To the Editor
Here at July 2017, the Lumbee people need more to celebrate each other. We need joy in our faith, fellowship, families and friends.
We enjoy our golf carts, our collard sandwiches, our grape ice cream, our pageants, our cookouts, our sports competitions, our parades, our gospel singings and our vendors.
We complain about the heat, but we sweat it out. We think about having Lumbee Homecoming in November and tempers rage higher than July heat waves.
We complain about our Lumbee Tribal Government, and we wait it out every three years and then we put the same type of people back in.
We complain about national politics, but we have so much on our plate in Robeson County that there is no room for national stage discussion.
We take the time to complain about our schools, our streets, our unemployment and our neighbors. We, however, never take the time to work together to improve any of these.
We go to church in our Sunday finest and forget on Monday how to “love thy neighbor.”
We forget the places we came home to decades ago. We forget that cropping was shared. We forget that there were no barriers when food was put on the table. We forget that when you looked down at someone, it was to help them up.
We Lumbee are a people of progress. We have progressed in isolating ourselves from the responsibility of caring for one another. We have progressed in becoming more illiterate. We are more likely to shoot each other and more likely to die young and in a violent way. In our future there may be a day that the Lumbee won’t want to come home.
I remember those early Homecomings. They weren’t annual events, they were daily recognitions of a healthy life founded in faith, family and friends.
Lumbee Homecoming used to be an all year happening. You felt loved wherever you were. You showed love to whomever you met. Yeah, it’s time for the Lumbee to come back home.
Eric R. Locklear
Fayetteville