Talk:Lumbee

I tried reading this article to learn Lumbee origins but the History section is almost unintelligible. It is as if someone cut and paste from the middle of a sophomore screed. 76.90.139.154 (talk) 14:52, 25 January 2025 (UTC)

This request for help from administrators has been answered. If you need more help or have additional questions, please reapply the {{admin help}} template, or contact the responding user(s) directly on their own user talk page.

<Need assistance with false harmful information repeatedly added to Lumbee and Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina page through the day. This information attacks our cultural and Native Identity of the Lumbee Tribe of N.C. This ongoing attack of false information removes our correct updates. It is harming the legislative review process by congress of the S.521 Lumbee Fairness Act and H.R. 1101 Lumbee Fairness Act > LTTao (talk) 18:31, 11 February 2025 (UTC)

Your editing to the article is disruptive. You should stop; otherwise, you may find yourself blocked. If you want to propose changes - in a non-combative and civil manner - you may do so. Administrator intervention, though, is not needed for such a discussion.--Bbb23 (talk) 18:37, 11 February 2025 (UTC)

It is not false, its true information backed up by sources. Quit whitewashing yourself. DACartman (talk) 19:04, 11 February 2025 (UTC)

The information that is being posted is from opinion news articles not reliable sources. The Lumbee PR manager has spoken and sent scholarly articles from the US Congress and PBS that proves the Lumbee Tribe is not of tri racial decent. If you have questions you can speak with the Lumbee Legal Team at 910-522-2187 and they can assist with updating the factual information with accurate sources. 24.106.191.146 (talk) 21:36, 11 February 2025 (UTC)

Neither the subject of a Wikipedia article nor anyone associated with the subject has any form of final editorial control or claim of ownership over the content of the article, and all content (positive or negative) is going to be expected to be assessed in accordance with relevant Wikipedia policies and guidelines. So, if you or anyone else associated with the Lumbee feel some of the article's contact is incorrect, the first thing that should be done is for you or they to carefully read through Wikipedia:Conflict of interest. Wikipedia has processes in place to help the subjects of articles address any concerns they may have about what's written about them on Wikipedia, but these process can take time to work. There are, in principle, WP:NODEADLINES when it comes to Wikipedia and disagreements over content are expected to be resolved in accordance with WP:DISPUTERESOLUTION, absent any major violations of Wikipedia policy that require more immediate action be taken. Moreover, all Wikipedians are WP:VOLUNTEERs who work on things at their own pace, and who are located around the world; so, asking or expecting them to contact someone by phone to verify any changes being proposed is highly unlikely to get very far.

If there are things in the article that you feel need to be changed, you're free to use this article talk page to make WP:EDITREQUESTs and propose them. You should be a specific as possible when making such a request, but also try to keep them as easy-to-understand and as simple as possible. Trying to request too much at once is unlikely going to lead to quick response other than perhaps a quick decline. The easiest requests to answer tend to be things like "Change A to B in paragraph 1 of "XXX" section of the article because doing so is in accordance with Wikipedia's policy on "YYY". I also suggest you use the template {{Edit COI}} when making such a request because it helps other be aware of the request. Any changes proposed should be supported by reliable sources (as defined here by Wikipedia) which can be verified by those answering such requests; moreover, providing a link to the source where it can be verified tends to make verification easier. The more exceptional the proposed change, the stronger the source needs to be, but in general WP:SECONDARY sources are better and preferred for verifying anything other than basic factual information. Wikipedia article content is intended to be many based on what reliable secondary sources are saying about the subject; WP:PRIMARY sources can be used, but only for certain types of article content.

Edit requests should be added to this talk page, and not the user talk pages of individual Wikipedians because this is where any proposed changes need to be discussed, and this is where any record of such discussion needs to be found. If you've got any general questions about the above, you can ask them here, at WP:HELPDESK or WP:TEAHOUSE. If you feel the article content is so wrong that immediate action is needed, you can seek help at WP:COIN or WP:AN. Even at those noticeboards, though, you might have to wait a bit of time before someone responds. Finally, its best to just stick with one person using one account when making edit requests; multiple accounts making the same request won't speed things up, but could lead others to assume there's some sock puppetry or meat puppetry taking place, which would not be helpful in getting any proposed changes made. -- Marchjuly (talk) 03:06, 12 February 2025 (UTC)

These are the descendants of those Tuscaroras who canoed down the Roanoke River to hunt Turtles on Roanoke Island every year (see F. Roy Johnson's "The Tuscaroras") Including the year English settlers tried to colonize it. These are those who encountered the very first attempted settlement of Europeans on these shores that were just accused of making a mockery of the pain of other tribes. These are those who have endured the most pain, for the longest amount of time, than any of those brats in comparison have in actuality. Hamilton MacMillan is on record in the Fayetteville Observer 2 days after the Croatan Bill he wrote passed stating that Croatan was just a village/place and that they themselves say that they are actually Tuscaroras. It's on record on microfilm in the Fayetteville Observer's archives. ~2026-31417 (talk) 17:19, 2 January 2026 (UTC)

