Media Specialist Dana Ramseur made this tintype of herself at her ancestral home and uses this image for her published books.
Recently we have had a new addition to our staff here at Watauga High School in Dana Ramseur, our new librarian. But Ramseur is far more than just a librarian. She is a spokesperson, an educator, a cultural event planner, and a mother. Yet even all of those titles don’t fully encompass her. The identity that Ramseur cherishes the most is her American Indian roots.
“Before anything, before I’m a female, before I’m a human, I’m American Indian. And I know it. There’s nobody that can tell me otherwise,” Ramseur said.
When Ramseur was a middle school student in Charlotte Mecklenburg schools she was a part of a program called the Charlotte Indian Education program. Through this program she met Rosa Winfrey, one of the biggest influences on her life, who helped fostered within Ramseur a deep passion and love for her culture.
“She was everything to us. She was just amazing. She helped me with being able to speak and being able to be on time and work hard. I can't think of a bigger person in my life than her,” Ramseur said. “Rosa would say okay here we are with this tribe. I want you to go up there and tell about being a Lumbee. She had high expectations of us. I think back on how valuable it was because it taught me public speaking.”
While in this program Ramseur traveled to Oklahoma, Montana, Washington, and other places as an ambassador for her tribe, the Lumbee.
The Lumbee people consist of a unique mix of Algonquians, Iroquoians, and Siouans, originating in southeastern North Carolina. They are one of 8 distinct North Carolinian tribes. Their headquarters are in Pembroke, North Carolina.
Ramseur grew up in the more urban part of Charlotte Mecklenburg county where there were fewer American Indians, but she made many visits to the Lumbee cultural center in Pembroke. She attended University of Pembroke North Carolina.
“I feel a constant pull to go back to my cultural home. There’s this need, like I got to get home,” Ramseur said. “There’s this urgency for me. I need to get there just to get a little bit of drink of the family and the culture."
This swaying back and forth between cultures caused Ramseur to feel split between her life in Charlotte and her cultural heritage in Pembroke.
“I was constantly having to define what I was. In Charlotte it was hard for me to define myself. And then in Pembroke they would say things like, you try to talk better than us. You talk like a white girl,” Ramseur said. “The boys would call me an apple indian. I was red on the outside and white on the inside. I became super quiet, which then they’d say, oh she’s stuck up.”
Ramseur overcame this inner conflict in her own unique way.
“My twist on it is if I’m going to be an apple Indian, I’m going to be a candy. I’m just going to be myself.”
Ramseur has written three books, one of them called Poems and Hollers from a Candy Apple.
In light of Native American History Month coming up in November, Ramseur had some things to say about her people as a whole.
“They’re (The Lumbee) not in our history books. What’s hard is we can’t tell our stories because they’re not available unless we tell them ourselves,” Ramseur said.
Ramseur has been giving presentations to juniors at Watauga High School, giving a brief but compelling overview of the history and culture of the Lumbee tribe and their fight for federal recognition. Ramseur has been doing these presentations for years, exposing elementary, middle, and high school students to an Indigenous culture and history that they may have never heard of before.
When asked why she thinks it’s important to give these presentations, Ramseur said, “ I think it’s important because a lot of people don’t realize we exist. We are the minority of the minority. It’s just really important for us to have a voice and each of our voices are completely different, because the tribes differ.”
When many non-natives think of Native Americans in North Carolina, one name comes to mind: The Cherokee. Yet the Cherokee are only one of eight distinct Native American tribes in North Carolina.
“I think that a problem for Indigenous people is non-natives will put Native Americans together. There’s so many Native American tribes that are completely different,” Ramseur said. “They have different cultural identities, different cultural celebrations, food, etc.”
The Lumbee people were recognized as a distinct tribe in 1885 by the state of North Carolina. While the federal government recognizes the Lumbee as a tribe, it denies the Lumbee people the benefits that should come with recognition.
“Funding is how it affects us. There would be more opportunities to do drug prevention, teenage pregnancy prevention, gang violence prevention,” Ramseur said. “I know that we would be better off if we were fully federally recognized. And that’s just been a battle. We’ve been promised and promised and we just still have not gotten it yet.”
Empty promises are an all too familiar concept to Native Americans in the U.S. While Indigenous peoples day was first recognized as a holiday in 1934, only recently have people started to shift their focus away from Columbus Day to celebrating Native American culture. Despite a shift in focus, many Americans still celebrate Columbus, a man who massacred many Indigenous people and found America by accident.
“I tip the hat to the younger Indigenous natives that are getting a little bit louder and sort of demanding these things to be recognized. I do think a lot of people admired Christopher Columbus, like he was the start of us. But he was lost. And we were misidentified,” Ramseur said.
Recent progress in recognizing and respecting indigenous culture through the changing of offensive brand designs and team names have spurred an increase in awareness of Native American people, but the fight to come to terms with a torrid history of displacement and discrimination against Indigenous people is far from over.
One of the biggest struggles that Native Americans face in the U.S today is the colossal number of missing and murdered Indigenous women in the U.S. Recently there has been a lot of discussion over the phenomenon “Missing White Girl Syndrome,” which is the term used to describe the stark contrast between media coverage of white women and indigenous women.
“I think one thing a lot of Native American tribes have in common is knowing someone, either in our family or someone in the community that has been murdered. And it’s just the facts,” Ramseur said. “The bluer her eyes are, the quicker we go to try to find her. The quicker it’s on the news. There’s countless ethnic girls that are also going missing. It’s just not front page news.”
It’s not just coverage of Indigenous women in the present that is being overshadowed, the history of Indigenous people in America only takes up a small portion of our history textbooks.
“I think the school system can only teach us so much,” said Ramseur. “There’s just such a short time. And we’ve got to push ourselves beyond that and learn more about slavery, the Holocaust, and other genocides. I feel like within the state you should know how many tribes there are. There’s a lot of people that have no idea. They just think North Carolina, the Cherokee.”
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