Why are interdisciplinary methodologies so important for telling American Indian histories? How does Indigenous documentary filmmaking and television bring scholarly research to broad and diverse audiences? What might Native foodways teach Native and Non-Native folks about political sovereignty?
In episode 101 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast, host Cathy Hannabach interviews Lumbee historian and documentary filmmaker Malinda Maynor Lowery about how she weaves together family stories with official documents to tell a new history of the Lumbee Nation, using film documentary to expand definitions of what counts as Southern cuisine, the role of food in Indigenous sovereignty movements, and why valuing a world forever in community is how Malinda imagines otherwise.
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Guest: Malinda Maynor Lowery
Malinda Maynor Lowery is a historian and documentary film producer who is a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina.
She is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and director of the Center for the Study of the American South. Her second book, The Lumbee Indians: An American Struggle (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), is a 300-year history of the largest American Indian community east of the Mississippi.
Malinda’s interests include oral history, American Indian migration and identity, school desegregation, federal recognition, religious music, and foodways, and she writes for both scholarly and general audiences.
Films she has produced include the Peabody Award-winning A Chef’s Life (PBS, 2013–2018), the Emmy-nominated Private Violence (broadcast on HBO in 2014), In the Light of Reverence (broadcast on PBS in 2001), and two short films, Real Indian (1996) and Sounds of Faith (1997), both of which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.
We chatted about
- Malinda’s most recent book The Lumbee Indians (02:00)
- Bringing Native historical methods into the academy (04:48)
- Why public scholarship is vital to telling Indigenous stories (08:26)
- How Lumbee foodways illuminate their struggle for political sovereignty (14:22)
- Bringing documentary film into the classroom (19:40)
- Why art drives social change (23:56)
- Imagining otherwise (26:35)
Takeaways
Malinda’s new book The Lumbee Indians
I’m a member of the Lumbee tribe myself and I’ve been working off and on on topics related to Lumbee history for about 25 years now….We have so many ways of knowing in our community that I think enrich anybody who wants to understand how we—we meaning the United States—a society got to this point. There are so many windows into answering that question through Lumbee history.
Indigenous multimedia approaches to history
As I was living this experience of being an American, being a Lumbee, being a Southerner, I realized that the intersection of those experiences was not appreciated or, or elevated. Most people tend to want to talk about those experiences as separate. But my love of fiction and what grew into a love of filmmaking and storytelling showed me that you can’t separate those things. They’re not separated in people’s real lives so why try to write as if they are?….I have always loved writing from a place of informed research and write in such a way that would stitch pieces of a puzzle together. So my family stories became a piece of the puzzle to help readers get the broadest, most robust picture of Lumbee history.
Writing for multiple publics
Writing for a public or a set of publics really started for me when my first book [The Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South] came out and my relatives said to me, “This is great and all but can’t you make it more understandable?” I love that piece of feedback because I had struggled with it so much in writing the book, knowing that it needed to speak to scholars and be driven by historical interpretation instead of stories. I then took that piece of feedback from my relatives and said, “Well, what else can I do that promotes stories and where people really do recognize themselves in the text but also that helps remind people who are not Lumbee of the critical roles that American Indians play in our society today?”
Food sovereignty as a way into political sovereignty
There would be no settler foodways without Native foodways. Native foodways are a conduit to asserting our inherent sovereignty, the sovereignty that we possess as political communities that predate the existence of the United States. In the South, there’s an interesting conversation that’s led by food that helps us really understand how inherent sovereignty functions.
Imagining otherwise
I want to live the kind of life where the work that I do has a meaningful impact on others. As I realized what that really means, I’m not the one that gets to define what impact looks like. I’m not the one that gets to decide what kind of impact other people need. So I guess the kind of world I want to create is more of a process than a container. It’s a process where we can live in relation as those universes are in some kind of relation to each other, where we are listening to create new things that are useful to others and also to ourselves.
