Books like The Only Land I Know; A History of the Lumbee Indians

The Lumbees are reportedly the largest group of Indians east of the Mississippi, but not well known outside of the Carolinas. Dial is himself a Lumbee, and a professor emeritus of history at UNC at Pembroke in Robeson County, the area where the largest concentration of Lumbees occurs. The book is therefore personal as well as historical and he is clearly invested in his subject. That said, the account of the history of Lumbee Indians is moving and compelling. One thing that makes this book particularly interesting to me is that Dial clearly believes the tradition that the Roanoke Colony (the group that included Ananias and Elinor Dare, parents of Virginia Dare, the first European child born in North America) that disappeared between 1587 and 1590 was absorbed into the Croatoan nation that then populated the North Carolina coastal region, and that many Lumbees today are descendants of those English settlers. Other historians question this, but few have come up with a better explanation of what happened to the settlers.