(White) Indians of North Carolina letter from the secretary of the Interior, transmitting, in response to a Senate resolution of June 30, 1914, a report on the condition and tribal rights of the Indians of Robeson and adjoining

Page 140: There is a dim but persistent tradition of a strange white race preceding the Cherokee, some of the stories even going so far as to locate their former settlements and to identify them as the authors of the ancient works found in the country. The earliest reference appears, to be that of Barton in 1797, on the statement of a gentleman whom he quotes as a valuable authority upon the southern tribes. “The Cherokee tell us, that when they first arrived in the country which they inhabit, they found it possessed by certain ‘moon-eyed people,’ who could not see in the daytime. These wretches they expelled.” He seems to consider them an albino race? Haywood, twenty-six years later, says that the invading Cherokee found “white people” hear the head of the Little Tennessee, with forts extending thence down the Tennessee as far as Chickamauga Creek. He gives the location of three of these forts. "The Cherokee made war against them and drove them to the mouth of Big Chickamauga Creek, where they entered into a treaty and agreed to remove if permitted to depart in ace. Permission being granted, they abandoned the country. Hlsewhere he speaks of this extirpated white mace as having extended into Kentucky and probably also into western Tennessee, according to the concurrent traditions of different tribes. He describes their houses, on what authority is not stated, as having been small circular structures of upright logs, covered with earth which had been dug out from the inside? Harry Smith, a half-breed born about 1815, father of the late chief of the Bast Cherokee, informed the author that when a boy he had been told by an old woman a tradition of a race of very small people, perfectly white, who once came and lived for some time on the site of the ancient mound on the northern side of Hiwassee, at the mouth of Peachtree Crock, a few miles above the present Murphy, North Caro- lina. ‘They afterward removed to the West. Colonel ‘Thomas, the white chief of the Fast Cherokee, born about the boginning of the century, had also heard a tradition of another race of people, who lived on Hiwassee, opposite the present Murphy, and warned the Cherokee that they must not attempt to cross over to the south side of the river or the great leech in the water would swallow them.\* They finally went west, “long before the whites came.” ‘The two stories are plainly the same, although told independently and many miles apart. A report on the condition and tribal rights of the Indians of Robeson and adjoining areas in response to a Senate resolution of June 30, 1914.In 1913 the State of North Carolina officially recognized Robeson County Indians as “Cherokees,” a designation that went largely unnoticed by the Federal Government. When the same Indians petitioned for Federal recognition and assistance in 1915, the Senate tasked the Office of Indian Affairs to report on the “tribal rights and conditions” of those Robeson County Indians. Special Indian Agent Orlando McPherson, a Midwesterner who was in the final stages of a long career as a civil servant, was commissioned to investigate.The resulting federal report is essentially literature review in the guise of fact-finding. It relies heavily on Robeson county legislator Hamilton McMillan’s musings on the relationship between Sir Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colony and the Indians around Robeson County. The report reaches many erroneous conclusions, in part because it was based in an anthropological framework of white supremacy, segregation-era politics, and assumptions about racial “purity”. Ironically, McPherson’s murky colonial history connecting Lumbees to early colonial settlers was used to legitimize them and to deflect their categorization as African-Americans. The McPherson report documents one important phase of an Indian people’s long path to self-determination and political recognition, a path that would designate them variously as Croatan, Cherokee Indians of Robeson County, Siouan Indians of the Lumber River, and finally, Lumbee--the title of their own choosing and the one we use today.