Native Heritage Project

A continuation of Robert K. Thomas’s Report of Research on Lumbee Origins.  This was transcribed from a photocopy of an original report at the Wilson Library, UNC, Chapel Hill, NC in June of 2012.   Any comments I have will be made at the end of these transcriptions and it will be evident that they are mine.  To see more about Robert K. Thomas, go to:  http://works.bepress.com/robert_thomas/

(P 25)  Part III – Traditional Lumbee History

My main contribution in the research on the Lumbee has been to look at Lumbee traditional history and to see what could be gleaned from the Lumbee accounts of their own origin.  Wes White had done a fairly complete historical record of early Indian history in the Carolinas and Michelle Lawing has done very good genealogical research on Lumbee families. 

The most extensive accounts of Lumbee oral history were recorded by amateur historians who were writing on Lumbee origins between 1880 and 1915.  Most of these men were trying to prove one hypothesis or another, mainly trying to tie the Lumbee into the Lost Colony of Roanoke.  But in the process they quoted a lot of Lumbee traditions and it as Lumbee traditional history they relied upon to make their case for the lost colony hypothesis.  Of course, Hamilton McMillan was the main researcher in this area but there were several others as well.  In fact, one researcher I have mentioned, Mr. Mclean, had another hypothesis. However, all of the quoted extensively of Lumbee traditional history.

The other body of material was gathered modernly.  I have interviewed quite a few older Lumbees, particularly Mr. Jim Chavis, and LRDA itself has collected quite a bit of such material.  What I tended to do was use the modern oral history as a check on or to add to the accounts I got from the literature written from 1880 to 1915.

I should at this point give some idea of my methodology; that is, the way I went about to analyze this body of literature. 

Most of the men who wrote during this period had an “axe to grind” and most of them were not professional historians.  Their material is very disorganized and much of it is garbled or else is unusable.  Sometimes it appears to they put words in the mouths of the Lumbee elders in order to bolster their own interpretations.  Much of their argument is circular; it is assumption based on assumption based on assumption until in their later arguments they are taking their previous assumptions as fact and as proof of the argument which they are presenting to you later in their article.  However, they do present one mass of material and these writers are honest scholars, particularly McMillan, even though they may be undisciplined.

The way I handled this material was to first read it over several times until I almost had these works memorized.  It must have taken me almost a month to read and re-read this material until I had a gestalt in my own mind.  This was for my own benefit as a researcher.  I tend to work this way and to let my unconscious do a lot of sorting out and rearranging of material.  After I had done this I went over the materials and weeded out all the tribal names since these names are simply confusing and cue one the wrong way.  I also weeded out all statement where it appeared to me that the authors were putting words in the mouths of Lumbee elders.  Then, I tried to weed out what I thought were garbled passages.  Now I should tell my readers that in none of these works are there direct quotes of Lumbee elders.  The authors usually say the Lumbee tradition says such and such but I think I managed to weed out all the author’s own interpretations, as such, of Lumbee traditional statements.  I must say that McMillan is the most disciplined in (p 27) keeping his statement separate from the Lumbee statements.  Then I took that whole mass of material and I simply listed each statement of Lumbee tradition, not in any particular order.  Then I tried to check out these statements with historical fact, statements that I thought were Lumbee tradition unaltered.  They checked out well.

For instance, McMillan in one of his later publications says that the Lumbees referred to the region of Pamlico Sound as Roanoke and that they referred to the sound itself as Pamtico.  In looking at accounts in the early 1700s – Lawson and others – and looking on old maps, this does check out.  Old maps do show Pamlico Sound as Pamtico and Lawson and others referred to the region of Pamlico Sound as Roanoke.  McMillan also says that the Lumbees say that the Indians in Sumter County, SC were their relatives and that the people known as Melungeons in the east Tennessee were also their relatives.  This checks out historically as well.  There are other items which I checked out and I came to the conclusion that Lumbee traditions as recorded by these authors was very accurate.  Of course, these traditions are speaking to a time in the 1800s which was probably only a hundred years distant from the time the first author, McMillan, started to look at Lumbee tradition; a great deal of time had not passed.

I also tried to make an evaluation of the authors themselves and checked their material internally and with each other and with historical records.  Except for their rather undisciplined methodology and rather offhand interpretations not based on evidence they seemed to be fairly honest and accurate, particularly McMillan.  One author, Ford, tends to put words in the mouths of Lumbee elders but he was the only one of about 6 or 7 who seemed to me to do that.

