If you ask Ben Chavis, a Lumbee, why the Lumbees were never forced off this land as so many of their brethren were – the Cherokee and Navajo used to occupy vast swaths of the American South before they were pushed west – he’ll tell you, “The land was so worthless, no one ever bothered.”
As Fergus Bordewich says of Lumbee territory, “The swamps were a terra incognita without newspapers or schools; even churches were so rare that births, marriages and deaths went unrecorded.”14 Eventually the swamps were drained and the land was used for farming tobacco and cotton. Lumbees, who had been living a mostly isolated existence, also began to mingle more with whites and free blacks – to the point that today Lumbees do not have any distinct racial characteristics.
Bordewich suggests that this is one of many factors that have made gaining recognition from the federal government and even gaining respect from other tribes difficult. “The Lumbees challenge almost every preconception of what Indians should be. . . . They run the physical gamut from blond hair and blue eyes to the nearly Negroid. They have no chiefs or medicine men and no reservation. They have no memory of the tribe from which their ancestors may have come, nor the language they spoke, nor of any religion older than the pious and passionate Baptist faith that, to a person, they today profess.”15
Whether any of these things should be considered a requirement for being categorized as an American Indian is debatable, though. More than half of all Indians in America don’t live on reservations, and many have no sense of their heritage. The vast majority are Christian. A significant portion don’t have any distinctly Indian appearance, speak no Native language, and know nothing about traditional language or culture.
But the reason to investigate the Lumbees is that they’re a case study in what a community of American Indians can accomplish without a reservation and without the kind of preferences and money that the federal government has offered hundreds of other Indian communities throughout the country. Cheryl Beasley, a professor of nursing at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, ticks off the number of professionals among Lumbees – doctors, lawyers, nurses, accountants. There are 60 doctors here among 60,000 people. “You don’t find that in other tribes,” she tells me emphatically. “The Navajos would like to have those numbers.” She says that this success comes from the tribe’s independence from the federal government. “Indians had to pay for everything themselves here. They had pride in the people who built it.” Beasley says she has friends on the Rosebud reservation in South Dakota and she sees how a culture of dependence has taken over there. “They just say to the federal government: ‘Give us our check and tell us what to do.’”
What’s now the University of North Carolina at Pembroke started off as a grade school for Indians. In 1887, American Indians actually petitioned the General Assembly of North Carolina to help the community educate its children. They received a paltry $500 grant toward the payment of teachers. But it was enough to get things off the ground. Pembroke became a college in the 1930s and part of UNC in 1972. In part because the school has a strong nursing program, there are a great many trained nurses among Lumbees.
But there are also doctors and lawyers and accountants. Beasley’s sister Lucy Lowry is a CPA who teaches at the local community college. Four of the Beasley siblings have PhDs, and the other three have master’s degrees. Their grandfather was a schoolteacher. They’re third-generation college educated, they tell me proudly.
There’s a middle class here in Lumberton and in the neighboring towns. Unlike on reservations, people here can own land outright. Lumberton (2010 population: 21,542) is a popular stop on the I-95 corridor, and, in addition to countless fast-food restaurants and motels, the town boasts a Super Wal-Mart. In other words, there’s plenty of poverty, but there’s also economic activity and opportunity.
One afternoon, I drive with Chavis around town. We stop at various landmarks. There are small cemeteries, each with a few gravestones. The names are all the same – Lowry, Locklear, Oxendine. Lumbees are really only a few large extended families. The larger gravestones are usually for local bigwigs. On one Oxendine stone just off the road, it says, “He was a quiet Indian leader who gave fiercely of his love, time, counsel and wealth to others.” Chavis laughs: “Translation: He never had a job.”
Chavis believes that because Lumbees don’t live on a reservation, they have a chance to succeed that tribes out west simply don’t. And though the tribe’s story doesn’t follow a simple trajectory, his own story supports his belief.
Like many Lumbees of his generation, Chavis managed to work his way up from poverty, get an education, start a career, and live a middle-class life. He grew up in Robeson County, the oldest of six siblings. His abusive father died when he was six years old. And his mother got by on sharecropping and working as a maid.
In his autobiography, Crazy Like a Fox, Chavis says that when he was growing up, the family could eat only if his mother earned enough money. According to Chavis, the family once got a visit from a local official to see whether his mother could qualify for food assistance – this was before the food stamp program. She told Chavis’s mother that if she wanted help, she’d have to turn over three of her children to the state. She refused, and the family barely scraped by. One night, recounts Chavis, the family had to split one piece of cornbread as their entire dinner.16
But that experience motivated him. He’s the only one of his siblings to have finished high school, let alone attend college. He earned a track scholarship to Oklahoma City College and a received a doctorate from the University of Arizona before going on to make a small fortune in California real estate. He tells me he remembers being in high school running down the street where his farm is now and dreaming of being wealthy enough to own a house here. He recently bought his parents a home on the street for $30,000.
“There ain’t nothing better than pain and fear,” Chavis tells me. “I’m fearful in my life that I will go back and live in total poverty as I did as a child. I’ve got a retirement account. That don’t mean nothing. I’m still afraid.”
