In Prospect, N.C., a speck of a community where most of the residents were members of the Lumbee Tribe, Ruth Locklear grew up immersed in her people’s struggle to secure the full recognition of the federal government.
It was a step that would not only open up the prospect of much-needed federal benefits, but would also come with outside acknowledgment: Despite all the Lumbee had endured, they were still there.
Ms. Locklear’s father inherited the fight from his father, who had inherited it from his. Eventually, she took it on herself. She would make trips to Washington, watching as efforts in Congress got close to success but were never close enough.
“It becomes a way of life,” Ms. Locklear, 77, said of a fight that seemed endless. Until it didn’t.
On Thursday, President Trump signed a bill that extended the federal recognition that the Lumbee Tribe had chased for more than a century. The measure was slipped into the annual defense policy bill, the centerpiece of which was the authorization of $900 billion in military spending. The package, which must be passed each fiscal year, was one of the few vehicles left to get something through an acrimonious Congress.
The recognition now enables access to federal support that tribal leaders regard as urgently needed, as much of the community is deeply impoverished and faces dire health outcomes that are some of the worst in North Carolina.
“I know with every fiber of my being that our ancestors are smiling down on us today,” John L. Lowery, the tribal chairman, said in a statement on Wednesday after the Senate passed the legislation, the hurdle that tribal leaders saw as the most daunting after past experiences. “Our tribe has finally crossed a barrier that once seemed impossible to overcome.”
North Carolina has recognized the tribe since 1885, and Congress passed a law acknowledging the tribe in 1956. But in that legislation, lawmakers declined to make the tribe eligible for federal benefits set aside for Indigenous people — effectively, the tribe argued, making it second-class to hundreds of other formally recognized tribal nations across the United States.
But the tribe’s efforts to be recognized have been tangled up in fraught questions of sovereignty and identity. Some of the staunchest opposition that the Lumbee have faced has been from other tribal nations, who have challenged the legitimacy of their historical and genealogical claims.
At a Senate Indian Affairs Committee hearing this year, Ben Barnes, chief of the Shawnee Tribe, told lawmakers that “nationhood is not a label to be chosen, but an identity carried through generations of removal, loss and resistance.”
The Lumbee Tribe, with its roughly 60,000 enrolled members largely living in southeastern North Carolina, has said that its ancestors were members of tribal nations who came from the Algonquian, Iroquoian and Siouan language families, who coalesced in the swamplands around Robeson County, N.C. Over time, according to researchers, those ancestors intermarried with enslaved Black people and freedmen, as well as English settlers.
In the 1940s, they settled on naming themselves the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, after the river that courses through their land.
Some have argued that they did not necessarily need the validation of the federal government. They had worked hard to pass down their history, taking pride in founding the institution of higher learning that became the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, and in the so-called Battle of Hayes Pond in 1958, when the Lumbee ran off members of the Ku Klux Klan.
But having that recognition can be empowering, others say, especially as members have faced uncertainties over how they fit into the broader patchwork of the country’s Indigenous communities.
“It was never just about the money or the politics,” said Natascha Wagoner Tilson, the chief executive of the Lumbee Regional Development Association, a service provider that had once served as the tribe’s governing body. “It was about righting a wrong that had been done.”
Full federal recognition establishes a formal government-to-government relationship between the American government and the Lumbee Tribe, and enshrines key elements of tribal sovereignty and independence. It will also unlock federal funding for health and other programs, as well as the ability to establish a casino or other gambling-related economic opportunities on tribal land.
The funding, as well as the opportunity to develop new economic infrastructure, could be crucial to the tribe’s North Carolina region, which struggles with entrenched poverty and elevated rates of heart disease and diabetes.
But programs for tribal nations, Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians have also historically struggled to receive adequate and equitable funding. A 2022 estimate from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said that the Lumbee recognition would cost hundreds of millions of dollars in the initial years after enactment.
Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, the top Democrat on the Indian Affairs Committee, acknowledged this year that there was a valid concern about how those programs would have to be stretched to serve thousands of Lumbee Tribe members.
“That’s a real issue,” Mr. Schatz said. “It’s just not a reason not to grant recognition.” It will also take time for the tribe to submit records and establish the extent of its need under the programs.
Some tribal officials argued that the legislative success was grounded more in political momentum than the Lumbee Tribe meeting the historical standard for recognition. Those critics contend the Lumbee Tribe should have gone through an administrative process to gain recognition, rather than turn to Congress.
“This is not fairness,” Michell Hicks, the principal chief of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, told lawmakers this year. “It is the abandonment of every safeguard that protects tribal sovereignty and identity.”
But the Lumbee Tribe had fresh momentum with the support of Mr. Trump, who promised during the 2024 campaign to grant full federal recognition. Tribe members make up a notable voting bloc in Robeson County in a swing state that Mr. Trump won by about three percentage points. He won the county by 28 percentage points. (Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent, also made the same commitment.)
Shortly after taking office, Mr. Trump asked the Interior Department to examine a path toward full recognition. The department told lawmakers in written testimony in November that it believed that congressional action was “the most direct means to resolve ambiguities” from the 1956 law.
Ms. Tilson and others also credited Thom Tillis, the retiring senior senator from North Carolina, for leading the push to keep the legislation in through both chambers.
In recent weeks, he has repeatedly pushed for the Senate to take up the measure, challenging its critics and highlighting the coalition that has grown to support the Lumbee cause.
“It’s rare to see Republicans and Democrats come together on anything,” Mr. Tillis, a Republican, said in November. “But when it comes to Lumbee recognition, the support is overwhelming, and it’s bipartisan.”
Ms. Tilson, 53, watched the proceedings in Washington, bracing herself for disappointment. “We’ve been close so many times,” she said. She was sitting beside an elder, a man in his 80s. When it passed, he told her, with tears in his eyes, “I never thought I would live to see this day.”
Ms. Locklear thought about her family, going back to her great-grandfather, who had been involved since in the late 1800s.
“It’s an acknowledgment that we’re still here,” she said. “After all these years — centuries — we’re still here.”
Many of the practical implications of the recognition remain unclear. But those were concerns for another day — and for Ms. Locklear, another generation.
“I won’t be part of it,” she said. “I’m 77 years old, and I’m going to sit back now and just watch.”
Rick Rojas is the Atlanta bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of the South.
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