By TROY LITTLEDEER for Kituwah Press
(Special thanks to Suzette Brewer)
STILWELL, Okla. — Senator Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) has co-sponsored a bill to grant recognition to the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina – a state-recognized group whose ancestry and identity have long been a source of deep controversy among neighboring Native nations.
As Cherokee people, bound to you by blood, language, clans and history, we owe you an apology.
We are sorry for the desecration inflicted by one of our own who has lit the match to undermine the sovereignty our ancestors fought to protect.
We are sorry that as you stand on your sovereign right to defend the integrity of the federal recognition process, you are being undermined by a U.S. Senator who, by his own citizenship, should know better.
It is a profound embarrassment that one of “ours” – a citizen of the Cherokee Nation – is the one co-sponsoring the Lumbee Fairness Act.
We apologize to all of Indian Country for the fact that the only Cherokee citizen in the U.S. Senate is also one of the most dangerously out-of-touch people in Washington on the subjects of tribal sovereignty, federal law, and our own history. We are sorry you have been forced to endure his incompetence and denounce his words and actions in regards to the negative impact they have had on American Indians and Alaska Natives.
For anyone who has not been paying attention, Sen. Mullin has a staggering record of legislative attacks on tribal sovereignty and policies that prioritize political and financial gain over Indigenous rights.
In 2018, for example, Sen. Mullin stood on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal and, in a discussion about the Trail of Tears, referred to it as a “volunteer walk.” He appeared to minimize the forced removal and ethnic cleansing of 60,000 of our own ancestors as a choice. This is not an allegation; it is on tape in his own words.
The Lumbee have historically made – and later abandoned – claims of descent or connection to numerous tribal nations, depending on the political context.
In the late 19th century, they identified as “Croatan Indians,” asserting ties to the Hatteras and the so-called Lost Colony of Roanoke. By the early 1900s, they rebranded as “Cherokee Indians of Robeson County,” then later as “Siouan” or “Cheraw Indians.” During the 1930s and 1940s, their petitions invoked links to the Catawba, Waccamaw, Pamlico, and Tuscarora, among others.
The modern name “Lumbee,” adopted in 1953 after the Lumber River, was meant to unify these diverse claims, but many neighboring Native nations – including the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, Catawba, and Tuscarora – continue to dispute the group’s asserted, but unverified, ancestry.
Meanwhile, Sen. Mullin’s office was simultaneously, according to the United Keetoowah Band, a federally recognized Indian nation with ancient lineage, language, clans and culture that has existed for thousands of years, drafting “legislative language” that would “terminate the UKB” by stripping its land rights.
He is playing God with recognition in one state while playing Andrew Jackson with a Keetoowah Cherokee land base in his own.
As a Congressman in 2013, Sen. Mullin voted against the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. This was the landmark version that finally restored tribal jurisdiction over non-Natives who commit violence on our lands. He voted against the tool tribes needed to protect our women.
Today, Sen. Markwayne Mullin has built his brand by railing against “DEI” as a “waste of money.” Yet he now champions a bill that, at its core, is the very embodiment of political favoritism – an act that would legitimize a group with a century-long record of shapeshifting ancestry claims while gutting the sovereignty of the United Keetoowah Band and desecrating the hard-won principles and legal standards for federal recognition.
You can’t call the Trail of Tears a “volunteer walk” and then claim to be a moral authority on tribal history.
You can’t vote against protecting our women and then pretend you are a defender of tribal rights.
You can’t try to “terminate” one tribe’s land base and then, with a straight face, co-sponsor a “fairness” act for another.
To the Eastern Band, we stand with you – in solidarity, in truth, and in grief. We see the deep wound this inflicts, the generations of erasure it echoes, and we are profoundly sorry for the harm and disrespect this betrayal represents.
It is the oldest, most treacherous story in our history: the knife that cuts deepest is the one wielded by those who trade the blood of their ancestors for proximity to power, forgetting the sacred fire that made them who they are.