@Lumtuskyprof: Please discuss the problem you see with the content you removed here, and I think a couple times after that. Your edit summary "spelling" is not informative, and you need to start communicating with other editors. I have restored the content pending a discussion. ☆ Bri (talk) 15:56, 21 October 2025 (UTC)

Decades ago I printed off and combed through about 25 of the genealogy trees composed by Paul Heinneg and Virginia DeMarce. They did NOT demonstrate what you claim in reality. Let us examine the largest most prominent Lumbee ancestral family to illustrate. They found Robert Locklear owning land on Quankey Poccosin on the Roanoke River in Northeast NC before he relocated to what is now Robeson County. They found no genealogical paper trail whatsoever before him and no race mentioned of him there. A man did get off a ship in VA 60 years prior with that surname but there is no record connecting them other than a surname that could have simply just as easily have been borrowed. It is a bold faced LIE to claim they have been documented as you describe. Mary Normant described Betty Locklear as a half breed Tuscarora. There is nothing demonstrating that she was not exactly that in reality.

Look at the faces showing now. Self evident when they can be seen instead of hidden.

Is this a necessary descriptor? Most nations in the East and many in the Midwest are made up of a multitude of racial phenotypes. Are we going to add "mixed-race" to all of their descriptors as well?
If the term is being used to refer to the various nations, escaped enslaved people and Europeans who make up their ancestry perhaps the term multi-ethnic might be better? ~2025-41586-13 (talk) 13:33, 18 December 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for your comment, but it is unclear. By nations, do you mean Native American tribes? If so, I think Lumbee are distinct from many tribes in that their ancestry includes more European and African origins compared to other tribes. It's all a matter of degree. Most ethnicities have some degree of mixed ancestry, but it's more pervasive among Lumbee. If you think other tribes have that degree of mixed ancestry, please provide reliable sources. And a side note to other anon IPs who have addressed this issue by simply changing the article without discussion, this is how it's supposed to be done on Wikipedia. Discuss before changing. Sundayclose (talk) 17:38, 18 December 2025 (UTC)

Yes, the Indigenous American nations of what is now the US!

I'm not sure how much material there is on the amount of mixed ancestry, I was speaking mainly from personal experience with people of many different nations who I've met and how they present phenotypically. I will say that according to the US census around 5 million Indigenous people identify as mixed. Many Indigenous Americans also marry outside of their communities (NPR quoted around 50% and I saw similar numbers on some other sites).

However I'm not sure why it is important to have the label in the first place. Does it offer any meaningful information that would not be addressed by the more in-depth section on their proposed ethnogeneses? ~2025-41893-72 (talk) 18:18, 19 December 2025 (UTC)

Unfortunately our personal experiences cannot be used on Wikipedia without being supported by reliable sources. Use of the term in the WP:LEAD is important because it's a brief way to describe more detailed information that can be obtained by clicking the link and reading the remainder of the article. Sundayclose (talk) 18:55, 19 December 2025 (UTC)

I think this is a great question actually, good point. I checked the Wiki article for Mixed Race and it says "The term multiracial people refers to people who are mixed with two or more races and the term multi-ethnic people refers to people who are of more than one ethnicity." - I suppose the implication is Lumbee would be multi-ethnic if they identified as multiple races? But I don't see them being labelled as black, or white on the article, so they would be mixed-race, rather than multi-ethnic, I'm pretty sure. Kotthu (talk) 02:23, 19 December 2025 (UTC)

Read John Lawson and Baron Christoff Von Graffenried, you will notice that the Tuscaroras were known to harbor runaway slaves BEFORE the Tuscarora war ever happened. Of course their descendants are peppered by it. Duh! ~2026-31417 (talk) 15:46, 2 January 2026 (UTC)

Adjutant General John C Gorman kept a diary. He conducted a parleigh with the Lowry Gang after the Union won the Civil War. His diary stated that a century ago members of the Tuscarora tribe of Indians lived upon the banks of the Roanoke River and were forced to relocate by the planters, and that they settled in Robeson County. Matters not that other racial admixture was mentioned because all of them carry that too. ~2026-31417 (talk) 16:48, 2 January 2026 (UTC)

I think there a few things that ought to be addressed with this subsection. First, I think it's a bit odd that there is no mention that this is the official stance of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. The history page on the Lumbee tribal government's website directly makes this claim (https://www.lumbeetribe.com/history-and-culture), and during the Senate Committee of Indian Affairs hearing on the Lumbee Fairness Act on November 11, 2025, lawyer Arlinda Locklear also made this claim on behalf of the tribal government. I just think it should at least be mentioned that this is the tribe's official stance.

