- For detailed discussions of stories as scholarship, see Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy, “Toward a Tribal Critical Race Theory in Education,” Urban Review 37, no. 5 (2005): 425–446; and Aman Sium and Eric Ritskes, “Speaking Truth to Power: Indigenous Storytelling as an Act of Living Resistance,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 2, no. 1 (2013).
- See the “origin myth” discussed in Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), 46. See also the criticism of land as pristine wilderness in William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” Environmental History 1, no. 1 (1996): 7–28. In the monumental work Custer Died for Your Sins, Vine Deloria Jr. condemns assumptions and stereotypes about Indigenous peoples as “(m)ythical generalities of what built this country and made it great.” Vine Deloria, Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), 52. Brittany Hunt and colleagues demonstrated recently that harmful stereotypes surrounding Indigenous peoples are alive and well in the United States through a study of American Indian student experiences in large urban school systems. Brittany D. Hunt, Leslie Locklear, Concetta Bullard, and Christina Pacheco, “‘Do You Live in a Teepee? Do You Have Running Water?’ The Harrowing Experiences of American Indians in North Carolina’s Urban K-12 Schools,” Urban Review 52, no. 4 (November 2020): 759–777.
- Dominique M. David-Chavez and Michael C. Gavin, “A Global Assessment of Indigenous Community Engagement in Climate Research,” Environmental Research Letters 13, no. 12 (2018).
- Krystal S. Tsosie, Joseph M. Yracheta, Jessica A. Kolopenuk, and Janis Geary, “We Have ‘Gifted’ Enough: Indigenous Genomic Data Sovereignty in Precision Medicine,” American Journal of Bioethics 21, no. 4 (April 2021): 72–75.
- Ryan’s family name also belongs to relatives who reject both Lumbee and Coharie political identity and instead identify as Tuscarora. The topic of Tuscarora political identity in twenty-first-century North Carolina is beyond the scope of our essay.
- Indigenous people living in the British colonies of Virginia and North Carolina around the turn of the eighteenth century sometimes adopted European first names, last names, or both. For examples relevant to Lumbee ancestors, see J. Cedric Woods, “Lumbee Origins: The Weyanoke-Kearsey Connection,” Southern Anthropologist 30, no. 2 (2004): 20–36.
- There are at least two instances in which parts of the Emanuel family’s oral tradition were recorded or published. A few details were printed in a 1916 pamphlet that described the Indigenous people of Sampson County, North Carolina (ancestors of present-day Coharie people). George Edwin Butler, “The Croatan Indians of Sampson County, North Carolina. Their Origin and Racial Status. A Plea for Separate Schools” (Durham, NC: Seeman Printery, 1916), https://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/butler/frontis.html. Lumbee historian Adolph Dial made passing reference to the Emanuel story in a 1972 oral history interview for the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida. See “Interview with Adolph Dial August 25 1972,” George A. Smathers Libraries Digital Collections, University of Florida, https://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00007010/00001. Technologists have recently proposed the application of blockchain or “distributed ledger” concepts to genealogical research. This idea parallels what we describe here—metadata attached to oral traditions. Michael Meth, “Chapter 2: Blockchain Primer,” Library Technology Reports 55, no. 8 (2019): 7–12. Scholars indirectly reference the practice of explaining how a story was passed along in discussions about unique aspects of Lumbee speech. In particular, Dial and Eliades comment on preambles given by Lumbee storytellers to explain the genealogical provenance of a story. Adolph L. Dial and David K. Eliades, The Only Land I Know: A History of the Lumbee Indians (San Francisco: Indian Historian Press, 1975), 11. Lumbee people (and other Indigenous peoples) assume their ancestors transmitted oral traditions accurately and in good faith, the same assumptions that historians and scholars often apply to other record-keepers.
- Ryan’s Uncle Enoch was a contemporary of George Edwin Butler and is featured prominently in his 1916 pamphlet advocating for resources to support schools for Native Americans in Sampson County; see notes 7 and 9.
- The interviewer referenced the published account mentioned in notes 7 and 8. Quote from “Testimony of Edward Emanuel” in McNickle, D’Arcy, Edward McMahon, and Carl Seltzer, “Report on Application for Registration as an Indian: Case No. 25, Sylvester Emanuel,” Washington, DC, June 10, 1936.
- Elizabeth Hirschman, James Vance, and Jesse Harris, “DNA Evidence of a Croatian and Sephardic Jewish Settlement on the North Carolina Coast Dating from the Mid to Late 1500s,” International Social Science Review 95, no. 2 (2019).
- Hirschman, Vance, and Harris, “DNA Evidence,” 11.
