My first Lumbee-adjacent assignment during my early days at my current gig — staff writer at Tribal Business News — turns out to be an entrepreneur profile on Moore Brothers’ Beef, a North-Carolina-based cattle outfit built on the remains of an ailing tobacco operation. I scrounge up a phone number for the folks from their Facebook page and dial in, and I find myself nervous as I wait for someone to pick up the phone.

By the time this assignment rolls around — in the middle of October 2020, as the paradigm was shifting around us — my conversation with the Moore brothers would mark my first time talking to another Lumbee in five years.

When Harbert Moore picks up the phone, I recognize his accent immediately: Southern, deeply Southern, with a snap and lift toward the end of words with long vowel sounds and vanishing consonants. It’s a Lumbee accent. It’s my father’s accent. It’s my accent, a few days after any visit to Robeson County, North Carolina.

After just a few minutes chatting with Moore, I find myself slipping into it the way someone slips on an old hoodie— with the surprised discovery that it still fits.

I’ve never fit easily into my own Lumbee heritage — but then, I’ve never fit easily into any heritage. I couldn’t tell you where the disconnect occurs, but anytime I try to shrug the mantle of ‘Indigenous’ onto my shoulders, it never settles quite right. Neither does ‘white,’ and despite what my colleagues in grade school insisted on calling me, nor does ‘Hispanic.’

Outside of a few summers spent visiting my dad’s side of the family, much of my experiences with indigeneity were broad, distant lessons from underfunded nonprofits. All I really had was a vague understanding that my father — whose skin is much, much darker than mine — came from a tobacco farm on the eastern side of North Carolina, one of seventeen children born to Mary Bell Oxendine, and that made me Lumbee.

I’ve never danced in a powwow; we left that to my brother and sister, who tan in the sun and more neatly fit the image. I’ve never worn a regalia. I’ve never worn a feather, not even when the other kids in my neighborhood ran back and forth across our yard during games of Cowboys and Indians, errant bluebird feathers tucked into dirty headbands amid whoops and yells and phantom drumbeats.

(I didn’t play on the Indian side much. It always felt strange.)

When I was younger, being Lumbee meant confusion as to whether I was from America or Mexico, mainly so that other kids could decide which to deride me for. It meant the occasional trip into the city for a meeting, or strangely eager attention from civil rights youth groups, or people asking me if I was adopted when they saw my dad. It meant awkward weeks spent with rural family members I barely knew grilling me about my burgeoning agnosticism.

Eventually, being Lumbee meant moving across the country, from North Carolina to Oklahoma with some other Lumbee kids to go to college at a private school offering scholarships to Native students.

But of course, Lumbees are a state-recognized tribe in a rural portion of North Carolina. A lot of Oklahomans had no idea who we were — so it was back to discussions about whether I looked white or Hispanic, and for a long time, being Lumbee didn’t mean anything at all.

Harbert Moore is friendly, especially once he realizes my last name is Oxendine. He rattles off a few names in hopes that we discover we’re distantly related (we are, through my father’s mother, which meant a panicked message to my boss about a potential conflict of interest at the time.) After pleasantries, we muddle our way through an interview about what it’s like running a beef company in the middle of COVID, and what it’s been like getting away from tobacco and into selling food to people.

(I remember tobacco fields in Lumberton, rows so straight that driving past them created the illusion of a perpetual gap between the broad, green leaves. I used to say I knew we were in Lumberton when we passed more tobacco than houses.)

During the conversation, I find myself doing my best to prove I’m Lumbee. I mention towns and places near Maxton. I bring up the bevy of last names common to Lumbee people: Oxendine, Chavis, Hunt, Locklear, Jacobs, Moore. I point to my grandfather on my dad’s side, the man I was named after, the Rev. Chesley Oxendine.

Harbert doesn’t know Chesley, or his son Chesley Jr., but he does know some Oxendines, and he’s related to some Oxendines, and that’s good enough for him.

I get some pretty good material for my story out of the interview. Harbert talks about the prominence of tobacco in the early 90s, and its decline in the late 90s. He talks about how much it meant to Lumbee — that we had the third biggest allotment in the country, how it let us compete on a national level.

