In The Lumbee Indians: An American Struggle, Malinda Maynor Lowery, an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe, examines her people's story as they participated in the building of the United States; resisted settler encroachment onto their land; and experienced political, economic, and social challenges and successes while fighting for federal recognition. In this comprehensive narrative, Lowery provides detailed answers to questions that surround Lumbee authenticity by using oral histories, personal experiences, and documentary evidence to support the existence and survival of her people.

Lowery divides her study on Lumbee history into seven themes that focus on European contact: the American Revolution; and the Civil War; the segregation era; the civil rights movement; the Red Power movement; the 1980s war on drugs; and the challenges of creating a tribal constitution in their attempts to obtain federal recognition in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She argues that “one tribal name or single cultural origin is insufficient to explain Lumbee history” because today's Lumbee Tribe is a consequence of the coalescence of many nations (18). Although many of today's federally recognized tribes are a result of coalescence, the leaders of these nations maintain that tribal names signify historical and cultural continuity over an extensive time. Indeed, most of these tribes have an uninterrupted, proven connection to their ancestors of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Despite the challenges to Lumbee authenticity, Lowery fleshes out her people's connection to the Cheraw Indians that migrated to eastern South Carolina in 1712. The Cheraws, she reasons, were first encountered by Hernando de Soto (1540) as the Xualla Indians, a tribal group she connects to the late seventeenth-century Saura Indians of the North Carolina Dan River Valley and thus, the early eighteenth-century Cheraw Indians. The association between the Saura of the Dan River and the Xualla Indians, however, remains uncertain because of the lack of archival and archaeological evidence, which has resulted in scholarly debate about whether the two groups were the same group of Indigenous people. Although the diaspora of the Xualla and Saura Indians remains unclear, violence that resulted from Native, colonial, and American wars transformed the lives of Lumbee people.

The latter half of Lowery's study concentrates on the Lumbee fight for federal recognition, in which she uses early Lumbee history to support the tribe's twentieth and twenty-first century's attempts to gain federal recognition. She analyzes the political strategy of the Lumbee Tribe's name changes adopted during the twentieth century, including but not limited to the Cherokee Indians of Robeson County, the Siouan Indians of the Lumber River, and finally, the Lumbee Indians. A small group of Lumbees, known as the “Original 22,” gained federal recognition (with limited benefits) under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which was a huge political gain for the tribe because the federal government recognized some Lumbees as Indians. In 1949, the “Lumbee” name, according to Lowery, was a symbol of self-determination for the Indians. The name provided them with a shared identity connected historically to a specific geographical place.

Even with federal acknowledgment of the Original 22, Lowery explains, Lumbee troubles continued in terms of racial terrorism and discrimination in the latter half of the 1900s and the early 2000s. For example, when the Ku Klux Klan attempted to terrorize the Indians and encroach on Indian land in the late 1950s, it was successfully routed by the Lumbees. In addition to racial tensions, Lumbee people faced high unemployment rates and a decline in farming in the 1980s, hardships that led to growing participation in illegal drug trafficking. Lumbee suicide and homicide rates rose, while many dealt with the uneven hand of justice. Rather than completely destabilizing the tribe, Lumbees' sense of unity strengthened with these trials. In response, they rekindled their campaign for federal recognition and self-determination.

The Lumbee's creation of a constitution was essential to their federal acknowledgment process. Lumbee leaders believed that federal recognition would be easier to obtain with a constitution that articulated Lumbee self-governance and thus, capability for a relationship with the federal government. Other federally recognized tribes, however, continued their opposition to Lumbee recognition for a variety of reasons, including assertions that Lumbees lacked Indigenous legitimacy because of the lack of evidence confirming a genealogical connection to Cheraw Indians through ancestry. In addition, recognized tribes, especially in North Carolina, reasoned that they would receive less federal funding because of the Lumbee's large numbers. Lowery responds to these arguments by emphasizing that, for Lumbees, “political, strategic debates demonstrate the exercise of sovereignty” (136).

In The Lumbee Indians, Lowery challenges readers, scholars, and other Natives to reconsider the influence that the federal acknowledgment process has on Lumbee sovereignty. Her book adds to the current debate on who is Indian and which group meets the federal criteria to receive recognition. Many federally recognized tribes oppose the acknowledgment of groups that identify as Native but are unable to demonstrate historical and cultural continuity that began with European arrival. Lowery pushes back at the ideology that a Native group must have a specific Indigenous name that is connected to the distant past. She argues that federal recognition does not make one an Indian or a sovereign nation, but it is evident that acknowledgment is crucial to the tribe's survival. She makes historical leaps when arguing that the Xualla Indians might be Lumbee ancestors and that Lumbee women probably married Cheraw men in the 1700s, two factors that weaken her argument of a temporal existence. Conditionals like this, however, are unavoidable when working with a paucity of early European evidence about Native people. That said, Lowery's study is a significant contribution to Native American studies and to the scholarship on understandings of Indigenous identity and who determines the definition of Indianness.