| Contents |
Letter of transmittal; Report on condition and tribal rights of Indians of Robeson and adjoining counties in North Carolina -- Exhibit A. A1-Senate resolution No. 410; A2-Office instructions, July 23, 1914; A3-Eleventh Census, United States, 1890 -- Exhibit B. B1-Petition of Croatan Indians; B2-Office letter of Hon. J. W. Powell, January 7, 1889; B3-Letter of J. W. Powell to Indian Office, January 11, 1889; B4-Office letter to Hamilton McMillan, January 29, 1889; B5-Letter of W. L. Moore to Indian Office, July 2, 1890; B6-Office letter to Hamilton McMillan, July 14, 1890; B7-Letter of Hamilton McMillan to Indian Office, July 17, 1890; B8-Office letter to W. L. Moore, August 11, 1890 ; Exhibit C.-Sir Walter Raleigh's Lost Colony ; Exhibit CC.-The Lost Colony of Roanoke: Its Fate and Survival ; Exhibit CCC.-Extract from History of North Carolina ; Exhibit D.-Notes of Lederer's Travels in North Carolina ; Exhibit E.-Lawson's History of Carolina ; Exhibit F -- Historical Sketch of the Indians of Robeson County -- Letter of A. W. McLean, dated September 7, 1914 -- Statement by Wash Lowrie, a Robeson County Indian -- Office letter of September 14, 1914, to A. W. McLean. Exhibit G.-History of the Cherokee Indians (from Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology); Exhibit H.-History of the Tuscaroras (from Handbook of American Indians); Exhibit I.-History of the Old Cheraws (from Greggs' History of the Old Cheraws); Exhibit J.-History of the Catawbas (from Handbook of American Indians); Exhibit K; History of the Cheraws (from Handbook of American Indians) -- History of the Cherokees (from Handbook of American Indians); Exhibit L.-Legislation relative to Indians of Robeson County; Exhibit M. Correspondence relative to the investigation of the condition, tribal rights, etc. of the Indians of Robeson County, N.C. |
| Abstract |
In 1913 the State of North Carolina officially recognized Robeson County Indians as "Cherokees," a designation that went largely unnoticed by the Federal Government. When the same Indians petitioned for Federal recognition and assistance in 1915, the Senate tasked the Office of Indian Affairs to report on the "tribal rights and conditions" of those Robeson County Indians. Special Indian Agent Orlando McPherson, a Midwesterner who was in the final stages of a long career as a civil servant, was commissioned to investigate. The resulting federal report is essentially literature review in the guise of fact-finding. It relies heavily on Robeson County legislator Hamilton McMillan's musings on the relationship between Sir Walter Raleigh's Lost Colony and the Indians around Robeson County. The report reaches many erroneous conclusions, in part because it was based in an anthropological framework of white supremacy, segregation-era politics, and assumptions about racial "purity." In fact, later researchers would establish that the Lumbees, as Malinda Lowery writes, "are survivors from the dozens of tribes in that territory who established homes with the Native people, as well as free European and enslaved African settlers, who lived in what became their core homeland: the low-lying swamplands along the border of North and South Carolina." Excavations would later establish the presence of Native people in that homeland since at least 1000 A.D. Ironically, McPherson's murky colonial history connecting Lumbees to early colonial settlers was used to legitimize them and to deflect their categorization as African-Americans. The McPherson report documents one important phase of an Indian people's long path to self-determination and political recognition, a path that would designate them variously as Croatan, Cherokee Indians of Robeson County, Siouan Indians of the Lumber River, and finally, Lumbee--the title of their own choosing and the one we use today. |
