\u27I Know You!\u27: Understanding Racial Experience and Racial Practice within the Lumbee Indian Community

Over the past three centuries, academic and public discussions of race have been divided into two distinct spheres: an understanding of race as “blood” and, alternatively, an understanding of race as that which is defined by visualization of human phenotype. In contemporary anthropological and Native American research, scholars of Native America have been mostly concerned with communities that are defined by blood. These scholars have presumed that notions of blood (or “blood quantum”) ought to structure how we (as scholars) discuss Native American existence. These scholars have, subsequently, ignored the notion that Native American peoples still live in large numbers in the U.S. South and are as enveloped in U.S. Southern racial practice and experience as both white and black peoples. In this article, through a literature review of scholarship on race and the Lumbee Indian community, and an equally important auto-ethnographic discussion of his becoming a member of the Lumbee community, the author explains racial practice and experience in the Lumbee community. He asserts that instead of being conceptualized as a “problem” (to use a term employed by anthropologist Karen Blu), the Lumbee community’s racial practice and experience provides a solution to the divide between the two racial spheres that has made it impossible to comprehend Native Americans as ongoing citizens of the U.S. South