- Kim TallBear examines the tendency to conflate Indigenous identity with the results of commercial genetic tests in Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
- Deloria Vine, “History in the First Person: Always Valued in the Native world, Oral History Gains Respect among Western Scholars,” Tribal College: Journal of American Indian Higher Education 6, no. 4 (Spring 1995). Deloria challenges the dominant view that “information possessed by non-Western peoples … becomes valid only when offered by a white scholar recognized by the academic establishment” (33). Deloria notes that “the non-Western, tribal equivalent of science is the oral tradition, the teachings that have been passed down from one generation to the next over uncounted centuries.” These teachings were often conveyed in stories. They carried knowledge about origin and migration, as well as “precise knowledge of birds, animals, plants, geologic features, and religious experiences of a particular group of people” (36). Vine Deloria Jr., Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 1995). Deloria demonstrates the validity of oral tradition and the depth of insight available within the teachings throughout this work.
- According to an archived version of the website from 2017 (two years before the research in question was published), the website was “open to anyone who believes they are descendants of a LUMBEE Native American” (emphasis in the original). At that time, the website was called the “Lumbee Tribe Regional DNA Project” despite no formal Lumbee involvement. Around 2018, the website was renamed the “Robeson County NC American Indian Regional DNA Project” and the description was revised to note that the site was “open to anyone who believes they are (or could be) descendants of an American Indian, and who desire to determine and/or prove their American Indian heritage when their ancestors are believed to originally be from the Robeson Co., North Carolina vicinity.” See archived versions at Robert B. Noles, “About Us,” LumbeeTribe, Family Tree DNA, accessed July 18, 2022, https://web.archive.org/web/20170302093222/https://www.familytreedna.com/groups/lumbee-tribe/about; and Robert B. Noles, “About Us,” Robeson Co. NC American Indian, Family Tree DNA, accessed July 18, 2022, https://web.archive.org/web/20180523105609/https://www.familytreedna.com/groups/robesonconcamericanindian/about. Most recent version available at: Robert B. Noles, “About Us,” Robeson Co. NC American Indian, Family Tree DNA, accessed January 2022, https://www.familytreedna.com/groups/robesonconcamericanindian/about.
- K. TallBear and D. A. Bolnick, “‘Native American DNA’ Tests: What Are the Risks to Tribes? Native Voice (2004), D2.
- TallBear and Bolnik, “‘Native American DNA’ Tests,” 4.
- Hirschman, Vance, and Harris, “DNA Evidence,” 11.
- LorrieAnn Santos, “Genetic Research in Native Communities,” Progress in Community Health Partnerships: Research, Education, and Action 2, no. 4 (2008): 321–327; Adam J. P. Gaudry, “Insurgent Research,” Wicazo Sa Review 26, no. 1 (2011): 113–136.
- Two such figures are Mary C. Norment and Hamilton McMillian, prominent non-Indigenous residents of Robeson County during the nineteenth century who wrote about Lumbee ancestors. Mary C. Norment, The Lowrie History, as Acted in Part by Henry Berry Lowrie, the Great North Carolina Bandit. With Biographical Sketches of His Associates. Being a Complete History of the Modern Robber Band in the County of Robeson and State of North Carolina (Wilmington, NC: Daily Journal Printer, 1875); and Hamilton McMillan, “The Croatans,” North Carolina Booklet 10, no. 3 (1911): 115–121.
- Dan Rasmussen, “The Lumbees’ Long and Winding Road,” Roll Call, Washington, DC, July 17, 2006. Also note that Heinegg’s assumption that Lumbee ancestors were African Americans who sought a better situation for themselves in the racial hierarchy of Jim Crow relates to the notion of racial “passing”—an idea that Brewton Berry popularized in the 1960s to explain the preponderance of unrecognized Indigenous groups in the eastern United States. According to Berry (and others who espouse this racist idea), the groups invented tribal identities to improve their social status. Brewton Berry, Almost White (New York: Macmillan, 1963). The flip side of Berry’s argument is that the groups really are who they claim to be—tribal nations that have existed since historic times. In fact, several groups discussed in Berry’s work have been recognized by the federal government in recent years as American Indian tribes, each providing detailed evidence to support their claims. Susan Greenbaum explains how the racist ideas embodied in the work of Berry and others have created major challenges for unrecognized tribes in the southeastern United States. Susan Greenbaum, “What’s in a Label? Identity Problems of Southern Indian Tribes,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 19, no. 2 (1991): 107.
- Heinegg’s work includes genealogies for at least eighteen Lumbee families. Of these, Heinegg found evidence that individuals from six families migrated from Virginia to North Carolina. For all of the other family trees that Heinegg created, he used various phrases like “may have been the ancestor” or “probable descendants” to denote a lack of evidence that genealogists typically use to establish relationships between individuals. For more details on standards of evidence typically used in genealogical research, see Elizabeth S. Mills, “Working with Historical Evidence: Genealogical Principles and Standards,” National Genealogical Society Quarterly 87, no. 3 (1999): 165–184. Heinegg’s work is viewable online at http://www.freeafricanamericans.com.