More from Malinda Maynor Lowery
- Malinda’s website
- Malinda’s book The Lumbee Indians: An American Struggle
- Malinda’s book Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation
- A Chef’s Life PBS series
- Private Violence film
- In the Light of Reverence film
- Malinda on Instagram
- Malinda on Twitter
Projects and people discussed
- Lumbee Nation
- Ralph Ellison
- Toni Morrison
- James Baldwin
- James Baldwin’s book Notes of a Native Son
- William Faulkner
- Viviane Howard
- Cynthia Hill
- Food sovereignty
- Settler colonialism
- Dawnland film
- Cathy Hannabach’s interview with Solomon Enos, Abigail Romanchak, and John Hina (Prime) on Native Hawaiian Food Security
About Imagine Otherwise
Imagine Otherwise is a podcast about the people and projects bridging art, activism, and academia to build better worlds. Episodes offer in-depth interviews with creators who use culture for social justice, and explore the nitty-gritty work of imagining and creating more just worlds. Check out full podcast episodes and show notes at ideasonfire.net/imagine-otherwise-podcast. Imagine Otherwise is hosted by Cathy Hannabach and produced by Ideas on Fire, an academic editing and consulting agency helping progressive, interdisciplinary scholars write and publish awesome texts, enliven public conversations, and create more just worlds.
Transcript
Cathy Hannabach [00:03]: [upbeat music in background] Welcome to Imagine Otherwise, the podcast about the people and projects bridging art, activism, and academia to build better worlds. Episodes offer in-depth interviews with creators who use culture for social justice and explore the nitty-gritty work of imagining otherwise. I’m your host, Cathy Hannabach. [music fadeout]
[00:22] This is episode 101 and my guest today is Malinda Maynor Lowery.
Malinda is a historian and documentary film producer who is a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina.
She is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and director of the Center for the Study of the American South. Her second book, The Lumbee Indians: An American Struggle, is a 300-year history of the largest American Indian community east of the Mississippi.
Malinda’s interests include oral history, American Indian migration and identity, school desegregation, federal recognition, religious music, and foodways, and she writes for both scholarly and general audiences.
[01:01] She has produced the Peabody Award-winning television series A Chef’s Life (PBS, 2013–2018), the Emmy-nominated feature film Private Violence (broadcast on HBO in 2014), the feature film In the Light of Reverence (broadcast on PBS in 2001), and two short films, Real Indian (1996) and Sounds of Faith (1997), both of which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.
In our interview, Malinda and I chat about how she weaves together family stories with official documents to tell a new history of the Lumbee Nation, using film documentary to expand definitions of what counts as Southern cuisine, the role of food in Indigenous sovereignty movements, and why valuing a world forever in community is how Malinda imagines otherwise.
[to Malinda] Thanks so much for being with us today, Malinda.
Malinda Maynor Lowery [01:42]: Thanks for having me. It’s great to meet you.
Cathy [01:45]: I would love to start off by talking about your most recent book, The Lumbee Indians, which traces a new history of one of the largest Indigenous nations in North America. What got you interested in tracing Lumbee history in a new way?
Malinda [02:00]: I’m a member of the Lumbee tribe myself and I’ve been working off and on on topics related to Lumbee history for about 25 years now.
As soon as I got out of my home environment, I started getting a lot of quiz questions about “How much Native are you?” or “What’s a Lumbee?” or “There are no Indians in North Carolina, they’re all dead.” Those kinds of questions. I began to realize, of course, that folks didn’t know the kind of history that I had the privilege of growing up with.
As vibrant and as thriving as North Carolina Natives are, and Native people are in general, a lot of that knowledge hasn’t penetrated the general public. Their understanding of Native people is still very much stuck in the past. So for me it kind of started out as something more personal, just to to be able to share what I knew from a different authoritative place.
[02:58] When I moved through my first career as a documentary filmmaker and then into my second career as a historian, Lumbees kept coming back up as containing amazing examples of what it’s like to live with a degree of social and racial injustice in the United States, what it’s like to overcome or at least create a new vision for your community in the midst of that type of social and racial injustice.
