For the Tuscarora, recognition has been a 40-year fight (2024)

By Sarah Nagem

sarahnagem@borderbelt.org

This story is published in partnership with The Assembly.

Brandy Locklear Alvarez took her 8-year-old twins to a newly unearthed burial site in Carteret County to pray. They were awed by their ancestors’ bones poking out of the dirt, a reminder that Indigenous people inhabited the coastal community for thousands of years before colonizers–and later, bulldozers–arrived.

Dressed in a traditional ribbon skirt to honor her Tuscarora heritage, Locklear Alvarez and her children attended the June 23 ceremony in Cedar Point with a handful of others from the Tuscarora and other Native American tribes. A proposal was moving through the state legislature to allow developers, including those of the Bridge View neighborhood on Bogue Sound, to build on archaeological finds in coastal counties.

But what was meant to be a peaceful prayer session turned into a melee when some Bridge View residents accused the group of trespassing.

“You didn’t give a sh*t about it until now,” a man later identified as James Delao Jr. said in a video posted online. Delao, who was an off-duty Onslow County sheriff’s deputy at the time, threatened to “knock out” a man who stepped in front of him and then tackled an Indigenous woman to the ground. Delao reportedly no longer works for the sheriff’s office.

“It’s racism,” Locklear Alvarez said of the altercation, “and it’s a hate crime.”

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The Carteret County Sheriff’s Office arrested Delao on July 15 and charged him with assault on a female, communicating threats, and filing a false police report. His arrest marked a significant shift in the police investigation, as the sheriff’s office initially said a Bridge View resident had been stabbed with a pocket knife. Locklear Alvarez said the woman who was tackled to the ground was wearing an earring that scratched Delao.

It’s not hard to draw parallels between the altercation in Cedar Point and the centuries of history between the Tuscarora and the Europeans who colonized eastern North Carolina, particularly when it comes to land and culture.

The 1,200 or so Tuscarora tribal members in North Carolina say they are tired of being pushed around. They want respect and justice–starting with the Carteret County incident–and they want formal state recognition of their tribe.

After they were defeated by European settlers in the 18th century, most Tuscarorans migrated to upstate New York and joined the Iroquois Confederacy, now the Six Nations. But hundreds of Tuscaroran families remained in North Carolina.

Perhaps nobody wants state recognition more than Cecil Hunt, the 81-year-old chief of the Tuscarora Saddletree longhouse in Robeson County. The designation would bring access to scholarships and funds for workforce development, housing and utility assistance, and domestic violence programs–vital resources in a community plagued by drugs and crime where themedian household incomeis nearly $29,000 below the statewide figure. It could also pave the way toward federal recognition.

His people need help, Hunt said. Without recognition, he worries that his tribe’s history, retold for generations amid rows of tobacco leaves and cornstalks, will be lost forever. “It’s about fairness,” he said. “I want people’s grandchildren to know who they are.”

The rise and fall of Indian Woods

Indigenous people have lived in what is now North Carolina for at least 12,000 years,according to archaeologists.

Related to the Iroquois, the Tuscarora are believed to have migrated from the Great Lakes into the Carolinas more than 2,000 years ago. By the time European colonists showed up, the tribe had long lived in villages along the Neuse, Pamlico, Roanoke, and Tar rivers in the coastal plain. Although they were known as fierce warriors, the Tuscarora traded goods with other tribes and settlers.

Fed up with European newcomers encroaching on their land and enslaving their people, more than 500 members of the Tuscarora and other local tribes attacked colonists’ settlements in September 1711. TheTuscarora War, considered the bloodiest colonial war in North Carolina, culminated two years later with the warriors’ defeat at Fort Neoheroka in what is now Greene County. A thousand Indigenous people were dead, captured, or enslaved.

Through a 1718 treaty, the colonial North Carolina government set aside 56,000 acres of land in Bertie County that became known as “Indian Woods.” The site was home to many of the Tuscaroran families who didn’t leave the state, but it didn’t take long for unfair land deals and settler encroachment to push them from the reservation. Some made their way to Robeson County, living in the swamplands along the Lumber River.

Hunt’s ancestors were among them.

From his home in Shannon, Hunt has led the decades-long charge for state recognition.

He traveled to Raleigh earlier this year to drum up support forHouse Bill 970, which would give state recognition to the Tuscarora Tribe of Eastern North Carolina, comprising the longhouses in the Saddletree, Maxton and Prospect communities. Rep. Edward Goodwin, a Chowan County Republican, sponsored the bill, which has stalled in the state House. A similar bill was filed last year.

