President Donald Trump signs a memorandum making full federal recognition for the Lumbee a priority for his administration on Jan. 23, 2025. (Screengrab from White House YouTube channel)
When President Donald Trump signed a memo declaring support for “full Federal recognition, including the authority to receive full Federal benefits, of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina,” he called it the “first big step” on the path to the Lumbee becoming a federally recognized tribe.
“I love the Lumbee Tribe,” Trump said in the Oval Office in January. “So, this is the first big step, right? They were with me all the way, they were great.”
But for a group that has spent nearly 140 years vying for federal status, words will not be enough. Lumbee advocates have seen efforts in Congress fail year after year, with several bills passing the House of Representatives but failing to make it through the Senate.
Even when a federal law commonly referred to as the Lumbee Act of 1956 declared that they be “known and designated as Lumbee Indians of North Carolina,” with the same stroke of the pen it denied them the federal rights and benefits granted to other tribes. And despite pledges by the last three presidents, modern recognition efforts have yet to come to fruition.
Danielle Hiraldo, the director of UNC’s American Indian Center and a member of the Lumbee, said recognition is more meaningful to her as a measure of approval for her ancestors’ efforts than for herself.
“I don’t need the federal government to tell me I’m Lumbee,” Hiraldo said. “I know who I am, I know who my people are, and I know what we’ve had to do to maintain who we are as Lumbee people today.”
She looks forward to the day when the Lumbee fully enter the “circle of community” with other Native American tribes and receive the same access to resources and benefits they have.
‘Only Congress can undo what Congress has done’
The Trump administration memo outlines three distinct paths toward recognition: an act of Congress, a federal court ruling, or an acknowledgement through the U.S. Department of the Interior.
The Lumbee’s preferred route is congressional recognition. That possibility was set in motion again in January when North Carolina’s senior senator, Republican Thom Tillis, joined with his fellow Republican, Sen. Ted Budd, to introduce a bill backing recognition. Framed by Tillis — long an advocate for Lumbee recognition — as the resolution of a “six-decade-old promise,” the bill would extend full federal rights and benefits to members of the tribe and strike language in the original 1956 Lumbee Act denying them such.
Enactment of legislation represents the most straightforward route, since executive or judicial action would leave intact the 1956 termination language which states that “nothing in this Act shall make such Indians eligible for any services performed by the United States for Indians because of their status as Indians, and none of the statutes of the United States which affect Indians because of their status as Indians shall be applicable to the Lumbee Indians.” Lumbee advocates maintain that those aspects of the law must come off the books to ensure lasting rights and recognition.
But overturning that 1956 legislation — enacted during the so-called Termination Era, when federal officials sought to end treaty obligations with tribes wherever possible – has proved elusive.
Since 1974, more than 40 bills have been introduced in Congress that would allow for or grant federal recognition of the Lumbee, backed by a bipartisan procession of advocates over the years that has included Senators Jesse Helms, Robert Morgan, Terry Sanford, John Edwards, Elizabeth Dole, Richard Burr, Kay Hagan, Tillis, and Budd — a group that would likely find little other common ground. (Helms, whose proposed bills in the 1970s would only have removed the termination language at the end of the 1956 law without granting recognition, would ultimately become the staunchest opponent of Lumbee advocacy efforts in the ensuing decades.)
Eight times, bills in support of Lumbee recognition have passed the House of Representatives — including during the past three sessions of Congress — but each has fallen short in the Senate despite the backing of every senator to serve North Carolina in the 21st century. Even Lumbee Chairman John Lowery is unsure why the upper chamber of Congress has been such a consistent stumbling block for recognition efforts.
“I’m not sure what the holdup is throughout the different terms,” Lowery said. “There is a 60-vote threshold to break a hold, and so I think that there’s just been different times when our senators just ran out of time.”
Tillis, Lowery said, has been an ardent supporter of the fight for recognition, sponsoring bills for recognition in each of the past four congresses. “Senator Tillis has been a tireless advocate for us. He has worked this bill like no one else has ever worked it before.”
There is modern precedent for a tribe gaining federal recognition through Congress rather than the more commonly used method of a Department of Interior review. In 2019, recognition for the Little Shell Chippewa Tribe of Montana passed as a rider to the National Defense Authorization Act. Trump signed it into law during his first term, putting an end to a 125-year recognition fight.
Ryan Emanuel, a Lumbee and an associate professor in the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University, said the difference he sees between current efforts and those of the past is that the Trump administration has put recognition on the “front burner in Congress.” He caveated that his “gut is skeptical” the memo will lead to real change — to him, it seems that it could just be “political posturing” by the administration.
“I have seen this bill die in Congress enough times that I have more than a healthy dose of skepticism,” Emanuel said, adding that he has seen little difference in the political landscape to suggest passage will come this year.