We have so many ways of knowing in our community that I think enrich anybody who wants to understand how we—we meaning the United States—a society got to this point. There are so many windows into answering that question through Lumbee history that I wound up really sticking with it and then writing two books about it, which was much more than I intended to do when I started doing more academic research.
Cathy [04:04]: You mentioned your earlier book, The Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South, and I love to talk a little bit about methodology for both of these texts. You do something really interesting: you weave together traditional historical research with archival sources like photographs and state records, these forms of documentation that historians are quite comfortable with. But you also weave those together with your own personal story and family story and narratives that you had access to in other ways. What, first of all, attracted to you to that kind of mixed methodology, that multimedia or interdisciplinary methodology, and how did it help you tell the history of the Lumbee tribe more specifically?
Malinda [04:48]: From a young, young age, I’ve always loved to read and I’d love to read stories, especially stories written by I’ll call them Southern writers. But when you think of Southern writers, you sort of limit yourself to white Southern writers. I’m also really thinking about African-American writers who write from a Southern orientation or speaking to experiences that African Americans have indelibly marked on this region that I grew up in. That’s people like Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin, as well as writers like William Faulkner.
It was a variety of voices from this region that really started to wake me up to the fact that there was an absence of Native people in that conception of what it means to be an American and what it means to be Southern. So as I was living this experience of being an American, being a Lumbee, being a Southerner, I realized that the intersection of those experiences was not appreciated or, or elevated.
[05:52] Most people tend to want to talk about those experiences as separate. But my love of fiction and what grew into a love of filmmaking and storytelling showed me that you can’t separate those things. They’re not separated in people’s real lives so why try to write as if they are? You’re not giving us an accurate or robust picture of the past if you’re striving too to make these categories of race, identity, and nation so distinct. But in the field of historical scholarship, there’s not too many models for how to do that. I don’t have a fiction writer voice, as much as I’ve tried to write fiction and poetry. It’s not something that comes naturally to me.
[06:51] I have always loved writing from a place of informed research and write in such a way that would stitch pieces of a puzzle together. So my family stories became a piece of the puzzle to help readers get the broadest, most robust picture of Lumbee history. I’ve been fortunate to get a lot of support for that work from other Indigenous scholars, but also non-Indigenous people who say, “Yeah, it’s obvious that kinship, for example, family, is a really important part of how Lumbees have made decisions historically.” But we lack primary source documents written down—documents that really illustrate how important kinship is or how kinship actually functions. So in my case, it was an obvious opportunity to turn my relationship to my family and my family history into some examples of how that really important historical factor has worked for us.
Cathy [07:45]: This methodology comes out, I think, in a really lovely manner in the way that the book itself is pitched or the writing of it. It’s a very accessible text. It’s a very public scholarship text, and it’s clearly intended to reach different audiences through all these stories that you’re telling. I’m curious what draws you to public scholarship or that more public voice that many scholars across various disciplines struggle to emphasize, particularly in the context of the academy where we don’t tend to get a ton of training in it. What draws you to public scholarship as a genre?
Malinda [08:26]: Well, I think it’s kind of organically driven by my actual membership in the public. I am a member of the public, even as I’m also a member of an academic community and the languages that academics use to speak about matters of concern to historical interpretation, to name one example. That’s a very powerful language and it’s important. It injects classroom teaching. One of our most important arenas of civic engagement is public education. So historical scholarship injects public and private education in a really important way.
[09:43] But I myself have found it sometimes frustrating to read academic texts that use language that doesn’t speak to me as a member of the public or to me as a Lumbee, as a citizen of the Lumbee Nation, or as a citizen of the American nation. I think the real gift of American Indian history and the way that we go about doing it for those of us that specialize in it is that, especially in the last 20 years, it’s seen as largely unacceptable to do this work in the absence of a relationship with a Native community, certainly the Native community that is the descendants of the folks that you’re writing about if you’re writing about the deeper past.
