'A Little Indian There': Henry Louis Gates, DNA, and the Immutability of Lumbee Identity

• Published in: Native south (Lincoln, NE) Vol. 14; no. 1; pp. 114 - 125
• Main Author: Hunt, Brittany D
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Lincoln University of Nebraska Press 2021
• Subjects: American Indians; Audiences; Celebrities; College campuses; Colleges & universities; Gates, Henry Louis; Indigenous peoples; Native North Americans; Race; Slavery; North Carolina; United States > US
• ISSN: 1943-2569; 2152-4025; 2152-4025
• DOI: 10.1353/nso.2021.0001

[...]the staff began giving the usual signs that a talk is ending: staff in the background began making eyes at each other, checking their watches, signaling to the moderator. [...]the moderator thanked Gates for coming and the crowd erupted in applause, further emphasized by a standing ovation from every audience member except one: me, the little Indian there. Tribal Belongings and the False Promises of Genetic Science and Malinda Maynor Lowery's The Lumbee Indians: An American Struggle, as well as the works of other Indigenous scholars who focus on the politics of membership, exclusion, and race science in and for Indigenous communities. In North America specifically, membership was often determined matrilineally.4 The influx of European invaders and their subsequent intrusion into tribal nations resulted in the imposition of white classifications of race onto tribal membership practices.5 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang state that, by Eurocentric standards, "Native American-ness is subtractive . . . constructed to become fewer in number and less Native, but never exactly white, over time"6 However, under these same constraints, Blackness is expansive, to make certain that slave/criminal status will be passed down to an increasing number of Black descendants.7 This dual system was crafted to reduce the American Indian population, in order to seize more Indian land, and to increase the Black population, to ensure continued generations of forced servitude; both systems ultimately served whiteness by ensuring perpetual access to free land and labor. Universities like Harvard were particularly weaponized against Indigenous people by their attempts to variously proselytize, enslave, or remove them from their lands to make way for university expansion.9 Other universities, including Dartmouth, were created with the explicit purpose of "educating Natives" but in fact had an effect similar to that of their predecessors: assimilating Indians into white culture, in order to "save them."