Government institutions had spent generations defining the community through changing legal labels.

National audiences often defined Native Americans through stereotypes that had little to do with twentieth-century Robeson County.

The Lumbee response was a rejection of all three forms of outside authority.

The people at Hayes Pond did not wait for a Klan leader to recognize their dignity.

They did not need a photograph to create their identity.

They did not need a federal statute to make them a people.

Those things affected their lives politically, but they did not create the community itself.

That is why the battle remains connected to the recognition struggle even though the rally was not a congressional hearing or legal case.

Both conflicts ask the same underlying question in different forms:

Who gets to say who the Lumbee are?