(I remember how hard some of my family worked to get by in their little circular neighborhood in Lumberton. I remember small trailers with four rooms and a kitchen. I remember half-hearted attempts at raising chickens or pigs. I remember long, hot days spent wandering in circles behind my aunt’s trailer, desperate for something to do that wasn’t another chore. I remember boiled snap-peas and strawberries frozen in sugar water, presented during family gatherings as though they were ambrosia laced in gold.)

We end the call on a friendly note and I sit down to write, but my fingers won’t budge. I’d just talked to a man I was related to, from the same place as my father, about things I remembered.

Why does it all sound so foreign? Why does it all sound so far away?

These youth organizations developed an interest in me at a young age. I learned to read early, and in one of those desperately precocious attempts to garner favor from adults that I wasn’t earning from my peers, I did my best to impress at every turn. I used long words and dove headfirst into anything any adult told me to do (except homework, admittedly. Never got the hang of homework.) I tried to be exceptionally polite. On more than one occasion, other Native kids told me I was acting white.

I could see it. I didn’t act like them. I was too nervous of making someone upset, and I didn’t understand a lot of the social cues involved in building camaraderie with people my own age.

The adults, though, loved me. I think some of the adults running the youth organizations saw an opportunity for a success story — someone who went off to college and made something of themselves, the next Lumbee doctor or lawyer or actor. They liked that I could speak in public, and that I could write. I was invited to conferences and camping trips; I remember specifically taking a trip to Washington D.C. where I spent most of my time dealing with some kind of allergic reaction to face wash, which did not blend well with the cold up North.

Those adults seemed to be the one string connecting me to being Lumbee, and being Lumbee meant going to these events, holding my hands behind my back, and saying “yes ma’am” to the kindly old women who’d taken an interest in my short stories. When I was told I was acting white, I could point to the adults who told me I excelled at being Lumbee.

Eventually, though, I outgrew the youth groups, and then outgrew the idea that I was going to be a doctor or lawyer or famous actor. Toward the end of my ailing high school career, it wasn’t clear whether I was even going to make it into college, though I eventually rebounded.

The thread, for what frayed and fragile connection to my heritage it represented, was cut.

Eventually, my attention span slows down, and I climb over that distant sensation and get the piece done. I write a story about Lumbees doing the best they can with what they’ve got. For what it’s worth, I think it’s one of my best pieces on the Tribal Business News website.

After I get the story turned in, I make my way to the Lumbee Tribe’s Facebook page and follow it. Turns out there’s a lot more going on than just recovering from the tobacco collapse — within a few months I’ve picked up a story about the Lumbee’s federal contracting enterprise, and how it’s expanding.

The woman on the phone recognizes my last name. (I think that plays a part in someone calling me back, to be honest; on more than one occasion with this job I suspect the Native folks I’m talking to wouldn’t be interested in an interview with non-Native press.)

I end up talking to the new head of the tribe’s enterprise arm. I recognize his accent. After a few minutes, I recognize mine, too.

My path to being Indigenous is ramshackle, and conscious, and constantly evolving. I’ve fought hard to reconstruct that thread between myself and my people — and then between myself and other Native Americans.

My daily work involves telling Native stories. I went from occasionally greeting family members or being told I act white to centering Native perspectives five days out of the week (the weekends I take it easy and center my own perspective, typically on a video game or tabletop RPG.) I’ve learned more about cultures and tribes across the United States in the last year than I have the entire three decades preceding.

Some days, reaching out to other Indigenous people for stories feels like I’m cold calling someone else on the other side of the world — someone whose experiences and culture and understanding are entirely divorced from my own, even through the shared history of colonialism and marginalization.

On other days, it feels a little like going home. When I find common ground with other Indigenous people — and what’s more common than ground — it helps reinforce that I am Indigenous, however uneasy the word sits on my shoulders. I’m not a fraud. I’m an Indian. I’m a second generation Lumbee Indian.

I’m not likely to ever wear a regalia; I couldn’t grass dance if you gave me detailed instructions. I find it hard to sink into traditional thinking sometimes, and the only way you’re going to hear my accent is if you take me to Robeson County (or put a family member on the phone for a few minutes.) I’m never going to wear a feather, in a headband or otherwise.

But I am Indigenous. Whatever else I might be, however far from home I go, I am Indigenous.

Whatever that means.