‘A defined process’
While the legislative approach may be the most straightforward path to recognition, Trump’s memo to the Department of Interior asks for a broader review of the options.
It sets out a 90-day window for the department to look at all available routes, after which it will “submit to the president a plan to assist the Lumbee Tribe in obtaining full Federal recognition.” That could include recognition through the Department’s own Office of Federal Acknowledgement, which has a detailed administrative process to review the anthropological and historical evidence surrounding tribal claims.
This route — which the majority of modern recognition efforts have taken — is the one preferred by some federally recognized tribes, whose leadership view the legislative approach as providing insufficient scrutiny toward historical claims. But for decades, this path was foreclosed to the Lumbee, until 2016, when the Department of Interior reversed its previous position that the 1956 act made them ineligible to petition for recognition.
“The default of doing additional diligence through the Department of Interior is something that we’ve pushed for, for a long time,” said Michell Hicks, the principal chief of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. “To make sure if there’s any request — whether it’s the Lumbee group or any others — that there is a defined process to make sure that they’ve reached a level that any sovereign tribe should reach.”
This, however, would leave the 1956 language that expressly prohibits the Lumbee from receiving additional rights and benefits undisturbed. “I don’t think that changes our perspective,” Hicks said.
The Trump administration could also seek to overturn those aspects of the original Lumbee Act in the courts, either by backing a legal challenge from the Lumbee or by taking executive action and forcing those opposing recognition to challenge the move in federal court.
In 2022, the Duwamish Tribe of Washington sued the Department of Interior, arguing that the federal government had in fact already recognized the tribe — leading to a decision by a district court judge last month that the department must reconsider the tribe’s recognition petition.
Attorneys for the Lumbee could make a similar argument — that the 1956 Lumbee Act does in fact represent full federal recognition, and that the government must grant tribal rights and benefits despite the language stating otherwise. The Trump administration could also come to this determination itself and provide full recognition on the basis that it interprets the act to require it, likely setting up a showdown in court with recognized tribes opposed to the move.
While the Lumbee have examined the possibility of a lawsuit, Lowery said he only sees one pathway to recognition right now: through Congress. He believes the administration will agree once it has reviewed all the options.
“Congress acknowledged us. Congress designated us as a tribe,” Lowery said. “At the end of the day, there’s no reason for us to go through another acknowledgement process when the United States government has already acknowledged us as a tribe.”
A disputed history
At issue in the Lumbee recognition efforts are not just the benefits and rights they would be afforded as a tribe, but also, legitimation of the group’s history by the federal government — a heritage that is challenged by some recognized tribes.
According to Lumbee historians, the tribe is descended from survivors of an array of tribal nations, including the Algonquian, Iroquoian, and Siouan peoples who came together in the swamps surrounding the Lumber River amid the ravages of colonialism and the conflict and disease that came with it. “The Lumbee are the survivors of centuries of decimation and conflict,” a Lumbee factbook reads. “We are the ones who remain.”
The Lumbee take pride in a history of standing up to white supremacy — first during a period in the Civil War they term the “Lowry War,” in which a vigilante gang led by Henry Berry Lowry, whose father and brother were killed by Confederate soldiers, took it upon themselves to exact vengeance on the Confederate Home Guard during and after the war.
Nearly 100 years later, the Lumbee fought off the Ku Klux Klan when the organization held a rally in Robeson County, promoting the segregation of Native Americans. Hundreds of Lumbee stood off against a showing of roughly 50 Klansmen, firing off rifles at the white supremacists and chasing them out of the town.
Hicks, the principal chief of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, cast doubt on the lineage of the Lumbee in a statement released shortly after the signing of the Trump memo.
“The Lumbees have a history of shifting claims, including claiming Cherokee ancestry and other historical tribes,” Hicks wrote in a statement calling for “due diligence” in the review of Lumbee recognition. “Experts have repeatedly found that their claims cannot be verified through historical or genealogical evidence.”
In an interview, Hicks called members of the Lumbee “self-proclaimed” and challenged their tribal identity on the basis that the Lumbee name was not in use prior to the 20th century. He noted that in the 1910s, the group was known as the “Cherokee Indians of Robeson County,” despite a lack of historical Cherokee presence in the area.
“If you go back to the 1956 act, all the act did was recognize the name Lumbee for those who self-proclaim to be Native in a five-county area in eastern North Carolina,” Hicks said. “The Lumbee tribe was never a historical tribal name, and if you want to do some research on this, the Lumbees have never been involved in any historical war in the United States.”
He said scrutinizing these historical and genealogical claims is especially important given that recognition of the Lumbee would further subdivide the finite appropriation that federal government allots to tribes. “This is about a $1.8 billion decision for a five-year period,” Hicks said. “This is a huge decision.”
