Brief mention. For readers interested primarily
in the Lumbee, the pertinent sections are “One People: Tri-racial
Communities” (pp. 8-10) and a short discussion in “Three Peoples:
Red, White, and Black Relations” (pp. 10-11).
The Lumbee are discussed as one of many peoples “.
. . of mixed Native American/European/African ancestry who managed to
carve out a separate status for themselves despite the two-tier system
of race in the southern United States. This system had neither legal
nor cultural room for persons who were neither Black nor White”
(p. 8). The article mentions several scholars (William S. Pollitzer,
Guy B. Johnson, William H. Gilbert, Edward T. Price, B. Eugene Griessman,
and Brewton Berry) who studied tri-racial isolates (for more information,
see The Lumbee Indians: an annotated bibliography (1994), pages
90-94). The article provides a quotation from a Lumbee interviewed by
Brewton Berry.
The article also classifies Gerald Sider's Lumbee
Indian histories (1993) as an indirect attack on African American
culture. Jones feels that Sider “. . . does not so much denigrate
Blacks as he silences them” (p. 11). Jones also asserts that although
Sider “does not avoid the issue of miscegenation,” he “clearly
identifies with and supports the Lumbee in their claims that they are
Indian and have no African ancestry” (p. 11). I disagree with this
analysis and offer, as evidence, the following excerpt from the Preface
to Sider's book: “. . . --twenty or more years ago, some anthropologists
and some local Whites in Robeson County said that the Lumbee had a contestable
identity because they were either partly Black or something that was
called in professional jargon a 'triracial isolate.' But the Seminole,
for example, were substantially mixed with African-Americans, yet few
if any contested their Indian identity; moreover, a great many Indian
peoples have intermarried with Blacks as well as Whites, many far more
than have the Lumbee, without calling their identity as Indian people
into question. How then did Lumbee history differ from the history of
other Native Americans so as to make their Indian identity more of an
issue?” (Lumbee Indian histories, “Preface,” page
xxii).
For the general reader, this research overview analyzes
the literature on Black/Indian relations from a variety of disciplines,
grouping the analysis according to six themes or trends the literature
has taken. These include comparing Blacks and Indians; triracial communities;
chauvinistic studies (which maintain that one race was either treated
worse than or was superior to the other); and “the romanticists
who see a mystical link between Amerindians and Blacks” (p. 11).
