groups, and better reflect a more insightful reading of historical and contemporaneous sources.
Lumbees, with our own and interdependent cultural and historical tribal experience, our joy and deep-seated sense of responsibility in practicing the tenets of Christianity, and our ability to decisively adapt to changing political, social, and historical currents while maintaining our tribal cohesion belies the immutability of essentialized, race-based constructs of identity, and the staticity of communal experience.