Download the Tribe’s complaint (PDF) here.
Link to news coverage in News & Observer here.
The Tribe is suing for unauthorized use of its logo and slogan on Budweiser advertisements in convenience stores in North Carolina.
Lumbee Tribe
MSU Law Prof Study Helps N.C. Inmates (inc. a Lumbee Indian) Get Off Death Row
Here.
Excerpts:
After the act was passed, researchers from Michigan State University studied the application of the death penalty in North Carolina and found that peremptory challenges had been used to remove blacks from juries at a rate more than twice that of whites, a rate that was even higher in Cumberland County. Removing potential jurors solely on the basis of race has been ruled unconstitutional.
***
Mr. Golphin and Mr. Augustine are black, and Ms. Walters is a Lumbee Indian. They were convicted of unrelated murders and have been on death row at least 10 years. Their victims included whites and blacks; in Mr. Golphin’s and Mr. Augustine’s cases, the victims were law enforcement officers.
A summary of the study is here.
A paper by the study’s authors, Catherine Grosso and Barbara O’Brien, in the Iowa Law Review about the study is here.
What’s Going on with the Lumbees?
From the Fayetteville Observer via Pechanga:
Bad bet: Tribe gambles its assets on recognition bid.
It appears that Lumbee leaders have decided it’s acceptable to bet a big piece of the tribe’s net worth on one game of chance.
It’s not surprising, though, that many of the people they represent are outraged. They should be.
On March 12, the Lumbee Tribal Council, meeting at a conference in Raleigh, abruptly dumped longtime Lumbee lawyer Arlinda Locklear, who had worked – for free – for more than two decades to achieve full federal recognition for the tribe. Recognition would bring hundreds of millions of federal dollars to the tribe, to improve housing, education and health care, and to create new and better jobs.
The recognition effort has made good progress in the current Congress, winning approval in the House and clearing the Senate’s Indian Affairs Committee. The measure has President Obama’s support and both this state’s senators believe it has a good chance of Senate approval.
That may be out the window now, because the Tribal Council hired a Nevada gaming consultant to take Arlinda Locklear’s place. That means (although the council won’t say as much) that the tribe’s pledge to forsake casino operations, as a condition of recognition, is also out the window. The tribe wouldn’t hire a specialist in casino development if it wasn’t planning to get into the gambling business. That sudden change of course may be enough to kill any chance of Senate approval this year – or any other year.
And then it gets worse.
The Tribal Council’s contract with Lewin International includes penalties of $35 million if the council can’t get the tribe to agree to gambling once federal recognition is in place. If the penalty is assessed, most of the tribe’s assets – including housing and public buildings – could be at risk.
Malinda Maynor Lowery on The Politics of Lumbee Recognition
Cross-posted from First Peoples Blog:
Historian and First Peoples author Malinda Maynor Lowery (Lumbee) writes for us about her tribe’s federal recognition struggle and how recent moves by the Lumbee Tribal Council highlight the fact that every tribe, recognized or not, is still a political entity.
Who’s Pulling the Strings in Today’s Lumbee Recognition Process?
By Malinda Maynor Lowery
I’m a big fan of the Godfather (there are a lot of metaphors that explain Indian politics in those movies) and so recent events with Lumbee recognition have reminded me that someone else is always pulling the strings.
My book Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South (University of North Carolina Press 2010) explores federal recognition and identity formation between the 1870s and the 1950s, a critical period when the Lumbees’ formal political organization developed in the presence of brutal pressure from white supremacists at both local and federal levels. My community responded to this pressure by dividing into strategic factions, and each party developed its own way of dealing with the capricious and subjective identity definitions that Congress and the BIA articulated. These identity definitions revolved in part around stereotypes of Indians, but they also involved comparisons to African Americans. We had to convince outsiders that we were not black, and therefore worthy of separate recognition.
During this period, our political system developed essentially two tiers—a formal, elected leadership, and an informal, unelected leadership. The unelected leaders were the puppeteers, pulling the strings behind the scenes. They were often the most literate members of the community, the ones with the closest personal and political ties to whites, and they believed that they understood the “system” and could make it work for us. To a degree, walking this tightrope between black and white forced these brokers into political compromises that worked against our interests. But the brokers also had their own reasons for making these compromises; often they wanted to shore up their own power and authority within the Indian community by delivering on a promise, and they wanted to increase their clout with the white elites, locally and nationally, who were giving lip service to our recognition efforts.
What these leaders never grasped was that the more you squeeze out of the system, the more autonomy it squeezes out of you, and we are left with compromises that ultimately get us nowhere (the two previous instances of recognition, in 1938 and 1956, are cases in point). So how will it turn out this time?
Turtle Talk 