This Flickr photostream connects to pictures of our recent field trip to the Lumbee, Catawba, and Eastern Band Cherokee communities for our NEH Summer Seminar.

Helen Scheirbeck receives her honorary Doctor of Laws degree at the 2009 spring Commencement ceremony at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Saturday (May 10). Presenting the hood is Provost Bernadette Gray-Little.

HELEN MAYNOR SCHEIRBECK (1935-2010)

One of the Twentieth Century’s Most Significant American Indian Leaders

Washington, D.C.—Dr. Helen Maynor Scheirbeck, longtime champion of American Indian civil rights, pioneer for Indian control of their own education, and passionate advocate for the sovereignty of her Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, died Sunday night, Dec. 19, 2010. She was 75 years old. In May of 2009, just weeks before the debilitating stroke that led to her death, Helen’s 40 plus-year odyssey fighting for Indian Self-determination was recognized by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. By her side also receiving an honorary degree was anti-apartheid campaigner and Nobel Peace Prize winner Bishop Desmund Tutu.

Helen was a member of the first Board of Trustees of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. She served as the Secretary to the Board for two terms and joined the staff at the museum, where she served from 2000-2007 as Senior Advisor for Museum Programs and Scholarly Research and earlier as the Assistant Director for Public Programs.

Prior to joining the museum, Dr. Helen Scheirbeck had a long career working for the development of Indian tribal governments and communities, Indian  control of educational  institutions, and on issues related to Indian children and families.

She began her career as a staff member of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights chaired by former Senator Sam Ervin (D-North Carolina). She helped organize a Capitol Conference on Poverty in 1962, where Indian leaders advocated for Indian participation in the War on Poverty. On her recommendation, Ervin held hearings that culminated in the 1968 Indian Bill of Rights.

That same year she was named director of the Office of Indian Education in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, where she led efforts to pass the Indian Education Act of 1975. As a member of the American Indian Policy Review Commission, she worked to craft reforms that led to the Tribally Controlled Community College Assistance Act of 1978.

“She had a hand in every major initiative in Indian education for the last 40 years,” remarked Kevin Gover, director of the museum. “Her passing is a great loss, and a reminder of what we can achieve when we believe deeply in our cause.”

As Assistant Director in the years immediately before and after the museum’s opening on the National Mall, Dr. Helen Scheirbeck established and set the course for Office of Education and its program in Cultural Arts. “Helen’s vision for education at the museum went beyond providing new perspectives on American history or correcting misconceptions about Native cultures,” says her colleague Clare Cuddy, director of the museum’s education office since 2004. “She deeply believed that the knowledge held by Native peoples, and especially the ways in which communities traditionally pass knowledge on to succeeding generations, can inform teaching models used by educators everywhere. The museum’s National Education Initiative, being launched in collaboration with Native communities, carries on her vision and will reach millions of students.”

Helen was a graduate of Berea College, Kentucky, with a B.A. in History and Political Science. She also attended Columbia University’s School of International Relations, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of California at Berkeley. She received her Doctorate of Educational Administration with a Public Policy emphasis from VPI-State University at Blacksburg, VA.

She was the first Indian intern to serve with the National Congress of American Indians.

In the area of children’s rights, Dr. Helen Scheirbeck served as the program director for the National Commission on the Rights of the Child and the White House Conference on Children, Youth and Families. She also worked in the private sector for the Save the Children Federation as their American Indian Nations Director. Prior to becoming the head of the Indian Head Start Program in 1991, Helen worked in North Carolina as the founding director of the North Carolina Indian Cultural Center in Lumberton.

She published and spoke extensively throughout the United States relating to American Indian rights issues, language and culture. Helen had a deep interest in cultural regeneration and enhancement and extensive knowledge of Indian cultural institutions, artists and craftsmen as well as spiritual leaders and their practices. As Senior Advisor for the office of Museum Programs at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., Dr. Helen Scheirbeck developed the subject matter which was used to plan museum exhibitions, cultural arts programs and educational materials.