A continuation of Robert K. Thomas’s Report of Research on Lumbee Origins.  This was transcribed from a photocopy of an original report at the Wilson Library, UNC, Chapel Hill, NC in June of 2012.   Any comments I have will be made at the end of these transcriptions and it will be evident that they are mine.  To see more about Robert K. Thomas, go to:  http://works.bepress.com/robert_thomas/

(P 21 of the report, his page 20)  I suppose that now that I have discussed these other hypothesis of Lumbee origins I should launch into the section of my paper in which I lay out my own hypothesis.  My hypothesis is not completely “nailed down” but I think it is fairly firm.  Before I do that, however, I would like to give a fairly short intellectual history of my own efforts up to this point because I have changed the nature of my hypothesis as evidence has come in.

(P 22) Part II – Intellectual History

I first seriously began to consider Indian communities in Virginia and North Carolina in the winter of 1976 when I did a survey for the Smithsonian in January, February and part of March, 1976.  I simply visited Indian communities in that area to see which ones were “alive and doing well,” so to speak.  I did some estimate as to numbers and present condition.  At that time, I was struck, like Price, by family names in common of these groups in Appalachia, eastern NC, and SC.  I didn’t think this could be an accident.  So what I did was look at migration patterns in general in the Carolinas and I could see four.  The first was simply a movement out from settlements on the coast, in a fan-like shape on the map.  But this was a minor pattern.  Another was a general migration from northeast to southwest; that is, people moved out of Virginia into northeastern NC and from northeastern NC in a southwesterly direction down the coastal plain and along the edges of the Piedmont into SC.  The third migration pattern was from the area of northeastern NC and southeastern Virginia straight west.  There was a fourth migration  pattern which was not significant in my research, a migration from north to south.  The Scots-Irish came south from Pennsylvania into the Shenandoah Valley, then into the Yadkin, then into Piedmont SC, but I was really only interested in the second and third migration patterns.

I took the Melungeons on the Virginia-Tennessee border (p 23) around Sneadville, Tennessee and Blackwater, Virginia and simply projected them straight east.  I took the Lumbee and projected a line northeast.  The two lines intersected at about Roanoke Rapids, NC.  Therefore, I began to look around for a group of Indians in the Roanoke Rapids area from which I thought these migrants had originated.  I didn’t think, like Price, that this was an old free black society that had scattered all over the South.  I thought it more than likely that these two groups with names in common had their origin in some Indian tribe.  The closest tribe I could find to Roanoke Rapids which might fit “my bill” was the Saponi tribe which from 1710 to perhaps in the 1740s had lived at Fort Christiana, Va.  This fort was right north of modern Roanoke Rapids, a few miles north of the Roanoke River, near present day Lawrenceville, Va.  I knew that anthropological sources stated that the Saponi went north in 1740 from Fort Christiana and joined the Iroquois Confederacy.  But I was unconvinced since the evidence was unclear and I thought that perhaps the Indian communities in the Appalachians, the Lumbees, and Indians in SC and Louisiana had a common origin in the Saponi tribe.

However, as I began to read and larn more I found out that the Tuscaroras were the largest group of Indians in northeastern NC in that period.  I then read Norment’s material in which she states that many fo the Indians in Robeson County were descendants of the Tuscaroras.  So at that time I changed my mind about the Saponi and began to consider the Tuscarora as the source of these widely dispersed communities.

(P 24) Finally, Wesley White did his very complete historical sketch of Indians in NC in the first half of the 1700s.  I began to change my mind again and to think that perhaps the Saponi were, indeed, the source of these widely dispersed communities.  Wes White found a Saponi community in Granville County in the 1740s, 1750s and early 1760s, in the general area from which Norment says that many of the Indians in Robeson County had migrated.  Now I still think that the Saponi in Granville County contributed to the formation of the Lumbee community but I do not think that the Saponi are either the largest element or the only element.

Since Michelle Lawing has completed her research the picture is beginning to look a little clearer.

