Lumbee Indian histories : race, ethnicity, and Indian identity in the southern United States
Gerald M. Sider (Author)
This book explores the dynamics of conflicts over racial and ethnic identities in the southern United States, focusing on the Lumbee Indians of North Carolina. During the colonial period the Lumbee were both referred to as Indians and generally treated as Whites: some owned slaves, most were just poor to ordinary farmers, half-hidden in the midst of extensive coastal and riverine swamps. From 1835 to 1865 they were legally "Free Persons of Color," a designation with a broad range of necessarily contestable meanings. Since Reconstruction the Lumbee have publicly insisted upon their legal identity as Indians, which is sanctioned by the laws of North Carolina. This book is also a history of Native American concepts and visions of history, beginning with the contemporary period and with the perspectives of the Lumbee Indians, and working backward to the colonial period and to the major groupings of Native Americans. The fundamental question here is: what grasp upon the connections between past, present and impending future enables peoples who almost always lose to keep on struggling? Lumbee Indian Histories is part of a larger project, centered at the Max Planck Institut fur Geschichte, in Gottingen, Germany, to create new methodological approaches to, and concepts for, an historical anthropology. It continues and expands the theoretical perspectives of the author's Culture and Class in Anthropology and History: A Newfoundland Illustration (Cambridge University Press, 1986)
Print Book, English, 1993
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge [England], 1993