Over her long career, Helen organized cultural festivals and powwows. She curated museum exhibits, conducted cultural symposia with traditional Indian leaders and scholars and organized arts and crafts cooperatives. She encouraged and developed marketing outlets for Indian artists and craftsmen. “Helen’s legacy lives on at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian,” said Howard Bass, director of the Cultural Arts Program at the museum since 2002. “She was an inspiring leader who mixed tough love and compassion. She questioned everything and listened closely, urging us to do our best to serve the interests of Indian Country and our visitors. She knew that with hard work everything was possible.”

What Helen most enjoyed was visiting Indian people and communities that she got to know through her decades of service. In Alaska she slept on the floor of Head Start centers, met with tribal leaders in their offices trying to solve one challenge or another, and spent hours working with people to found a tribal school, a Head Start program, a relief effort for Indian families stranded by floods on the Navajo Nation, and to help unrecognized tribes in Virginia and throughout the south become recognized. She not only met the movers and shakers in Washington, D.C. and in state capitals, but she worked with everyday people, building one program at a time to create Indian controlled institutions that improved the lives for all Indians.

The family is planning a memorial service for a later time and will be establishing a scholarship fund in her name.

Established in 1989, through an Act of Congress, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian is an institution of living cultures dedicated to advancing knowledge and understanding of the life, languages, literature, history and arts of the Native peoples of the Western Hemisphere. The museum includes the National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall, the George Gustav Heye Center, a permanent exhibition and education facility in New York City, and the Cultural Resources Center, a research and collections facility in Suitland, Md. For more information about the museum, visit www.AmericanIndian.si.edu.

What was here before civilization began?

The animals that no longer walk, swim or fly?

The primitive people who knew nothing of greed, but knew to depend on and help each other for survival.

The lake ripples with lost memories, long forgotten emotions of kindness and compassion.

While the rock I sit on are stained with the blood of my ancestors, my people.

The ones who knew how to survive without destruction.

They are gone now; some remain scattered to the wind.

But each stone, each tree, each animal that still walks this planet remembers them, the lost ones, and what they taught.

For now I know what was here before civilization began and through these memories and whispers of everything around me, I have my answer.

But it is something that must not be told, it must be realized, then you will understand the music of the flute and drums, the language of the earth.

Shane Kinney
October 5th, 2010
Age 17 1/2

See the article here, sporting a super-old photo!

Arlinda Locklear on Lumbee Federal Recognition

African and Native Americans in Colonial and Revolutionary Times

Cherokee Law of Blood (Video)

Thank you Abby Mogollon!

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Much work in the the field of Native American history has centered on Indians’ relationships with European colonizers and the U.S. government, perhaps rightly so. As historians, we are trained to analyze primarily the written word, words written mostly by colonizers. And while some scholars have done remarkable oral histories and ethnographies of Native communities, a history based on oral sources or indigenous knowledge is not automatically more relevant to Indian communities, just because it avoids the colonizers’ words. Sources don’t by themselves make Indian history more relevant to Indian people. We have to put the information we gather to work, or history forever remains a telling about an other, rather than an authentic rendering of a truth about human nature and societies.

Dr. Lowery shared photos from her book during a lecture at the University of North Carolina-Pembroke in April.

My book, Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South, has been called on to do several kinds of work since its release. Some of it, I feel, genuinely approaches a decolonizing purpose–an affirmation of inherent sovereignty–while some of it reinforces agendas set forth by the colonizer, thus yielding that sovereignty. To paraphrase scholar Kevin Bruyneel (The Third Space of Sovereignty), indigenous peoples claim a retained sovereignty while American law and policy possess a “colonial ambivalence” toward sovereignty that continually compromises our ability to express it. Colonialism thrives on the supposedly fixed boundaries between written and oral, indigenous and European, sovereign and dependent, colonized and colonizer. Indeed, our scholarship often resides within these boundaries as well and strengthens colonialism; but I hope that I can put this book to work in a way that will cross, expose, and disable those boundaries rather than strengthen them.

For example, people who are descended from Lumbees, or have Lumbee children, have contacted me after reading the book. They are rediscovering their ancestors or knowing them for the first time, and they typically express thanks that the book has taught them something new or explained an old question that has always lingered with them. I’ve heard, “Your book gave me such insight to my dad and understanding of his feelings and values,” and “Your book has made me angry, not at you but at the way that white attitudes and opinions have caused Indians to judge each other and distance themselves from Blacks, and even make Blacks hate themselves, wishing to be something else. History has been ugly at times. I have battled with these same questions of identity my entire life.” I feel blessed that the book evokes such strong reactions.

