The Eastern Nations, Lumbee, Tuscarora, Coharie, and the Peoples Who Remained

Most histories of Native North Carolina fix their attention on the Cherokee in the mountains and then move on. But the coastal plain and the Piedmont were home to dozens of peoples whose histories are equally long and whose presence in the state never ended. The Tuscarora lived in the eastern coastal plain when the first English colonists arrived.

They fought a devastating war against the colonial settlers between seventeen eleven and seventeen fifteen, losing thousands of people and much of their territory. Most surviving Tuscarora relocated north to join the Haudenosaunee confederacy in New York. A remnant community remained in Bertie County, where their descendants still live and hold tribal recognition today.

The Lumbee people of Robeson County are the largest Indigenous tribe east of the Mississippi, with a population of more than fifty thousand enrolled members. Their origins are debated, and Congress acknowledged them as Indians in nineteen fifty-six but withheld federal benefits for decades, and full federal recognition finally became law in December of twenty twenty-five. They speak English as their first language, have Anglicized surnames, and carry the question of the Lost Colony in their oral tradition and their genealogy.

In nineteen fifty-eight, armed Lumbee men disrupted and routed a Ku Klux Klan rally in Maxton, North Carolina, an event the national press covered with considerable admiration. The Klan did not return. The Coharie, Meherrin, Waccamaw Siouan, and Haliwa-Saponi are among the other state-recognized tribes in North Carolina, each with distinct territories, histories, and ongoing community institutions.

The state recognizes eight tribes in total. North Carolina is, in fact, one of the states with the highest Native American populations east of the Mississippi. They were never just a historical chapter.

They are a present fact.