A continuation of Robert K. Thomas’s Report of Research on Lumbee Origins.  This was transcribed from a photocopy of an original report at the Wilson Library, UNC, Chapel Hill, NC in June of 2012.   Any comments I have will be made at the end of these transcriptions and it will be evident that they are mine.  To see more about Robert K. Thomas, go to:  http://works.bepress.com/robert_thomas/

The other hypothesis about Lumbee origin which does not relate to some Indian source has been posed by some sociologists and demographers. It says the communities like the Lumbees in the Southeast are simply refugee communities which are formed by social deviants clustering up together  – free black, loose Indians, Latin sailors, whatever.  After this social group was formed it took over a middle ground status position between blacks and whites and many scholars have called communities such as this Lumbee, tri-racial groups.  In this they agree with many whites in Robeson County who see the Lumbees as a tri-racial, middle ground caste.  Not to be uncharitable, but I think the analysis as presented by these scholars is largely a refinement of a feature of the general world view of the American middle class; a view that does not see people or communities but only individuals of differing races and ranks.

Further, these scholars see the caste system in the South as the origin of such a community as the Lumbees.  Such scholars think the Lumbee community was created and maintained by the racial caste (p 19 of the report, his page 18) system of the South.  I think this shows two things.  One is a misunderstanding of the dynamics of caste, particularly castes based on race, and the other is ignorance of the history of the South.  A caste system rarely creates a new community of people.  It may create individuals who have the same rank, but it does not necessarily push these individuals into a single community.  Sometimes if there are individuals who have a common rank because of a shared occupation and are then pushed into one geographical area a community can emerge.  Such a dynamic may explain the origin of the Metis in Canada.  Of course, it doesn’t explain their continuation.  But I think it is very rare where people come together simply because of a common rank as individuals in a society and “bunch up” in order to form a common social group based on common rank. 

I think that these scholars are showing a very pronounced middle class American bias.  Middle class Americans will opt for rank over and above relatives or community or anything.  Of course, a great many of the suburbs of cities in the US are formed primarily on the basis of common rank within American society, that is people move to the suburbs and cluster together on the  basis of income and occupation.  They aren’t an occupational group that is pushed into a geographic area and then forms a community, but are in fact single individuals or nuclear families who migrate and close residences.  Needless to say, social cohesion in America is very fragile.  However, I think that for most people in the world association of the basis of common rank is a very rare occurrence.

(P 20 of the report, his page 19) More than that, as I say, such analysis belies a knowledge of the history of the South.  In the first place, most social deviants in the 1700s or early 1800s, if they wanted to, could go to the frontier and simply disappear.  Many such people chose to do just that in the US.  This is only one example of the kind of alternatives open to someone whose main consideration was rank within a fluid society.  It would not be necessary to bunch up in a refugee community in the swamps of NC.  Further, the caste system of the South as we know it really did not start to come into being until about 1800.  The first laws that began to regulate caste behavior were passed in the 1820s and 1830s in the South.  Most of the communities which these scholars are looking at, the Lumbee community specifically, formed many years before the caste system in the South had begun to assume any form whatsoever.  In fact, at the time the Lumbee formed as a community it was still possible in parts of NC for a black man to be married to a white woman, own slaves and be a landholder.  Michelle Lawing has cases of this in the works she has done in northeastern NC.  My point is, I don’t believe that rank of caste as such can explain the presence of these “tri-racial” communities.  As I say, it both belies the understanding of the dynamics of a caste system and the history of the South, as well.  The scholar who most operated according to this hypothesis was Calvin Beale, but Brewton Berry also tends to work from this hypothesis, at least implicitly.

A continuation of Robert K. Thomas’s Report of Research on Lumbee Origins.  This was transcribed from a photocopy of an original report at the Wilson Library, UNC, Chapel Hill, NC in June of 2012.   Any comments I have will be made at the end of these transcriptions and it will be evident that they are mine.  To see more about Robert K. Thomas, go to:  http://works.bepress.com/robert_thomas/

Now there are two hypothesis of Lumbee origin which are not related to descent from an Indian group or groups.  These two hypotheses have been devised primarily by non-anthropological and non-historical scholars – sociologists, geographers, population demographers and so forth.

