Arlinda Locklear

PEMBROKE — New regulations pushed by the Obama administration intended to make it easier for American Indian tribes to obtain federal recognition will not help the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina in its quest, according to the attorney who represented the tribe in Washington for more than 20 years.

Arlinda Locklear, a Pembroke native who has represented about a dozen tribes across the country in their efforts for federal recognition, told The Robesonian on Tuesday that the Lumbee tribe is not eligible to seek recognition under the new rules because it must obtain recognition through Congress rather than the usual process of going through the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The Bureau of Indian Affairs is a division of the U.S. Department of Interior.

Wording in a 1956 congressional bill granting the Lumbee tribe recognition without awarding the benefits usually associated with that status prohibits the tribe from going through the Bureau of Indian Affairs to gain full federal recognition.

“Nothing has changed. We are still at the same place,” Locklear said.

Federal recognition would mean the tribe could establish its own government, set up a legal system, and collect taxes and fees.

For the Lumbee tribe, full federal recognition could mean hundreds of millions of dollars a year in federal money for housing, health care, education and economic development.

Although the Lumbee Recognition bill has twice passed in the U.S. House, it has never received approval in the U.S. Senate. The closest the bill has ever came to passage in the Senate was in the early 1990s when it was defeated by a filibuster organized by Jesse Helms, a Republican from North Carolina.

According to a recent report by The Associated Press, the new recognition regulations are an effort by the Obama administration to update the current system that American Indians across the country have criticized because it takes years and piles of paperwork for each application. The regulations are expected to enhance transparency of the process by letting the public see most of the documents submitted by the petitioning groups on the Internet, as well as give tribal groups facing recognition rejection the chance to take their case to an administrative judge before a final determination is made.

The Associated Press also reports that under the new regulations, American Indian groups will no longer have to show that outside parties identified them as an Indian entity dating back to 1900. Those tribes seeking recognition must now only document that they have existed as a community and exercised political control over their members as early as 1900.

Since the current system of seeking tribal recognition through the Bureau of Indian Affairs began in 1978, the government has recognized 17 tribes and rejected the petitions of 34 other groups. In all, there are 566 federally recognized tribes.

The Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina is the largest tribe east of the Mississippi River. Most of the tribe’s more than 55,000 members live in Robeson and surrounding counties.

North Carolina formally recognized the Lumbee tribe in 1885. Three years later, in 1888, the tribe began its march toward federal recognition.

Congress passed legislation recognizing the tribe in 1956, but failed to provide the tribe with the federal benefits that other federally recognized tribes receive.