It already shows a Native community exercising collective strength in the middle of the twentieth-century South, at a time when many Americans still imagined Native history as something that had ended generations earlier.

Hayes Pond proved otherwise.

The Lumbee were not a memory from the past.

They were a living people defending the present.

That may be the most important image to carry forward from the field near Maxton.

Not the robes.

Not the gunfire.

Not even the captured banner by itself.

The strongest image is the crowd.

A community that had been told repeatedly by governments, segregationists, and outsiders how it should be classified arrived in overwhelming numbers and answered for itself.