In Lumbee Pipelines David Shane Lowry (Lumbee) examines the historical and modern paths, or "pipelines," through which members of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina maintain Lumbee national identity, community practices, and tribal sovereignty. Through extensive ethnographic research and contextualization, Lowry explores these pipelines: the programs and traditions through which the Lumbee people engineer the settler-colonial conditions that define life in North Carolina and the United States as a whole. Even as the Lumbee community depends on the economics, politics, and histories of settler colonialism, those realities at once threaten Lumbee life, freedom, and community. Despite that conflict, Lumbee people use these pipelines to protect their interests and to influence the world in the realms of public infrastructure and education, healthcare services, humanitarian networks, fossil fuel pipelines, environmental degradation, and artificial intelligence. Lowry paints an intimate portrait of how individual Lumbees define their identities and sense of being, revealing the disputes and affinities between Lumbee community members in various states of accepting and rejecting settler-colonial circumstances. Lumbee Pipelines engages conversations about how, even as American Indian identities and communities are often erased amid the business of contemporary American life, Lumbee people have devised ways to empower and enrich themselves and other peoples by repurposing and evading the genocidal pressures that define settler-colonial society.
David Shane Lowry (Lumbee) is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Southern Maine. He has held postdoctoral fellowships at MIT and Brandeis University.
List of Illustrations Theme Music A Presidential Foreword Preface Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Traffic(k) 2. Relief 3. Lumbee Pedagogy 4. Clinical Vignette 5. Dark Water 6. Artificially Indigenous Pipeline Is Not a Metaphor (A Conclusion) Appendix: Letter to Tribal Council Notes Bibliography Index
"Fearless and with a sharp eye for the many death-dealing hypocrisies that drive ongoing colonial states of American Indian and Indigenous oppression, Lumbee anthropologist David Lowry uses the tools of Indigenous anthropology and ethnography to call for a shift in discursive emphasis and analysis. . . . This book might very well become the foundation not only for innovative new scholarship in American Indian and Indigenous studies, but also in international courts that adjudicate human rights violations and reparation claims."-Ulrike Wiethaus, coeditor of Moravian Americans and their Neighbors, 1772-1822 "Lumbee Pipelines chronicles Lumbee circulations within Indian Country and to the most distant corners of the world, while always referring back to Robeson County. David Shane Lowry's ability to explain the multiple contradictions of contemporary Native life makes this work a rare find."-Robert B. Caldwell Jr., author of Choctaw-Apache Foodways "In Lumbee Pipelines David Lowry stays true to his passion to educate not only Lumbee citizens, but also Indigenous and non-Indigenous people from all walks of life about the struggles and resilience of the 'forgotten' people of the Dark Water. . . . Readers of Lumbee Pipelines will be challenged to reframe their orientation . . . and embrace those frameworks that uphold Lumbee and Indigenous history, culture, and values. I applaud Lowry for this outstanding, provocative work."-Ronny Antonio Bell, chair of the Division of Pharmaceutical Outcomes and Policy at the University of North Carolina Eshelman School of Pharmacy