Whatever it was that brought Chavis to where he is today, he’s not alone. Despite the problems that plague this area, Lumbees have managed to avoid some of the worst poverty and dysfunction that affect Indians to the west. Among the men and women I meet who are in their 50s and 60s, there’s a strong work ethic, a sense of the importance of education, and a tendency to shake their heads about what has gone wrong in the community over the past few decades.
Sadly, though, the federal government’s anti-poverty programs, and now the tribe’s likely recognition by the federal government, may mean they’re headed down the same path as other Indians.
One afternoon, Chavis and I drive by the local welfare office. The Robeson County Department of Social Services is the largest building for miles – surpassed only by the Super Wal-Mart, I’d guess. There are well over 200 cars in the parking lot, and a woman we encounter from Child Protective Services says at least 300 people work there. The annual budget is about $400 million.
From there, I go to see Dobbs Oxendine at the Toyota dealership he owns. When we pull up, Oxendine is riding around the lot in a golf cart. We retreat to the dealership office, which looks out onto the showroom, and talk about history.
“There has been a real decline,” says Oxendine, about his community and his business. He himself finances most of the loans for the cars he sells, because the local banks – even the Indian-owned one – won’t give most of his customers a car loan nowadays.
Although he’s quick to note that there aren’t a lot of opportunities for young people here, he does say that there would be more if the schools were better. “What makes a strong business is education.” He recently put out a notice that he was looking for cashiers at the convenience stores he also owns. Some of the applicants hadn’t finished high school. The bigger problem, though, says Oxendine, was that “half of the applicants acknowledged that they had been caught shoplifting.”
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bsp; And those are only the ones who admitted it, he adds.
But many of the young men and women in Lumberton simply don’t want to work. “They think they can stay at home and make more money in government checks,” Oxendine opines. Even the ones he does hire always ask to be paid under the table, so that it doesn’t affect their welfare checks.
Oxendine emphasizes, “I don’t believe in welfare. You need to give people a pole to fish with.” Between food stamps and housing assistance, Oxendine believes that no one has an incentive to work anymore. He describes how things were different when he was growing up: “We had hog killings. We’d give everyone a piece of meat. The church was more involved. We were a very proud people. The giveaways have made us lazy.” Oxendine’s words hint at the tribe’s long tradition of taking care of its members. But he doesn’t mistake Lumbees’ communal obligations to one another with an obligation for the state or federal government to care for them.
Rosie Hammonds, a woman in her 30s who runs a hair salon in Lumberton, seems to agree with Oxendine’s assessment of how things have gone downhill. Hammonds says she has trouble finding people to hire at the salon. Not only are they not hardworking, she says, they don’t want other people to succeed. Most of her customers come from nearby Pembroke and other towns, she says, not Lumberton itself, because people in Lumberton are jealous of her success.
The younger generation makes Oxendine shake his head. “They live in public housing. They are children having children. They live from day to day, with no view of tomorrow. They become entitled. They just want to know, ‘Where’s my check?’”
His daughter Melissa, who works for him, sits in on our conversation. “Churches used to be the welfare office,” she explains. “They used to help the elderly and veterans.” But now, she laments, it’s all the government.
Like the other boomer-generation Lumbees I meet, Oxendine tells me the schools were better when he was growing up. He attended segregated schools – “three schools, three school buses.” Like schools for African Americans at the time, Indian schools got used books. “We didn’t have lunch rooms or gyms, and there were no jobs for our parents except sharecropping and bootlegging,” Oxendine divulges.
But Oxendine nevertheless went on to Pembroke for college. It was mostly a teachers’ college at that point, but he says, “Pembroke is the real difference between the Lumbees and other tribes.” The fact that they had an institution of higher education that existed long before the tribal colleges came about and the fact that it was incorporated into the University of North Carolina rather than continuing to exist independently ensured that its standards remained high.
His uncle, Hilton Oxendine, opened one of the first restaurants in the area that would serve Indians. He had difficulty securing loans from local banks, but he managed to open the Toyota dealership as well. When he fell on hard times and had to sell the business, Dobbs bought it from him. By the time Dobbs purchased the business, the Lumbee Guaranty Bank had been incorporated.
But Dobbs tells me that he decided instead to go to a “white bank” and find a cosigner for his loan. Because, he explains, “The Lumbee bank’s interest rate is always higher.”
Dobbs Oxendine used to serve on the tribal council. He chaired a committee that demanded greater recognition for the tribe from the federal government. In 2013, both the House and the Senate introduced bills to offer the Lumbees the same recognition that other tribes have.
The proposed legislation read in part:
The Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina and its members shall be eligible for all services and benefits provided to Indians because of their status as members of a federally recognized tribe. For the purposes of the delivery of such services, those members of the Tribe residing in Robeson, Cumberland, Hoke, and Scotland counties in North Carolina shall be deemed to be residing on or near an Indian reservation.17
Although the privileges granted to Lumbees under this act would not extend to gaming – this has been a big sticking point for local officials, and Lumbees have insisted that their application for greater recognition has nothing to do with a desire to open a casino – Lumbees would be eligible for more federal grants to subsidize housing, food, et cetera. And the land itself could be taken into trust by the federal government.
