Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.