The first of these hypotheses is that the Lumbee are basically the descendants of an old strata of free blacks which came into being before the Revolution, who have absorbed a lot of white blood over time and a small but incidental amount of Indian blood.  This hypothesis was most “spelled out” by a geographer by the name of Price from the University of California who did his doctor’s thesis on “mixed-blood” communities in the South.  As a geographer he could not find any particular geographic explanation for the presence of these communities except that they were usually in out-of-the-way places.  One of the things he did notice was a commonality of family names in a great man of such communities – in Appalachia, in Robeson County, In SC and in western (p 15) Louisiana.  He had an idea, which he did not develop very much, that most of these families has originally come out of northeastern NC.  In fact, his hypothesis was that these families were all that remained of an old free black society which had been widespread over that region of the US.  He doesn’t say so bit it is obvious in his presentation that he thought that most of these communities’ claim to being Indian. and of course Lumbee are one of these communities, was really fraudulent.  Price doesn’t exactly say so but one gets the impression that he feels that the descendant of these old free blacks were trying to escape the stigma of being black and to raise their status by claiming to be Indians.  As I say, this latter is implicit; it isn’t spelled out but it is strongly hinted at.  He does think that these families are descendants of a widespread old free black society in the South.  There are other scholars who hold to this hypothesis and do indeed think that the claim of these communities to being Indian is fraudulent.

There is a glaring weakness in this hypothesis and that is if this notion is correct then all of these communities have been perpetuating a fraud for quite a long time.  One can imagine a single individual moving away from his community into another area and presenting himself as a member of a higher status group.  This has happened in the US many times.  But it is very hard for me to imagine that a whole community would enter into a commonly held “plot” and that no individual member ever exposed the plot and told the truth.  Further, not only is it almost impossible for me to imagine a situation like this in a single community but the fact that there would be widely separate communities and scattered (p 16) family groups who would all maintain this fraudulent identification of Indian racial status is hardly credible.  More than that, if this is fraud it is a fraud which has gone on for a very long time in the southeastern US in these communities.  We have evidence that many of these communities maintained this identification before the Civil War. 

Most scholars in the US, I think, have a distorted picture of Indian status in the general society relative to blacks and whites.  It is true that in most parts of the South after 1900 being an Indian gave you a slight “leg up” over being black.  There are some places, however, in which this is not true even modernly; in Mississippi and some parts of Florida and Louisiana.  But perhaps in the middle South, at least after 1900, being an Indian was of little higher status than being black.  However, this was certainly not the case in the 1700s and not the case in most places in the South before 1850.

In fact, if I as an Indian in the state of NC before the Civil War, I would have kept quiet about it. It was far more advantageous to be black and free in the state of NC in that period than it was to be Indian.  Anyone non-white was classified as free colored.  This included both free blacks, Indians and people who were mixed white and black.  Of course, there were certain disabilities to being classed as free colored.  But more than that, if you were also classed as Indian, there were additional legal disabilities.  For instance, no Indian could own land in the state of NC before 1866.  If you were a free black you had the disabilities of being in the free colored category, but you could own land even though you could not vote (p 17 of report, his page 16) and bear arms.  So that in the state of NC in that time and certain other states in the South it was legally more advantageous to be a free black than to be an Indian.  I don’t think that there was too much difference in social status between free blacks and Indians.

By the Civil War Indians in most of the eastern part of the US had faded out of  public memory and the litteri began to recreate Indians into the stereotype of the noble redman.  Indian status had raised a little above blacks by 1900, but certainly this has been a recent phenomenon.  In order to “buy” Price’s notions you would have to, thus, demonstrate that the “Fraudulent” Indian identification is modern in these communities and we know, in fact, that is it not.  It has been my observation that most folk communities are simply not very concerned with the opinions of outsiders, non-kin.  Certainly they are the most times unaware of their general social status or, at least, understand it only vaguely.  If they are indeed, aware of a low social status they tend to accept it as a given or conversely see it as persecution.  To raise social status by a fraudulent identity might occur to urban, middle class people but such a notion would occur not only the most marginal social deviant in most folk communities.  It is true that the importance of social status or rank has been promoted in most American folk communities by the school system, but this is a rather recent phenomenon.

I have visited two modern communities which have switched their identification from Indian to “colored” or black, largely by virtue of intermarriage.  One such community is Skeetertown in southeastern Virginia which became a black community in the 1880s.  Another is (p 18) Browntown in eastern NC which became colored in the lifetime of older members of this group. They state such a change in identification very matter-of-factly and do not seem so to have suffered from a rank deprivation.  Exactly why an old free black group would so suffer from rank deprivation as to manufacture an Indian identification is not quite clear to me.

Price did contribute to our understanding, however, in suggesting that these family names in common with a great many such “mixed-bloods” lead back in time to northeastern NC as their point of origin.