The Bureau of Indian Affairs, which oversees aid and funding to recognized tribes, had a budget of $3 billion in 2024 — a figure that will likely shrink under the new administration amid massive cuts to government spending. With more than 55,000 members, the Lumbee would immediately become the largest recognized tribe east of the Mississippi should recognition pass, entitling them to a substantial share of that funding.
According to David Wilkins, a Lumbee professor of leadership studies at the University of Richmond, attacks on the Lumbee’s legitimacy are misleading.
“The Lumbees did not ever think of themselves as Cherokee. That name, just like the name Croatan, the first name that we had formally established for us, was done by a white person,” Wilkins said. “The Lumbees really didn’t have the kind of cohesive identity that has evolved over the years, and they didn’t push back on that as I think they should have.”
He resisted the claim that Lumbee members are self-proclaimed, pointing to historical and genealogical research into the tribe’s membership based on prominent Lumbee surnames, such as Lowery and Oxendine. The tribe requires that members trace their lineage back to known Lumbee in the 1900 and 1910 U.S. census records.
Wilkins also noted that the origins of the Lumbee as the product of survivors from a diverse group of tribes is not unique in the U.S., and that a mix of different heritages should not be viewed as evidence against the Lumbee’s tribal identity today.
“Every tribe in the country is intermarried with other peoples, whether they are other indigenous peoples or other racial or ethnic groups,” Wilkins said. “The idea that the Cherokee try to push sometimes that somehow our amalgamate status is less than a genuine indigenous identity — that’s just historically inaccurate.”
Lowery, the Lumbee chairman, said he is disappointed by the attacks on his tribe’s heritage — and views them as a continuation of the intolerance they have experienced for generations. Instead of tearing each other down, he said, the few tribes in North Carolina should work together.
“We dealt with the Jim Crow South — this was still the South, minorities were still minorities, right?” Lowery said. “So, for the Eastern Band to walk around here and try to distort our heritage and our history and our ancestors — once again, it’s like, why? What are you hoping to accomplish?”
He said he believes economic interests are behind much of the opposition to Lumbee recognition efforts — including benefits to tribe as well as the lucrative gambling and marijuana industries, which are legal on tribal lands but not elsewhere in the state.
“They’re up in the mountain region, and of course, we’re down here in the coastal plains region. So I don’t know how we could affect them economically or vice versa,” Lowery said. “We’re not competing with each other in any way.”
Trump and the Lumbee
In Wilkins’ view, the president’s embrace of the Lumbee is a strictly transactional matter.
“He felt — and rightly so at the time — that North Carolina was going to be tied between him and Kamala Harris, right? And he knew that every vote was going to make a difference,” Wilkins said.
Trump first promised recognition of the Lumbee at a speech in Lumberton in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, prompting his opponent Joe Biden to do the same. That came two years after Trump flew over the home of the Lumbee in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence, with his daughter, Ivanka Trump, visiting the town and passing out food amid storm recovery efforts.
Over that time, the Lumbee have delivered Trump increasingly stronger election results, critical in a tightly contested swing state. In 2016, Trump won Robeson County by a margin of just 4.28%. He defeated Biden in the county by more than 18% in 2020, even as his share of the vote nationally fell precipitously. In the latest election against Harris, Trump won Robeson County by a seismic margin, beating her by more than 27%.
As Trump shows favor to the Lumbee, so too have his supporters — even including white supremacist groups favorable to the president, a striking development given the tribe’s history.
A group affiliated with the Proud Boys — a white nationalist group Trump infamously told to “stand back and stand by” in the 2020 campaign that later joined in the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot — seemingly followed the president’s lead in his overtures to the Lumbee on the morning of Feb. 8. Dozens stood outside the North Carolina State Capitol building, waving signs reading “We Stand with Lumbee” and “Clean H2O for All.” One Proud Boy wore a feathered headdress.
Wilkins said he feels apprehensive about the tribe becoming “tied to Trump” should recognition win approval under his administration. He noted that even as Trump works toward recognizing the Lumbee, his officials are arguing in court that Native Americans are not U.S. citizens by birth.
“Timing has always been a problem for Lumbees pursuing recognition. In the 1880s when we pursued recognition, that was during the Allotment Era. In the 1950s when we pushed for it, it was during the Termination Era,” Wilkins said. “If the Lumbees do get recognized, say, in the next 90 to 120 days, then we might turn around and be deported.”
Lowery said he believes Trump will fulfill his promise to the Lumbee, who he said have long been treated as “second-class Indians” in the U.S. For him, recognition is an important step toward ending that stigma, and Trump has demonstrated a commitment to “upholding his campaign promise.”
“There’s a lot of our folks who have been fighting for full federal recognition for over 130-something years. We’ve had a lot of elders pass and go home,” Lowery said. “Once this is completed, I will feel like our people are finally sitting at the table and we are not being pushed aside again.”