This applies to scholars who are both Native and non-Native. You don’t have to be Native to appropriately, ethically, and meaningfully engage with Native people. And as scholars, it’s sort of built in much more concretely into the way we teach one another and our methodology now to ask “What is the impact of these narratives on contemporary people now?” Because if we pretend like there’s not an impact, then we’re denying the the truth that colonialism is still with us and that colonialism is having a deep impact on Native people today.
[10:42] Writing for a public or a set of publics really started for me when my first book [The Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South] came out and my relatives said to me, “This is great and all but can’t you make it more understandable?” I love that piece of feedback because I had struggled with it so much in writing the book, knowing that it needed to speak to scholars and be driven by historical interpretation instead of stories.
I then took that piece of feedback from my relatives and said, “Well, what else can I do that promotes stories and where people really do recognize themselves in the text but also that helps remind people who are not Lumbee of the critical roles that American Indians play in our society today?” So there had to be an argument there, an interpretive backbone, but the flesh around the bone, for much of the work I hope to do in the future, is really about the kind of stories and the sorts of language and the sorts of information that my family and my community members find the most useful.
Cathy [11:54]: Do you have any favorite lessons learned or techniques that you’ve learned to capture your writerly voice in this manner that you might offer up to other scholars who want to do more diverse forms of writing?
Malinda [11:57]: I got a really great piece of advice from my editor at the University of North Carolina Press when I was struggling with this question of voice while writing my second book. He said to sit down and write one paragraph to someone that you want to read this book. The content of the paragraph should answer what is this book about? What is this book trying to do? What is its purpose? But how would you write it if you’re writing it to an individual that you wanted to be part of your audience.
[12:50] Immediately my mind went to James Baldwin’s…is it Notes from a Native Son that’s written to his nephew? Immediately my mind went to James Baldwin’s work and thinking about the way in which it’s constructed as a letter. So I wrote a letter to my daughter as that first practice paragraph about audience and defining the audiences. My daughter, who at that point was probably eight years old and she’s 12 now, was not the end-all-be-all of who is going to read the book. And it’s not written at an eight-year-old level. But there were things that I wanted her to know. I wanted to be able to tell her in language that I thought if she didn’t understand it at a eight she’d be able to understand it at age 16 or 18 what it meant to be Lumbee and an American and a woman and all of these other interesting intersections that our history displays.
So following that piece of advice to write one paragraph to somebody that you want to read the book was really transformative to me. It wound up in the book, actually, not in the exact same form in which I wrote it to Lydia, but it did wind up in the book and has proven to be something I’ve come back to again and again as I’ve tried to explain to folks what this is.
Cathy [13:53]: I’d love to turn a little bit back in time to your filmmaking and television work because I’m really struck by how that informs the way that you approach your scholarship and how you even approach this public emphasis on writing. One of the television shows I know that you’ve produced is a PBS show called A Chef’s Life, which is about cooking and the opening of restaurants. What got you interested in cooking and foodways, first of all?
Malinda [14:22]: I really got involved in that project because it’s an eastern North Carolina project. The show is about a place. In some ways we think of Southern cuisine you know, shrimp and grits. It’s just this hodgepodge of dishes from different locales within the South. But the South is a region of regions, a region of subregions, and the kind of cuisine that we have in eastern North Carolina, which is where the Lumbee homeland is, is a particular kind of cuisine. There are certain dishes or certain ingredients.
Vivian Howard, the host and co-creator of that show, was really interested in displaying how we get from homegrown ingredients to dishes that in some cases define a larger audience’s understanding of Southern cuisine but in other cases are really different than what an audience thinks of when they think of the South. One good example is Tom Thumb, which is a form of sausage that is pretty ubiquitous in eastern North Carolina but is virtually unknown outside of it.
[15:29] Our television show manages to focus on place in a substantive but also meaningful way, a way that helps people understand the region differently and talk about the region differently. That’s what drew me to the show. Also, the show’s director and producer Cynthia Hill, she and I have collaborated for a number of years on things that were similar in the sense of how they helped people understand the South or a sense of place in ways that are less stereotyped and more accurate. Cynthia has a remarkable ability to tell stories visually and with sound that I really admire. So when I had an opportunity to work with her and do something about a place that I know and love, I didn’t want to pass it up.
