Indigenous Belonging and the Swamp Forests of North Carolina
With Professor Ryan E. Emanuel
Previously, we’ve explored Native history on national and regional levels. Professor Ryan E. Emanuel’s book, On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice, offers a chance to take a more granular view.
In his book, and in conversation, Professor Emanuel traces the history of his tribe, the Lumbee, in Eastern North Carolina. He reveals how the colonial project that began hundreds of years ago continues. If the Lumbee are to survive, he concludes, “We've got to figure out a way to continue to belong to our homelands.”
Professor Emanuel is a hydrologist and tenured faculty member at Duke University. A condensed transcript of our conversation, edited for clarity, is below. You can also listen to the audio, which includes discussion of the war that upended Indigenous nations in 1711, the connection of fossil fuels in North Carolina to the Confederacy, my suggestion that settlers viewed swamp forests with the same confusion as when trying to understand why people yawn, and more:
Ben: You begin the book with a reimagined land acknowledgment. I wonder if you could give us a version of that here.
RE: Too often, land acknowledgments, especially institutional ones, are throwaway statements — fill-in-the-blank exercises that amount to nothing more than looking up the name of a specific group and announcing that these people were the original inhabitants of the land where an office, lecture hall, or conference center is located today.
The point that I wanted to make in devising a reimagined land acknowledgment, as I call it, is to sit down, take our time, and mull over the magnitude and the enormity of the history that Indigenous peoples have with the place that we now call Eastern North Carolina. This place has been inhabited by my ancestors for thousands of years. They established all kinds of agricultural practices and societies based along rivers and estuarine coastlines.
These are just amazing, beautiful places, and I don't think we spend enough time thinking about the duration of human habitation in them. In fact, we often say that the first town in North Carolina is Bath, founded in the early 1700s. I kind of hear a record scratch in my mind and think, wait a minute, Bath itself is founded on top of an Indigenous town.
Ben: We had an interview recently about Native history a little more generally.
One theme was how long Native peoples dominated their relationships with settlers. The exchange you describe between William Powell and Souther seems like a good encapsulation of some of those early dynamics.
RE: Absolutely. Souther was the leader of a group of men whom we only know in the historical record as Bear River Indians. Unfortunately, we don't have any other details than that. I found it noteworthy that Souther's name was recorded at all in colonial history by a man named William Powell.
Powell was a settler on the shores of the Pamlico Sound right around the year 1700. He came home from working in the fields one day to find Souther and his men going through his cabin. Powell confronted the men and Souther, but Souther didn't take any sass from him. He beat Powell across the head with his bow.
Powell said he was going to report Souther and his men to the local magistrate — basically complaining to the manager. The last thing that Powell writes in his complaint to the magistrate is a message saying when I told Souther that I was going to report him to you, he said I should tell you that you could “kiss his arse.”
Ben: Credit where credit is due to the phrase “kiss my arse.” It’s been around for a long time.
RE: People don't think about the fact that we, and my ancestors, have been cursing people out in English for more than 300 years.
Ben: You talk a lot about the Lumbee River and its swamp forests, and how the river and the swamps anchored Indigenous identity. How did the forests evade destruction well into the 19th century?
RE: We commonly think of colonization as this homogeneous wave that swept across the continent from east to west, but our case shows that's not necessarily true. There are isolated backwaters that weren’t colonized for a long time, and our territory was one of those backwaters. If you wanted to cross it, you'd be faced with any number of tributary channels and swamps in succession. That quirk of geography protected not only our swamp forests but also our communities, which lived in the spaces between the swamps.
However, the advent of railroads and then industrial machinery led to the exploitation of those swamp forests. They contained bald cypress, an extremely valuable wood known for its rot resistance. Companies began to excavate canals, drain the wetlands, and then bring machinery into those swamps to clearcut the forests.
Once that happened, there was a perception that hey, we have all of this freshly logged land, let's drain it some more and turn it into arable farmland. So that was the next step in the process of transforming the landscape. All of that happened around the turn of the 20th century up through the 1930s.
Ben: Another thing you talk about is the 1956 Lumbee Act. We've covered the government policy of termination a bit on Skipped History, but I'm interested to hear your take on the time.
RE: Backing up just a little more, my ancestors began to petition Congress for formal recognition starting in the 1880s. Finally, in the 1950s, they were able to get a recognition bill through the House of Representatives. It seemed to be sailing smoothly through the Senate, and then at the last minute, a clause was added that said, to paraphrase, Lumbee people cannot have a government-to-government relationship with the United States.
In other words, the United States in the Lumbee Act acknowledged that Lumbees were Indigenous peoples, but at the same time prohibited them from having a relationship with the U.S. that might result in any benefits or statutory protections.
Ben: It’s a little like applying for a passport for 75 years, and when you finally get it, you’re told its only function is to serve as a bad photograph that you can hang on the wall.
RE: That's a really good analogy. During the termination era, the federal government actively sought ways to reduce or even eliminate its formal responsibilities toward tribal nations. It created a lot of complications for us, and we're still grappling with them today.
Ben: Can you talk about the rise of big farms in the following decades?
RE: Yes. Starting in the 1980s, we saw a radical shift towards industrialization and centralization of production of livestock. These industrial livestock facilities grow a huge amount of the pork and the poultry that we consume, not only in the U.S. but globally.
There’s a very common practice in both the swine industry and the poultry industry of spraying partially treated wastewater on surrounding fields. Some of the poultry facilities spray a million gallons of water a day or more. Ultimately a lot of the contaminants end up in surface waters flowing across the land, especially when there’s flooding, spreading illness and wreaking ecological havoc.
It’s a major concern. And in theory, a regulatory framework is designed to prevent the spread of irrigation water. But the framework is largely performative. Companies will, for example, build projections around average rain amounts — saying that if it rains an average amount every day, no wastewater will spread from their fields. But in reality, of course, storms arrive at random intervals and drop random amounts of rain, especially as climate change worsens.
Ben: Setting your model to count for average rainfall rather than the reality of big storms is a little like a doctor advising amputation and then saying, on the bright side, if you average it out, you're only losing a millimeter of your arm per year.
RE: Yeah. And I really think that whether or not the proponents of these practices realize it, they are advancing a colonial narrative of exploitation of the land and people that's centuries-long, here and in other areas. If you go back to early 1700s colonial records, you find people speculating about the suitability of Eastern North Carolina for raising hogs, a frightening premonition of what was to come.
But we ought to think about the region as a relative instead of an object. We all have people in our lives who are complicated for various reasons, and perhaps there are things that trouble us about their behaviors or habits, or maybe they're in situations that are troubling for various reasons.
Our homeland is no different. It's complicated. We love it, and I really think that if Lumbee people are going to survive as a distinct group of people, we've got to figure out a way to continue to belong to our homelands, no matter what happens to them. In the Lumbee outdoor drama, Strike at the Wind, the fictional narrator says, “The greatest thing is not to possess, but to belong.”
Ben: A quote I was glad to learn of.
Professor Emanuel, thank you so much for your work, and for being here today.
RE: Thanks so much, Ben.