"Something to gather around": Powwows and Lumbee community identity (2010)

Undergraduates: Meredith McCoy, none none none

Faculty Advisor: Patricia Sawin
Department: Anthropology

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Since the 1709 voyage of John Lawson and his discovery of “gray-eyed Indians,” the Lumbee tribe of North Carolina has faced challenges from people outside the tribe to prove its legitimacy as a community of indigenous people. In the early 1970s, Lumbees began to use powwow, a traditionally Plains Indian gathering centered on music, dance, and community, as a reaction to those challenges compounded by the social and political changes of the 1950s and 1960s. Community members worked together to teach powwow singing and dancing locally, bringing the art form into the area not only to create an additional social space for Lumbees to gather and celebrate their shared Indian heritage but also as a way to assert their identity within the political dialogue of federal recognition. Through a collection of interviews with Lumbee storytellers, singers, and historians, this research explores both Lumbee powwow as a tradition in Robeson County, North Carolina and Lumbee presence in intertribal powwows in Raleigh and Chapel Hill, North Carolina. After the present research, it is clear that members of the Lumbee tribe use powwow as a festival space in which to publically affirm and negotiate Indian identity and that powwow, though an adopted art form, is very much at home in the Lumbee community today.