Cathy [16:23]: I’ve noticed that among several of the guests that I’ve had on this show, the topic of Indigenous food sovereignty has come up as a key form of how those guests navigate their sovereignty activism—the importance of reclaiming Indigenous diets, crops, recipes, foodways, food histories, and ways of approaching cooking. I’m curious in your research across your various projects, both your scholarship and books as well as your film and television work, how has food sovereignty or maybe reclamation shown up for you?
Malinda [16:58]: I got interested in Lumbee foodways in particular because of some of the ironies that are associated not so much with the way we cook food or that we handle food but with the ways our foodways are talked about or sometimes just ignored by outsiders. So when talking about Southern cuisine, for example, there’s a fair amount of attention paid to the European and African influences on iconic dishes of Southern foodways. But if Native American contributions are acknowledged, they’re described usually as corn a couple hundred years ago. And then we’re left out of the story.
Fast forwarding to our contemporary situation in the twenty-first century when Native people in Robeson County and in North Carolina are faced with epidemic rates of food insecurity, it’s no surprise that that erasure has resulted in our inability to feed ourselves on our own land. The way that Southern foodways have been elevated and talked about has been part of this larger settler colonial project to come take over a place, erase its people, and then impoverish those people in their own home.
[18:15] The ways that Native food has been left out of the Southern foodways conversation is something that I care about a lot. I think it speaks to question to issues of food sovereignty. There are Lumbee people who organize a Native foodways event every year around Thanksgiving. There’s way more than just Thanksgiving when it comes to attention paid to Native foodways but people are really thinking consciously around that time of year to elevate the relationships between Natives and settlers. Well for us what needs to be elevated is the reality that there would be no settler foodways without Native foodways. Native foodways are a conduit to asserting our inherent sovereignty, the sovereignty that we possess as political communities that predate the existence of the United States. In the South, there’s an interesting conversation that’s led by food that helps us really understand how inherent sovereignty functions.
Cathy [19:28]: Have you found that you’re able to put any of the lessons or tactics that you developed as a film and television producer to work in the classroom?
Malinda [19:40]: Yeah. So there’s the level one of showing films and being fortunate enough to have access to some networks of new work or interesting work that is beyond what’s available on PBS or available to students in more mass media outlets. Being able to show that work is incredibly important.
Also, bringing filmmakers to my classes or to campuses that I’ve taught on is a really powerful tool to bring forward Native ownership of film representation. That by itself is a pretty significant way to turn around the appropriation energy that’s been driven in our direction, especially by Hollywood and by filmmaking in general. The very origins of filmmaking in the United States were with Native people as subjects. So being able to then say Native people can control our representations through film and here’s all of the ways in which we do it is a pretty phenomenal tool to use in a classroom where you’re trying to elevate Native perspectives on our own history and find the source material that Native people themselves have produced in order to tell a more accurate version of history.
[20:41] So I use film a lot in a variety of classes and I especially try to use film made by Native people as much as possible or that Native people have been deeply involved in the production and the storytelling. I think in terms of my teaching strategies, it goes back a little bit to your question about why write for a public or why engage with the public. My students are the public. Most students are the most important public that I interact with on a daily basis. So I use whatever vehicles that public needs to better understand the communities that they belong to and the communities that perhaps they have ignored or overwritten in the development of their own communities.
[21:49] If they need film as a tool, they need a certain cinematic introduction to a topic, then that’s what I try to provide in my class. Film is an incredibly effective way to visualize not just a problem but also the really dynamic ways in which communities come together to solve that problem.