We have held two Lumbee community events around the book, one a conventional author lecture and the other a more dynamic roundtable discussion with other local historians and descendants of people depicted in the book. Rather than populate those forums with people who repeat the story printed on the tribal website, I prefer to bring people together who will speak plainly and offer insights that might be controversial but nevertheless should be heard. Lumbee and Tuscarora views were represented, with frank discussion about issues like race, blood, class, and recognition strategies–the sometimes “ugly” yet profound parts of our history, the ones that teach us the most about who we are. Indians and non-Indians have written me letters, sent me photographs, and shared with me oral history interviews which elaborate on the story the book tells and show me things I never knew. That exchange teaches me that while the printed word seems final, knowledge nonetheless continues to grow. Furthermore, accountability is an important part of community relevance; I have to share my new knowledge, even when I’ve been told I’m wrong (watch for that in another blog post).

During Lumbee Homecoming in June, local historians and descendants of people depicted in the book came together to frankly discuss issues like race, blood, class, and recognition strategies.

When people use the book to take ownership of their history I am most proud of what I’ve accomplished. In fact, my proudest moments came one afternoon as my family sat in a vigil over my aunt’s last days. She was dying from pancreatic cancer, and her siblings, children, grandchildren, cousins, and friends gathered around her. My book was there too, passed from hand to hand as a diversion from the suffering before us. My teenage cousins looked at the photographs. My aunts and older cousins immediately flipped to the picture of my grandparents, read the passages about them, and smiled, talking over old memories. I wrote elaborate epistles to my cousins on the title page. Some who had started reading it teased me about how hard the vocabulary was; I told them that using words the reader doesn’t know is a sign of poor writing. Greater community relevance could certainly begin with a complete overhaul of our academic style of writing.

Even though I know what some individuals take away from the book, what impact it has on the larger community struggle to assert sovereignty is still a mystery. Even activities like our roundtable discussion that show greater ownership over our past bear witness to how history is used strategically. For example, a Tuscarora speaker, a descendant of the “Original 22″ Indians recognized by the BIA in 1938, validated the rightness of blood quantum determinations of identity (though it was firmly situated in his own history, and not intended to be a general rule applied to everyone). He spoke on behalf of a colonial agenda that many Indians from other tribes have embraced but the Lumbees have rejected. At the same time, he proposed an inclusive path to recognition that would revisit that past decision and have all of us, regardless of blood quantum, now receiving federal services. His interpretation of the past could easily serve a colonizing agenda one moment, and a decolonizing one the next.

Scholarship can serve colonial ambivalence as well. Recently a prominent, Indian-run, national organization requested clarification from me regarding an individual applying for their services who claimed descent from the federally-recognized Original 22. They wanted to know whether this individual was eligible for services provided only to federally-recognized Indians. Given the limited information I had about the case, I unfortunately had to conclude that the person was not eligible; in recognizing the 22, the BIA contravened the Indian Reorganization Act and prevented them from organizing as a tribe and placing land into trust. Nor did the BIA allow recognition of their descendants. At first I felt pleasure that I could answer the question, and that something I had written would be useful in explaining the context around such a situation. But then I developed mixed feelings–my knowledge was essentially used to enforce the rules of federal recognition which we all know to be arbitrary in that they have excluded this applicant who was undoubtedly a member of an Indian tribe. The story I told, though truthful, did nothing to help this applicant and in fact sustained a justification for his exclusion.

Indian people live and breathe colonialism every day. It influences not only our contemporary circumstances but our view of the past. And I’d venture to say that most of us don’t look at that past exclusively through the lens of one of the colonizer’s collaborators; rather, our relationship to colonialism is more complex. Some of us find that a reading of the past influenced by colonialism serves our interests at some points, while at other times we resist views of history that privilege European epistemologies. Most of us live our daily lives in some grey area in between. I still have a long way to go to put my book to work in a way that crosses and exposes the borders that strengthen colonial domination. The book may empower Lumbee and Tuscarora people to tell their own stories and know themselves better, but it can also further our colonized status.