Kay Hagan (D-NC), who introduced the legislation in the Senate, told her colleagues: “Beyond simple fairness, the issue of Lumbee recognition is critically important to the North Carolina economy, and to counties and communities that have been hardest hit by the recent economic downturn.”18
Hagan argues that Lumbees are in a particularly bad position. As she said, “The Harvard School of Public Health has found that residents of Robeson County have a lower average life expectancy due to persistent poverty and limited access to affordable health care.” The proposed legislation, she claimed, would “enable the Lumbee to combat these trends through access to critical programs within Indian Health Services and economic development programs through the Bureau of Indian Affairs.”19
Just to be clear, Lumbees are already eligible for every form of public assistance that other low-income U.S. citizens may receive, from food stamps to housing assistance to help with energy costs to college financial aid. There are people who argue that these subsidies aren’t enough for anyone, but there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that Indians in Robeson County are worse off than, say, blacks in Robeson County, and there are plenty of whites and Hispanics living far below the poverty line too.
But Hagan and her colleagues – both Democrat and Republican – believe that it’s the fact that Lumbees are Indians that has led to this poverty, and thus the solutions we’ve employed to help other Indians are called for in this instance as well. Given the abject failure of the reservation system to allow for, let alone encourage, economic growth in Indian communities, it’s nothing less than shocking to hear that politicians in Washington actually want to expand the system.
Oxendine says he has seen where this is all going. But only recently. A few years ago, he says, “I had a change of heart.” He started to wonder whether federal recognition would really improve things for his community. “I used to be a professional Indian,” he says. “A preacher preaches what his congregation wants to hear.” And what the people who elected him wanted to hear was that greater recognition and more money from the federal government could solve their problems.
This is exactly why Chavis has been unimpressed with the Lumbee leadership. He has seen a lot of wheeling and dealing – political influence in exchange for more money to the community – but that, he says, is not the way forward. Lumbees don’t need more political influence in North Carolina or in Washington, says Chavis. They need freedom from government, not more government involvement in their lives.
Oxendine has come around to Chavis’s point of view. “If we get more checks, we will have more alcohol. It will be detrimental to the Lumbees.” As for the idea of having the federal government hold more land “in trust” for his people, he’s convinced it’s a terrible idea. He has visited many of the reservations out west, and he can only shake his head. “The people out there don’t take care of their property.” Because it’s not their own.
Oxendine is deeply worried about Lumbees’ future and the future of the United States, for that matter. “This country is messed up. I’m all right, but my great-grandkids won’t be.” He tells me, “We need less government in our lives. We used to be a strong country. We need another Ronald Reagan.”
If it seems as if Oxendine is some kind of anomaly, he’s not. I encounter this attitude frequently among members of his generation. Ronald Hammonds, Rosie’s uncle, is a cattle farmer, though he has started to raise buffalo recently because there’s a “niche market” for it. He grew up on a farm and thought that he would want to get off of it as soon as possible. Hammond’s six children all have college degrees from places like Notre Dame and Chapel Hill. One’s a lawyer. One’s in the Coast Guard. Another is a CPA. Hammond credits his wife, an e
ducator, with their success. But he says a lot of children their age never learned the value of hard work and education.
“Women are encouraged to have babies. It’s economic development. You get a check. We’ve got more illegitimate kids than ever, and it’s getting worse.” He calls the local housing project a “breeding ground” and says that the children are mostly being raised by their grandmothers. “They’ve got no responsibility. They’re looking for the government as the solution to all our problems.”
So what’s his solution? “Cut out the handouts.” He believes that the children being raised by their grandparents can go on for “about two more generations and then that horse will be dead.” Comparing people to cattle, something people here do with startling frequency, Hammonds tells me, “You’ve got a kid 25, 35 years old, and they’ve never been weaned. They don’t have a job. . . . You take those calves out there, those calves will suck on that cow, their mama, till they’re 600 or 700 pounds. Even when she has another calf, they will continue to suck that cow and the baby won’t get any. We’re going to have to wean those calves. They ain’t going to wean themselves.”
He believes that pursuing tribal recognition is a waste of time. “Our problems ain’t going to be solved by money. All you’re doing is making it worse. It’s time for people to take responsibility for their lives, but our government doesn’t want them to. They want to be the answer to our problems.”
Like many other Lumbees, Hammonds is very happy to not have to deal with the reservation system out west. “The only solution I see,” he tells me of the poverty on reservations, is this: “Divide everything up and give it to the Native American family and let them disburse it, spend it, keep it, whatever. I don’t need no government taking care of me.”
With a few exceptions – for example, Social Security and Medicaid – he believes the federal government should have less involvement in the lives of Native Americans and everyone else for that matter. “They don’t need to tell us how to eat . . . who can get married and who can’t. That’s why the Pilgrims left Europe. We’re just getting too regulated.” Hammonds says the government “owns too much land to start with. They have no business owning all this land that they took from the Indians.”
The New Trail of Tears Page 9