Goodwin decried the way the tribe’s requests have been treated in a Maypress conference. “It’s not right.”

To become recognizedby the state, tribes must be able to trace their lineage to a tribe prior to 1790. Tribes can submit “family bible accounts, baptismal records, and any other material that can substantiate the petitioning group’s historic and continuous identification as an American Indian entity.”

In 2019, the North Carolina Commission of Indian Affairsdeniedthe Tuscarora tribe’s request, calling it a “splinter group” of the Lumbee. During the press conference with Goodwin in May, Hunt accused the commission of“intertribal prejudice.”

And the Lumbee, some Tuscarora believe, have helped stymie their efforts for recognition.

‘A threat to their pie’

Both perception and politics play a role in recognition.

Elisha Locklear, a Tuscarora historian, said some tribes think of the Tuscarora as violent, radical, and rough around the edges—maybe not the best qualities to be associated with in the buttoned-down halls of the General Assembly and Congress. “They don’t want to be part of a group that they can’t control,” he said.

TheLumbee tribe, also based in Robeson County, gained state recognition in 1885 and partial federal recognition in 1956. With 55,000 members descended from several tribes, including the Tuscarora, the Lumbee make up the largest Native American tribe in the Eastern United States.

Increasingly well-organized and politically connected, the Lumbee have a budget of over $46 million this year. The biggest chunk, nearly $34 million, is from the federal Native American Housing Assistance and Self Determination Act of 1996.

During hisState of the Tribe addresson July 1, Tribal Chairman John Lowery said the tribe has helped 93 Lumbee families become homeowners over the past year. Nearly 200 benefited from the tribe’s home-repair program. More than 4,000 got help paying their utility bills.

Hunt said his people deserve those same benefits. He said some Tuscarora have become card-carrying members of the Lumbee tribe so they can access desperately needed financial assistance.

“It’s a shame my people have to jump off Tuscarora enrollment to get some assistance for their houses, their lights,” he said.

Tuscarorans say the fight for recognition comes down to money: Some tribes push back against recognition for other tribes because they worry about sharing state and federal funds.

“It’s the intertribal politics that are so deeply rooted now because of political gain and money that makes it difficult for someone like us,” said Eudora Locklear, Hunt’s daughter.

“We’re a threat to their pie,” Hunt added.

The Lumbee can surely relate. The Eastern Band of Cherokee, the only tribe in North Carolina with full federal recognition, has been a vocal opponent of the designation for the Lumbee, saying they can’t trace their roots back to a historic tribe.

Neither tribe has said it publicly, but casinos likely contribute to the sour relationship. The Eastern Band operates the Harrah’s casino in the North Carolina mountains. A proposal by Republican lawmakers last year called for allowingfour rural casinosto operate on non-tribal lands, including one in southeastern North Carolina run by the Lumbee tribe. State lawmakers haven’t taken up the issue this year.

In June, the Lumbee and the Catawba tribes signed a “modern-day treaty” that solidifies their friendship and partnership. After years of delays, including legal challenges from the Eastern Band of Cherokee, the South Carolina-based Catawba are building a permanent casino in Kings Mountain, 35 miles west of Charlotte.

“The Eastern Band fought them on their land and their trust, just like the Eastern Band’s fighting us on our full federal recognition,” Lowery said during his July speech.

Lowery also said U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis continues to push for full federal recognition for the Lumbee, along with most of North Carolina’s delegation in Washington. The status would bring money for health care, education, and other services.

The Lumbee tribe declined to comment for this story.

Some might ask why more Tuscarora don’t join the Lumbee to reap the benefits of a recognized tribe. They would have to give up their identity, said Rahnàwak?w Donnie McDowell, public relations officer for the Tuscarora.

“That doesn’t represent who we are historically or culturally,” he said. “We would have to transform ourselves into the Lumbee, and we’re not the Lumbee.”

A magnet that pulls you back

As a teenager, Hunt couldn’t wait to get out of Robeson County.

At 18, he finished his studies at the Magnolia School for Indigenous students and hitchhiked to Delaware before making his way to Long Island, New York.

“I told my dad, ‘I’m leaving. There’s got to be something besides cropping tobacco and picking cotton,’” Hunt recalled.

