Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Please join WGS in welcoming Dr. Maynor Lowery (UNC Chapel Hill) on Tuesday, April 23, 2019 from 4pm to 5:30pm in the Maple Room, EUC. 

Her presentation is titled “They Can Kill Me, But They Can’t Eat Me”: Lumbee Indians and the War on Drugs.

In Robeson County, North Carolina during the Reagan administration, narcotics were big business for whites, blacks, and Lumbee Indians. The assassination of Lumbee attorney Julian Pierce—a known opponent of drug dealers and the police officers alleged to collaborate with them—in 1988 sheds light on how Lumbee people on both sides of the law sought to acquire power that would promote their self-determination, and the multiple ways in which race and sovereignty can shift our understandings of the war on drugs.

Malinda Maynor Lowery is a historian and documentary film producer who is a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. She is an Associate Professor of History at UNC-Chapel Hill and Director of the Center for the Study of the American South. She writes on topics including American Indian history, Southern history, religion, music, and foodways. Her second book, The Lumbee Indians: An American Struggle, was published by UNC Press in September 2018. The book is a survey of Lumbee history from the eighteenth century to the present, written for a general audience. Her first book, Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation (UNC Press, 2010) won several awards, including Best First Book of 2010 in Native American and Indigenous Studies. She has published essays in the New York Times, Oxford American, The North Star, and Scalawag Magazine. She has won fellowships and grants from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Sundance Institute, the Ford Foundation, and others. Films she has produced include the Peabody Award-winning A Chef’s Life (currently airing on PBS), 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.

When: Apr 23, 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm

Location: EUC Maple Room, UNCG