2010
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press
In this richly detailed and very personal work, Malinda Maynor Lowery examines the U.S. government’s Indian New Deal, formally known as the
Indian Reorganization Acy of 1934, focusing on the
Lumbee people of North Carolina. Lowery is herself a Lumbee and uses personal anecdotes along with local, state and federal records, photographs, oral histories and letters in this work. This is a complex and layered story and the author lays some groundwork. She explores the history of Robeson County Indians, how white supremacy limited options, and the internal and external struggle of the Lumbee to be recognized by the federal government. The Lumbee are the largest Native American tribe east of the Mississippi River, and in an era of racial segregation they have struggled for recognition from a paternalistic bureaucracy. In
Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South, Lowery argues for a complicated definition of identity. American Indians were classified by outsiders based on their “blood,” while they themselves based identity on kinship and place. She further argues that factionalism and conflict among the Lumbee, far from being divisive, “demonstrated a creative response to the disempowerment they faced under segregation and contributed to new markers of identity” (p. xv).
Lowery begins each of her chapters by focusing on a photograph, with a brief story. The subjects of these pictures, often not important enough to the photographer to be identified by name, help highlight each chapter’s theme. Chapter three, for example, focuses on the differences between “outsiders” and “insiders.” The anonymous man featured in this chapter’s photograph, while an “insider,” is making an attempt to reach out to the “outsiders”- anthropologists, government officials, photographers- for his people. Lowery, as a historian, and a Lumbee Indian sees herself as both an outsider and an insider. In chapter five, for example, she writes of her own grandparents, using them to exemplify the complex political and class structures underlying the racial issue.
The
Jim Crow South is often viewed in terms of black and white. Lowery, however, takes the reader beyond such simplistic thinking. The American Indians of Robeson County, while often segregated from both blacks and whites, used the system to their advantage when possible. They told officials of how segregation “denied them economic advantages because of their status as Indians, and they expected the government to recognize their distinctiveness and redress such injustices” (p. 162). Unlike African Americans, many Indians were able to vote and used the franchise to their advantage. They lobbied politicians, supporting Democrats and the racial hierarchy. Lowery argues that the Lumbee “strategically embraced aspects of Jim Crow that upheld perceptions of their ‘Indian Blood,’ they furthered their economic autonomy, and they fostered a centralized government” (p. 255).
Lowery’s work adds not only to Native American history, but to Southern history and the history of race in America as well. Her argument that factionalism is a creative force builds on the work of such writers as James Taylor Carson (though he wrote of the Choctaw). In discussing the “privilege of whiteness,” Lowery brings to mind the work of Michelle Brattain and Tali Mendelberg, and expands the dialogue beyond black and white
1. At times the tome reads a bit like an ethnography and should be of interest to anyone interested in the history of that field and how anthropologists (such as Franz Boas) worked during the first half of the twentieth century. Most importantly, however, Lowery asks, “Why is that Lumbee way of seeing important for academic scholarship? Leaving it out reinforces an old colonial agenda to silence Indian people” (p.xvi).
The issue of race is an ongoing concern in the United States. In perhaps the book’s most harrowing passage, Lowery describes a showdown between the Lumbee Indians and a group of Klansmen who invade their county. In chasing out the Klan, the Lumbee protect “their” homes and families as well as preserve their “Indianness.” Lowery’s work can be a bit overwhelming with its sheer breadth of detail (she helpfully provides genealogy charts), but she does a great service, however by adding to the discussion of segregation and “how the system worked on a community that perpetuated an identity other than black or white” (p.263).
Notes See Michelle Brattain,
The Politics of Whiteness: Race, Workers, and Culture in the Modern South (Princeton University Press, 2001); Tali Mendelberg,
The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality (Princeton University Press, 2001).
Reviewed by Richard S. Primuth; University of West Georgia
Make a difference. Know the history. Change the future.
Find other great books on Indigenous Peoples via our Secure Bookstore.
North America 
