Native American Literature of North Carolina
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“As a child, I read a lot of books. I read constantly. I loved learning about new characters and exploring the world from my own house. The characters . . . might be adventurers, witches, wizards, doctors, lawyers, spies, explorers . . . However, there was one thing that they were not: Lumbee.” —Brittany D. Hunt (Author’s Note)
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Jane Haladay’s service learning assignment is included among the “Teaching North Carolina Literature” materials on NCLR’s website.
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Institute of Education Sciences’ National Center for Education Statistics in the United States website for Union Elementary School’s data from the 2020–2021 school year. Of note in this data is the fact that of 403 enrolled students at UES during this school year, four hundred were eligible for the free lunch program, one indicator of children living in low income and/or food insecure homes in Robeson County. According to the NCChild.org website scorecard for Robeson County elementary students, only 24.9% of third graders countywide scored proficient in reading. These are some of the reasons my service-learning community partnership with the third-grade teachers at UES for the past nine years has been so meaningful to me, to the teachers at UES, and to the third-grade Union Eagles and UNCP Native Literature students.
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For information on the eight state-recognized and one federally recognized American Indian tribes in North Carolina, see the Triangle Native American Society’s website. For a map of North Carolina tribal communities, see the North Carolina Department of Administration’s website.
Brittany D. Hunt, Whoz Ya People?, illus. Bea Brayboy (Independently published, 2020), unpaginated.
with them. I also thank Mr. Sandy Jacobs, the Director of the Office of Community and Civic Engagement at UNCP for his continued and unquestioning support of my service-learning activities with UES. Dr. Scott Hicks of the UNCP Teaching and Learning Center has long been my role model for best practices in service-learning, and he was the person who nudged me to take the plunge years ago, a step I have never regretted. A sincere miigwech to my writing pal, the author-scholar Dr. Carter Meland at the University of MinnesotaDuluth, for his suggestions on the original draft of this essay.
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COURTESY OF THE AUTHORS
children’s book Whoz Ya People?, reminds the story’s protagonist of a people’s powerful connections when he tells him, “Henry, Henry, don’t you know / there’s much power in your kin? / And when we ask ‘whoz ya people,’ / we want to know who you are and who you’ve always been.”2 Themes of kinship, community belonging, and cultural affirmation are also the centerpiece of the service-learning assignment I included in my fall 2021 Introduction to American Indian Studies class and spring 2022 Native American Literature class at The University of North Carolina Pembroke (UNCP).3 While I have regularly taught this service-learning literacy assignment in some form over the past nine years, during the academic year 2021–2022, I used for the first time the two Lumbee children’s books Whoz Ya People?, by Brittany D. Hunt and illustrated by Bea Brayboy, and It’s Lumbee Homecoming, Y’all! Nakoma’s Greatest Tradition, written by Leslie Locklear and Christina Pacheco and illustrated by Raven Dial-Stanley and Evynn Richardson. This service-learning collaboration takes place between my UNCP students and three third grade classes at Union Elementary School (UES) in Rowland, North Carolina, where the student population is approximately ninety two percent Lumbee.4 Authors Hunt and Pacheco are both Lumbee, as are all three of the wonderful third-grade teachers at UES – Katara Bullard, Ginger Brayboy, and Karen Revels – who have been my community partners in service learning for many years, along with other UES teachers. Author Leslie Locklear is Lumbee, Waccamaw Siouan, and Coharie, three of the staterecognized Native nations in North Carolina.5
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