A review by aimiller
Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation by Malinda Maynor Lowery

5.0

This book is just so good; Lowery does an incredible job of tracing the Lumbee attempts at recognized nationhood while also holding space for all the differences in opinion in the community and a collective understanding that holds the community together. The nuance she's able to use here is just incredible, and a great model for so many others on how to pay such careful attention to so many factors within the community, and explore them while holding the tension of insider vs outsider recognition in a community (and seeing that those are not necessarily binary, but connected and separate at the same time.) Really encourage folks to read this if they want to think about the processes of Native recognition on a federal and state level, as well as understand community as a complex matter with a number of levels.