Lumbee Indian Histories: Race, Ethnicity, and Indian Identity in the Southern United States [Paperback]

Gerald M. Sider (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 24, 1994

This book explores the dynamics of the struggle for racial and ethnic identities in the southern United States, focusing on the Lumbee Indians of North Carolina. The book is also a history of American Indian concepts and visions of history, starting with the contemporary period and with the perspectives of the Lumbee Indians, and working backward to the colonial period and to the major groupings of Indian peoples. The book addresses the key question of how differing interpretations of history cause traditionally oppressed peoples to continue their struggle. Lumbee Indian Histories is a part of a larger project, centred at the Max Planck Institut für Geschichte, in Gottingen, Germany, to create new methodological approaches to, and concepts for, an historical anthropology.

Editorial Reviews

Book Description

Gerald Sider explores the dynamics of the struggle for racial and ethnic identities in the southern United States, focusing on the Lumbee Indians of North Carolina. He provides a history of American Indian concepts and visions of history and shows how differing interpretations of history cause traditionally oppressed peoples to continue their struggle.

Product Details

• Paperback: 335 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (June 24, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521466695
• ISBN-13: 978-0521466691
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,704,792 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars it is a crime that this book is out of print, December 19, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Lumbee Indian Histories: Race, Ethnicity, and Indian Identity in the Southern United States (Paperback)

once again, cambridge had dropped the ball and let a perfectly wonderful book go out of print. this book, by an anthropologist and activist who worked among the lumbee since the late sixties, is essential reading for anyone interested in ethnogenesis, the federal acknowledgment program in the u.s., and the history of race relations in north carolina. buy it used if you can and hope that some sensible press picks up the publishing rights and makes it available again.

6 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Best book on the topic, but not perfect., March 16, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Lumbee Indian Histories: Race, Ethnicity, and Indian Identity in the Southern United States (Culture and class in anthropology and history) (Hardcover)

This is the most complete history of the Lumbees to date, but still lacking. Sider is very insightful, but utterly incompetent at organizing his thoughts. The book is a string of fascinating nuggets strung together in almost random fashion. Sider understands that peoplehood is socially constructed, and analyzes the Lumbee ethnogenesis of the late 19th century very well. But the book also lapses into a primordialist "blood essentialism" at times. Sider assumes that because the Lumbees are Indians today that they have always been so. Sider did little primary historical research, and utterly failed to come to grips with Paul Heinegg's comprehensive genealogical account of the Lumbee origins and migrations as a free mulatto population coming down from Virginia. Lumbee scholarship in general tends to recycle the same few dubious 19th century sources endlessly. Sider rarely moves out of this mode, but his is definitely the most insightful analysis in print to date.