The second thing that I think is strange is that article says that "Lumbee historian Malinda Maynor Lowery proposed that the Lumbee people were most likely descended from the members of several other tribes" when she is not the first person to have made this argument. In The Only Land I Know, a book originally published in 1975, 43 years before Malinda Maynor Lowery's The Lumbee Indians: An American Struggle, historian Andolph Dial says that Lumbees are descended from "remnants both of the 'Lost Colony' and several Indian tribes" on pages 23 and 24. These specific page numbers come from the 1996 Syracuse University Press reprint of The Only Land I Know, so I don't know if that quote would be found on the same page numbers in the original 1975 publication. Here's a source that the book was originally published in 1975, though: https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED101876.

In 1995, American Indian Quarterly featured an article called “‘Constructing’ Nations within States: The Quest for Federal Recognition by the Catawba and Lumbee Tribes”, which states that "[a]ccording to Robert K. Thomas, the noted Cherokee anthropologist, genetically, the Lumbee people (the term Lumbee, we shall see shortly, is of recent vintage) are the descendants of remnants of several small Southeastern tribes: the Hatteras, Saponi, and Cheraw, who from the 1780s through the 1840s worked their way into Robeson County where they intermarried and gradually developed a distinctive tribal identity." Source for the journal article: https://doi.org/10.2307/1185596. All this to say that the argument Lumbees are descended from an amalgamation of pre-contact tribes is a few decades older than The Lumbee Indians.

The third thing I noticed is that the subsection ends by saying "there is no solid proof of this claim", citing Karen Blu's The Lumbee Problem. Why is this single book treated by the article as a more authoritative source than The Lumbee Indians: An American Struggle? This subsection cites only two sources. Is one source alone that disagrees with the argument made in The Lumbee Indians really enough to say that Malinda Maynor Lowery is making claims with "no solid proof", especially when there are other historians that have made that very same claim?

Finally, I was also wondering if there was a particular reason that citation used for Malinda Maynor Lowery's work is from a StarNews article discussing The Lumbee Indians rather than the book itself. Graylakes (talk) 06:51, 29 December 2025 (UTC)

> that this is the official stance of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina.

Good point, thank you!

Dial's views are actually represented on the article, a few paragraphs up, I think that whole section should be cleaned up because of this, I find the claims being separated makes for a lot of repetition in the article which I think caused the issue, I was planning on condensing that. I agree with the weirdness of Maynor's citation, I was going to fix it soon as well as the separated claims issue Kotthu (talk) 07:58, 29 December 2025 (UTC)

They were refered to as a half breed Tuscarora population redundantly and almost exclusively before the 1885 Croatan act. Why? Because that's exactly what they were and still really are now truth be told. ~2026-3498 (talk) 04:01, 1 January 2026 (UTC)

3k Tuscarora survived the Tuscarora war. 1500 left the state and 300 went to Indian Woods. The other 1200, from the peaceful neutral upper towns on the Roanoke, stayed put exactly where they had always lived until Virginia settlers flooded in. They migrated South ahead of that settlement until they were cornered on several islands in Robeson county swamps. There are certainly traces from other tribes present but this is, and has always been, the nucleus population. ~2026-3498 (talk) 04:21, 1 January 2026 (UTC)

The Tuscarora only lived in villages of 300 to 500 persons during the winter months. During the planting seasons they disbursed all over in only 2 or 3 hut settlements to farm before the war. Those 1200 were scattered all over the Roanoke River region in NC most of the year every year. And according to F Roy Johnson's the Tuscaroras, went down the Roanoke River every year to hunt turtles on Roanoke Island, which would have included the year the Lost Colony became MIA. EVERY year! ~2026-3498 (talk) 05:03, 1 January 2026 (UTC)

I stumbled across this article saw its content explaining all the controversy on the origin of the Lumbee, did a quick internet search, found an dna database with hundereds of individuals, their Y-dna and mt-dna results, all seemingly Lumbee. Information that could help bring actual hard data to this topic. The site seems like its public information and publicly available, anyone can access it. Anyone that can read haplogroups can see it with their own eyes what the data says. There are more 'native' haplogroups on the mt side vs y side with strong european, african and some asian markers.

However why I hesitate is bc it has peoples names attached to it, its not anonamous. Also it lacks autosomal dna results, ideally one would have y-dna, mt-dna and autosomal dna for best picture. One is patrilinear, one matrilinear and autosomal compares more dna and compares it to populations. For example one could have an european or native ancestor, but that ancestor were from like 3,000 years ago or be your direct parent and by doing autosomal one can see ok only little of said dna left or vice versa.

The Lumbee have native dna, I think different experts looking at the data may simply interpert it differently from eachother like how much do you need to be able to claim actual decent, but the Lumbee claim ain't totally unfounded. They have plenty of European and African dna, from my glances, more so than native. Kennet Mattfolk (talk) 22:35, 18 January 2026 (UTC)

Do you have a source? Kotthu (talk) 22:40, 18 January 2026 (UTC)

Yes. However, as I said above, I hesitate to share it, you could potentially calculate actual living peoples haplogroups with it. Kennet Mattfolk (talk) 23:10, 18 January 2026 (UTC)