First Peoples of North America SUNY Fall 2014: UNC Native American Resource Center

When you mention Native American Indians, the first thing that comes to my mind is the Lumbee tribe of Robeson County, North Carolina. So I was delighted to discover that the University of North Carolina Pembroke’s Museum of Native American Resource Center was one of the online options available for this module. The Resource Center is engaged in scholarly research related to southeastern Indian communities with a particular focus on the Lumbees. The museum also offers educational information about the history, art, culture and contemporary issues of American Indians, as well as the collection and preservation of Native American material culture.

The Resource Center provides first-person testimony by Native American women and is developing links to expand its collection of historical events. In one section titled “Never That Far: Lumbee Men and World War II,” testimony is given of Indian men going off to fight in World War II and then returning home to battle discrimination and the Ku Klux Klan. During their military service, they had tasted equality and upon returning home, demanded that they be treated in the same way. They organized, became politically involved, demanded and then won the change they were seeking. Another interesting story is that of Henry Berrie Lowrie, who led an outlaw band during the Civil War. Lowrie fought against the white establishment to avenge the death of family members and became a symbol of pride and hope for the Indian people. Much of the site's recorded history for this group of Native Indians was only available as transcripts for sale which is typical of most museums.

The center’s history began as the Croatan Indian Normal School in 1887, later becoming the Indian State Normal School in 1940. Although normal schools were teaching colleges, early Indian Normal Schools had a dual agenda- teach the teacher to educate the American Indian student and then send them back to the reservations to help erase their Indian ways. This was thought to be the best way to assimilate them into white culture. Interestingly, this institution that is presently dedicated to the preservation of Indian culture first began as a school whose primary purpose was to destroy that very culture.