I think about a film like Dawnland, which is about a Truth and Reconciliation process for children in the foster and adoptive care system in Maine—Indigenous children who went through that system in Maine. This film has been made and at its core is personal testimony of individuals who suffered at the hands of this abusive foster care and adoption system. Dawnland is a phenomenal example of how we think that someone else’s problem is over there, not part of our community. But when you watch the film and you hear these stories, you cannot deny that this phenomenon of abused and stolen children is at the heart of our democracy and how it was constructed. So the purpose of film in the classroom to me is to illustrate how problems or issues that we would like to see as not us or as exceptional in some way are actually at the core of how our country got to this point.
Cathy [23:26]: So much of your work is a really fantastic example of the incredible power and efficacy of bringing together academic scholarship, public scholarship, and art (and I would certainly include filmmaking in that category) with an emphasis on social change. What draws you to that nexus? What do you find particularly productive or compelling about bringing together academia, art, and activism?
Malinda [23:56]: This might sound overly simplistic and I hope it doesn’t sound dismissive, but I don’t see any other way to do it. Of course I’ve been shown examples throughout my life and my career of how you can consider these things separately. But when I think about the defining moments in my life where I’ve come to an awakening or when I’ve realized that I need to do something different, I needed to change my attitude, I needed to change my approach, it’s almost always because of something artistic that emerged in my life. And then my natural curiosity, I suppose, sends me on a little journey to figure out where does that come from? Where does that piece of art come from? What are the social or political economic forces that converged to make this art necessary in that particular moment? Answering questions that are driven by curiosity is what produces the scholarship and material that we teach with in classes.
[25:02] For me, the family I was raised in, the community I was raised in, we were taught that none of us are alone. We’re not individuals on this journey; we are members of communities that we have responsibilities to. In my home training, that community starts with your family but it quickly extends beyond your family to include neighbors. And when you really try to see who those neighbors are, of course it includes people who are distressed, people who do not have the kind of privilege that you do, people that don’t have the same degree of opportunity or comfort. In my family life, we have been in community with people who have different life circumstances than us.
[25:59] When you’re in community with people, it demands that you see their circumstances and, at least in the case of my home training, that you track down the origins for those circumstances. Art plays a role there because it’s often an artistic piece of work that elevates the question to begin with, that asks the question and says, “Hey, look at this!” What I love about documentary filmmaking is that it really looks at things that no one else will look at and that’s why I value it so much. Of course there are a thousand other ways to do that work; it just happens to be the one that I got interested in first.
Cathy [26:35]: This brings me to my absolute favorite question that I get to talk with folks about and it really gets at the heart of that big why behind all of these varied projects that you work on. That’s that version of a better world that you’re working towards when you create films, when you step in front of a class, when you sit down to write. So I will ask you this giant question: what kind of world do you want?
Malinda [26:58]: That is a great question. I want all the worlds. I think that when I tell my daughter, “I love you to the end of all the universes and back,” that’s just a little way of rephrasing for her a concept that I ran across in physics sometime ago: that this is probably not the only universe. There very well could be other universes that we are nested within or that we have a spatial relationship to that is beyond our ability to understand. So if I think about what kind of world I’m looking for or trying to create, it’s a world in which my daughter feels connected and supported in her journey towards serving others.
I want to live the kind of life where the work that I do has a meaningful impact on others. As I realized what that really means, I’m not the one that gets to define what impact looks like. I’m not the one that gets to decide what kind of impact other people need. So I guess the kind of world I want to create is more of a process than a container. It’s a process where we can live in relation as those universes are in some kind of relation to each other, where we are listening to create new things that are useful to others and also to ourselves.
Cathy [28:24]: Well, thank you so much for being with us today and sharing all the ways that you imagine otherwise.
Malinda [28:29]: I really appreciate the opportunity. I’m excited for all of your work. Thank you.
Cathy [28:38]: [upbeat music in background] Thanks for listening to another episode of Imagine Otherwise. Imagine Otherwise is produced by Ideas on Fire and this episode was created by Michelle Velasquez-Potts and myself, Cathy Hannabach.
You can check out the show notes for this episode on our website at ideasonfire.net where you can also read about our fabulous guest as well as find links to the people and projects we discuss on the show. [music fadeout]
