I moved away from the Rez when I was 18 and living on my own in a city was a big shock to my system. In high school, my friends and I would drive the 45 minutes to Richmond to see punk rock shows but that was such a different experience than actually living and working in the city. I was fortunate to meet a great group of like minded creative people. One of these people was China (pronounced Chee-na), a fixture in the Richmond music scene and a member of the Lumbee tribe of North Carolina. Meeting China was kind of a revelation for me. I was able to commiserate with another Native person who got cultural in-jokes and had the same underlying frustration that I felt at that time of my life.

Similar to my tribe, the Lumbee had been vying for Federal recognition for their tribe for decades. The Lumbee are a people who came together to form a tribe in every sense of the word. Members of different tribes from what we now call Virginia, North Carolina, and West Virginia who had left their homelands due to sickness, loss of traditional hunting grounds and racial persecution found their way to the Lumbee river to join the people that had been living in the marshes around the river for thousands of years. This mix of people and make up the modern day Lumbee. They are a proud people with a storied past; including conscription by force to the confederacy and fighting against the Ku Klux Klan to push them out of their town.

One of the traditions China told me about is their annual Homecoming, where Lumbee people from all over the country come to the tribe’s ancestral homeland to crown “Miss Lumbee” and share in kinship with their fellow tribal members. Homecoming is a week-long celebration of their history and culture with traditional dancing and singing. Popular Youtube personalities, Rhett and Link, actually highlighted the Lumbee Homecoming and fight for federal recognition in a mini documentary called Looking for Mrs. Locklear.

My tribe finally gained federal recognition of our tribe in 2015 through the Bureau of Indian Affairs after decades of work and six other tribes in Virginia attained federal recognition through Congressional intervention. This recognition opens up opportunities for our tribes to apply for federal grants and funding to start to repair some of what the US took from our people. But today, there are 8 tribes recognized by the state of North Carolina and only one, the Eastern Band of Cherokee, that has federal recognition and access to federal grants and resources. The Lumbee have been trying to attain recognition through approximately 29 bills for over 130 years. It’s infuriating that a group of people with such a rich culture and heritage and, obvious history of persecution, cannot get the recognition that they deserve by the US government.