Jessica R. Locklear

This dissertation project addresses the history of American Indian mobility and focuses on two large-scale migrations carried out by members and ancestors of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina: southward from 1880 to 1920, and northward from 1945 to 1970. While these migration stores are often obscured in traditional archives, this project facilitates the collection and exchange of Indigenous knowledge that preserves and makes the history of Lumbee migrations and American Indian mobility legible to a larger public audience. By collecting stores of and connecting these two visible waves of Lumbee migrations, this dissertation project demonstrates that Indigenous peoples have intergenerational histories of utilizing mobility as a mode of adaptation to ever-changing historical circumstances while maintaining distinct Indigenous identities within the settler-colonial world.