- Some ethical issues are summarized in Santos, “Genetic Research in Native Communities,” and David-Chavez and Gavin, “A Global Assessment of Indigenous Community Engagement.” Santos, in particular, highlights ethical concerns associated with the use of blood and genetic information using the high-profile example of the Havasupai Nation and academic researchers.
- See note 2. Deloria notes that “tribal peoples were placed at the very the bottom of the imaginary cultural evolutionary scale.” This allowed colonizers to imagine us as animal-like with only “marginal status as human beings.” Deloria, Red Earth, White Lies, 65. For more on blood quantum, see Paul Spruhan, “A Legal History of Blood Quantum in Federal Indian Law to 1935,” South Dakota Law Review 51, no. 1 (2006): 1–50. Quinn Smith Jr. provides a less flattering (but no less accurate) description of blood quantum as a tool used by the federal government to “breed Indians out” of the United States. Quinn Smith Jr., “Real Indians and Fake Indians,” Wellian Magazine, Duke University, January 20, 2021.
- Two recent examples of how Indigenous knowledge systems are becoming more widely recognized and appreciated include fire management in California and water management in New Zealand. William Nikolakis and Emma Roberts, “Indigenous Fire Management: A Conceptual Model from Literature,” Ecology and Society 25, no. 4 (2020); and Gary Brierley et al., “A Geomorphic Perspective on the Rights of the River in Aotearoa New Zealand,” River Research and Applications 35, no. 10 (2019): 1640–1651.
- Letter from Howard Tommie to Regional Indian Liaison, Department of Labor, dated October 17, 1974, Vine Deloria Papers, Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
- William S. Pollitzer, Amoz I. Chernoff, L. L. Horton, and M. Froehlich, “Hemoglobin Patterns in American Indians,” Science 129, no. 3343 (1959): 216. Pollitzer adapted the mathematical models that purported to explain the origins of “hybrid” populations from research studies of castes in India. L. D. Sanghvi and V. R. Khanolkar, “Data Relating to Seven Genetical Characters in Six Endogamous Groups in Bombay,” Annals of Eugenics 15 (1950): 52–76.
- William S. Pollitzer, “Analysis of a Tri-Racial Isolate,” Human Biology 36, no. 4 (1964): 362–373. Blood characteristics from hospital patients in London were published in a popular medical text from this period: Robert Russell Race and Ruth Sanger, Blood Groups in Man(Oxford: Blackwell Scientific, 1950). Some present-day anthropologists point out that mid-twentieth century genetic researchers worked under an implicit assumption that they were studying populations that had been genetically isolated for hundreds or thousands of years. Veronika Lipphardt, “‘Geographical Distribution Patterns of Various Genes’: Genetic Studies of Human Variation after 1945,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 47 (2014): 50–61.
- In addition to Lumbee, Eastern Cherokee, and Gullah Geechee people, Pollitzer conducted research on genetics, race, and identity using blood samples collected from Catawba, Haliwa-Saponi, Seminole, and other American Indian communities and from other marginalized peoples throughout the southeastern United States. Pollitzer published case studies individually and summarized many of them in William S. Pollitzer, “The Physical Anthropology and Genetics of Marginal People of the Southeastern United States,” American Anthropologist 74, no. 3 (1972): 719–734; and Pollitzer, “Analysis of a Tri-Racial Isolate,” 366. See Karen Norrgard, “Human Testing, the Eugenics Movement, and IRBs,” Nature Education 1, no. 1 (2008): 170. Note also that Susan Greenbaum and Veronika Lipphardt are among the social scientists who question the veracity of anthropological research on mixed-race communities in the South and highlight links to discredited ideas from eugenics and race science. Lipphardt, “Geographical Distribution Patterns,” 50–61; and Greenbaum, “What’s in a Label,” 107.
- Pollitzer, “Physical Anthropology and Genetics of Marginal People.” The report to Congress was prepared by a researcher employed by the tribe engaged in lobbying against Lumbee recognition. Ironically, the researcher’s report cited figures from a study that Pollitzer had conducted not on the Lumbee Tribe but on a different tribe. Although Pollitzer substituted terms such as “hybrid” and “isolate” for the names of the tribes that he studied (a halfhearted attempt at anonymizing his research subjects), he included numerous identifying details that would make either tribe instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with them. Thus, the report to Congress is yet another warning about the intellectual hazards of conducting research on a community that one knows nothing about. Kenneth H. Carleton, “Comments on the Lumbee of North Carolina,” Vine Deloria Papers, Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Letter to Editor, Robesonian, June 6, 1973.
- Susan Greenbaum discusses Pollitzer’s links to Beale, an earlier eugenicist who popularized the study of minoritized groups in the Southeast by anthropologists. Greenbaum, “What’s in a Label?,” 113. However, TallBear and Bolnick speak against this notion of identity in TallBear and Bolnik, “‘Native American DNA’ Tests,” and TallBear, Native American DNA.
- N. S. Momaday, Conversations with N. Scott Momaday (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), 152.
