Resisting conformity, Robeson County Tuscarora preserve tribal claims against assimilation

Editorial by Rahnà·wakę·w Donnie McDowell

Across North Carolina today, conversations surrounding Indigenous identity, recognition, education, and historical accountability often begin in the wrong place. Too many discussions treat the Tuscarora people as a vanished population absorbed into history rather than as a living people who survived generations of political and institutional pressure.

That misunderstanding continues to shape public opinion, public policy, and access to opportunity in the present day. The consequences are not merely symbolic. The Tuscarora Nation of North Carolina and its communities remain the inheritors of reservation era lands, treaty era relationships, and longstanding Indigenous communities stretching across Robeson, Cumberland, Bladen, Sampson, Scotland, Columbus, and adjoining counties into South Carolina.

Yet those same communities continue to exist without many of the institutional advantages, resources, and political pathways that became available to populations that accepted the Croatan designation and later the Lumbee identity. That reality did not emerge naturally. It was constructed over generations through policy, education, and public systems that encouraged assimilation while discouraging the continuation of Tuscarora identity.

Read the 1867 testimony by Makenzie, Sinclair Lowery and his mother, and the Floral Collage about the deaths of Allen and William.

To understand how this occurred, the public must develop a clearer understanding of the Croatan Indian Normal School and the broader system surrounding it. For many North Carolinians, the school is remembered simply as an early educational institution for Indigenous children in Robeson County.

The historical record, however, reveals something more complicated. The school functioned within a larger framework that reshaped Indigenous identity across southeastern North Carolina during a period when land, classification, and political recognition were deeply intertwined. By the late nineteenth century, North Carolina officials already understood that Tuscarora communities remained active throughout the region.

Newspaper reports identified Scuffletown residents as Tuscarora. Historical investigations tied prominent Indigenous families such as the Lowrys, Oxendines, Locklears, and Cumbos to Tuscarora ancestry. Even Hamilton McMillan acknowledged that the word “Croatan” referred primarily to a geographic location and not to a separate tribal people. Despite this, the State formalized the Croatan designation in 1885.

The importance of that decision becomes clearer when viewed alongside earlier laws involving Tuscarora land. In 1766, long term leases were placed upon Tuscarora Indian Woods reservation territory. A 1778 state law further provided avenues through which Tuscarora land claims could weaken if the people themselves were considered absent, dissolved, or extinct. Identity and land became inseparable questions. Once that context is understood, the role of the Croatan Indian Normal School takes on deeper meaning. For nearly fifty years, Tuscarora and other Indigenous children across the region were prohibited from attending white schools.

During that period, many communities remained largely insulated from outside institutional indoctrination. That changed with the establishment and expansion of the Croatan Normal School system. The schools spread across multiple counties and enrolled thousands of Indigenous children under the Croatan classification. Public appropriations funded the system’s growth, including salaries for officials such as Principal H. L. Edens, who by the early twentieth century oversaw an increasingly influential educational structure.

The conditions endured by students reveal the severity of the system. Some children reportedly walked four to nine miles each day simply to attend school. In one administrative report, school officials acknowledged that students traveled through severe winter weather and suffered resulting health problems. These were not isolated hardships but part of a broader environment where endurance and submission were normalized.

The language preserved within school reports makes that reality impossible to ignore. Edens himself wrote, “They would submit, even the adult ones, to any kind of punishment I might see fit to inflict and utter no word of protest or in any way show resentment”. That statement was not framed as criticism at the time, but as evidence of successful discipline and institutional order. Today, however, it exposes the mentality surrounding the school system and the expectation that Indigenous students should accept authority without resistance.

Education itself was never the problem. Tuscarora communities have always valued knowledge, adaptation, and survival.

The concern lies in how these institutions operated within a broader assimilation framework that encouraged students and families to adopt newly imposed classifications while distancing themselves from earlier Tuscarora political and historical continuity. A 1912 federal investigation into the Croatan Indian Normal School further exposed this contradiction.

While officials debated funding needs and institutional expansion, testimony simultaneously confirmed that community elders still identified as Tuscarora and retained memory of that continuity. In other words, the identity persisted even while public systems worked to normalize replacement terminology. That contradiction remains important today because it directly informs current disparities.

Many people assume that modern disagreements involving recognition or identity emerged recently. In reality, these issues are rooted in generations of classification policies that rewarded conformity to state sanctioned labels while marginalizing those who maintained older Tuscarora distinctions and relationships. Over time, those differences influenced access to education, political recognition, funding opportunities, and representation.

At least 60,000 acres of Tuscarora communal lands and adjoining resources were ultimately absorbed through processes connected to these broader shifts in identity and governance. The implications reached beyond land ownership alone. Cultural authority, treaty relationships, and historical visibility were also affected.

This is why public understanding of the Croatan Indian Normal School matters. The school was not an isolated institution disconnected from larger political goals. It operated within a statewide environment where Indian classification carried enormous legal, economic, and territorial consequences.

This is not a story of disappearance. It is a story of survival under pressure. The Tuscarora people did not vanish. They endured despite legal pressure, institutional restructuring, and generations of policies designed to redefine them.

Archaeological evidence, oral histories, migration patterns, genealogies, and documentary records all confirm continuous Tuscarora presence throughout the region. Understanding that continuity requires North Carolina to confront uncomfortable truths about how education, law, and public funding were once used to reshape Tuscarora identity in service to broader political and territorial interests. This includes reaffirming Tuscarora birth and treaty rights, restoring trust, and creating long lasting peace through real and authentic reciprocity.

May 7, 2026

Rahnà·wakę·w Donnie McDowell

Rahnà·wakę·w Donnie McDowell is a Beaver Clan member the Tuscarora Nation of North Carolina, independent researcher, public speaker, and advocate for Indigenous cultural preservation and environmental stewardship. A 2015 graduate of the University of North Carolina at Pembroke in American Indian Studies, he has spent more than six years conducting independent research on Tuscarora history, treaties, and cultural continuity. Rahnà·wakę·w has played a leading role in Native conservation initiatives across North Carolina, including advocacy efforts that helped secure a historic $25 million federal wildlife crossings grant for critically endangered red wolves. He also serves in leadership with the Tuscarora Historical and Preservation Society, helping advance public education, cultural revitalization, and community engagement initiatives throughout the state.  He currently resides in Maxton with his wife and three daughters.

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