He didn’t stay gone long, though. It was 8 degrees below zero the day he left the Northeast. Hunt subsequently couldn’t find a job in Robeson County, and he didn’t want to be a sharecropper like his parents, so he joined the Army in 1963 during the Vietnam War. He said it took him 50 years to realize he had combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder.

He had never been a great student, Hunt said, but he went on to become one of the first students to study electronics at Southeastern Community College in Whiteville. Although he had started a career beyond the tobacco fields, Hunt wondered why he came back home. He gained clarity while fixing a television at a stranger’s house. A neighbor was visiting at the time.

“She said, ‘I can tell why you’re back,’” Hunt recalled. “I said, ‘Please, Miss, tell me.’ She said, ‘Your people are buried in the soil here, and it’s like a magnet you’ll never get away from.’ And she was a hundred percent right.”

Hunt, a slight man who speaks softly until he gets animated about the injustices that Indigenous people have faced for centuries, became civically active in his community in the 1980s as white residents began to lose their political stronghold in Robeson County. He was elected chief of the Saddletree Longhouse of the Tuscarora in 1983.

In the wake of the national Red Power Movement that pushed for Indigenous rights, the tribe first applied for federal and state recognition in the 1980s but was denied. Around that time, Hunt said, the Tuscarora got a $90,000 federal grant to combat the HIV/AIDS crisis. Members set up a runaway shelter for Indigenous people.

It was a transformative time in Robeson County. Hunt encouraged the merger of the county’s numerous school districts, arguing that Indigenous students had fewer resources than their white peers. But this period was also a powderkeg. To Hunt’s dismay, two Tuscaroran men held hostages atThe Robesoniannewspaper office in 1988 toprotest corruption and discriminationin the county. He worried the incident cast a negative light on the tribe and reinforced stereotypes of radical violence.

Hunt supported Julian Pierce, a Lumbee civil rights lawyer who campaigned to become a state superior court judge. Hunt said Pierce gave him a campaign yard sign and a stark warning: “Don’t put this in front of your bedroom window.”

“He knew something was going to happen,” Hunt said.

Pierce was murdered in 1988, before that election. Like many people in Robeson County, Hunt doubts the police narrative about a domestic dispute.

In the decades that followed, the Tuscarora longhouses in the Maxton, Prospect, and Saddletree communities have remained mostly separate from one another. But after the state Commission on Indian Affairs rejected the Tuscarora application for recognition in 2019, the longhouses banded together to take a different approach.

Now the tribe wants to bypass the commission altogether and get state recognition through the General Assembly. But that process also poses political challenges. A bill Goodwin filed last year never made it out of committee.

What remains

Alvarez Locklear, who witnessed the June altercation in Carteret County, was rattled.

“You can’t have violence on burial grounds,” she said. “We dishonored our ancestors because of the attack.”

To comply with federal law, the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources sent a letter in January to four federally recognized tribes, including the Tuscarora Nation of New York. The letter explained that the Bridge View builders found human remains during construction and that the state medical examiner “deemed the burials archaeologically significant.”

Carteret County has arich archaeological history. The ancient remains of about 30 people were found buried there in the early 1990s. Another two dozen sets of human remains were found in 2006, along with dozens of pot busts and charcoal pits.

In June, an amendment toHouse Bill 385was introduced in the state legislature that would allow developers to build on archaeological sites in coastal counties, including Carteret. Amid pushback, lawmakers scrapped the proposed change. But it highlights a larger debate about history and progress.

Bridge View, named after the crossing to nearby Emerald Isle, features homes that cost more than half a million dollars.

Schorr Johnson, communications director for the cultural resources department, said representatives of several state agencies have met with Cedar Point Developers, a Jacksonville firm, to establish a “plan for a path forward, and ongoing discussions will determine specific actions.”

For now, Johnson said, the state wants everyone to stay away. “Out of respect for any cultural resources present on site and the safety of those who live in the community, we encourage members of the public to refrain from trespassing onto the property.”

Hunt wants the site to be preserved, for his ancestors and for future generations of Indigenous people.

At home in Robeson County, he still tinkers with televisions while caring for his ailing wife. He hangs out with his grandchildren. And he hopes for a time when his young tribal members can wear feathers on their high school graduation caps, a right bestowed upon those enrolled in state-recognized tribes.

Hunt says he has no ill will toward those who oppose Tuscarora recognition, even though the process frustrates him.

“I’m not mad with anybody about it,” he said. “I just would love for the truth to be known.”