There are no buffalo hunts.

No frontier cavalry.

No nineteenth-century treaty council.

The setting is 1958 North Carolina.

There are cars, reporters, veterans, county officials, microphones, and a portable generator.

The people are modern Native Americans confronting a modern white supremacist movement.

That image is valuable because American culture has often trapped Native people in an imagined past.

Hayes Pond refuses that trap.

The Lumbee are Native precisely while living in the modern South.

Their identity does not depend on matching Hollywood expectations of what an Indian community should look like.