Wednesday, Nov. 28, the Center for Global Understanding and Peacemaking (CGUP), the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, the Dean of Curriculum and the Office of Diversity collaborated to sponsor “The Original Southerners: American Indians, the Civil War, and Confederate Memory,” a presentation by Dr. Malinda Maynor Lowery.
This lecture was in honor of Native American Heritage Month. Elizabethtown College has hosted an annual event to honor Native American heritage since 1992. Previous events have included dance and drumming performances. However, this year’s lecture focused on the role of Native Americans in the Civil War and the American South.
Lowery, who is a member of the Lumbee tribe of North Carolina, is a historian and documentary filmmaker. She is also an associate professor of history at UNC-Chapel Hill, where she acts as Director of the Center for the Study of the American South. She has published two books on American Indian history and is currently working on a third.
Lowery’s lecture opened with a recognition of the power of monuments to commemorate history and shape public memory. She presented the fact that Native Americans are typically excluded from modern understandings of American history.
“Histories are erased by putting up monuments,” she said. “The very definition of what it means to be American involves American Indians.”
Lowery proceeded to educate the audience on Native American involvement in the history of the American South. She explained how historical figures often proclaimed themselves to be “American” by “blood and soil,” but they could only do so by “erasing the land’s original inhabitants. [Native Americans were] here before the South…ever existed,” Lowery said.
In the 1830s, Lowery explained, the American South enacted a massive “removal” of American Indians to expand land offerings to white farmers. However, some tribes resisted removal and remained in the South, including Lowery’s ancestors—who were found among those who supported both the Confederacy and the Union.
Importantly, Lowery introduced many events throughout history that are taught rarely, if ever, in schools. These include the Massacre at Wounded Knee, the largest domestic execution in American history, in which the U.S. Army killed between 150 and 300 members of the Lakota Sioux tribe.
Lowery then turned her discussion to the modern controversy of Confederate memorials and monuments. She recognized that many monuments were erected not during the Confederacy but during the Jim Crow and Civil Rights eras. Because of this, she argued, the monuments “were built to express white Southerners’ objections to black equality” rather than to commemorate fallen Confederate soldiers, as many purport to do.
Lowery also extensively discussed American Indian “invisibility” in modern American culture. According to Lowery, it often rests on Native Americans to keep their cultures and traditions alive against a society that continually erases them, including through the monuments people choose to build.
“Monuments entail forgetting as much as remembering,” Lowery said. “American Indians keep that remembering alive.”
One of several monuments Lowery critiqued was “Early Days,” a monument to early American exploration and the pioneer era in San Francisco. It relies on stereotypes in depicting a Native American man and ultimately “venerates the subjugation of Indians,” Lowery said. In the context of California laws during the era “Early Days” depicts, the monument takes on a more chilling connotation.
“Genocide was the express intent of the California government [at the time],” Lowery said. “[It] was an articulated policy.”
Lowery also criticized modern American tendency to apologize without action, such as in the case of Mount Rushmore. South Dakota’s website claims that the monument expresses a “rich heritage we all share,” but Lowery presented that the statue was “forcibly installed on Lakota land.” The U.S. government offered a $1 billion settlement to the Lakota tribe, but they refused the money.
Lowery concluded with recent advancements in recognizing historical accomplishments of American Indians, including the Battle of Hayes Pond. This battle, in which members of the Lumbee tribe defeated a gathering of KKK members, received a historical marker just this year.
Students responded to the presentation with interest. “I thought the presentation was interesting and informative,” first-year Ashlee Reick said.
“It was great to learn about a tribe not readily mentioned in the education system,” junior Aubrey Mitchell said of the Lumbee tribe. Mitchell, a social studies education major, intends to use this information in her future classroom.
Director of the CGUP and Department Chair and professor of history Dr. David Kenley also found the presentation “fascinating.” He was appreciative of the fact that Lowery “was able to provide a unique perspective.”
Lowery hopes that her lecture inspires students to recognize Native American history more. “American Indians are a lot more intertwined in American history and identity than we think,” she said.
