Restorying the Native Southeast
June 8, 2026
By Nikki Locklear
(All photo credits: Joshua Chorman, UNC-Chapel Hill American Indian Center)
On a March evening in the Pembroke Holiday Inn’s conference room, Chef Pat Dial called together a boisterous group of people who had gathered for dinner. He stood before a table laid out with everything he needed for the culinary demonstration asked of him. There was a large, steaming slow-cooker. He had culinary tools that were, if not “traditional,” convenient: a stand mixer, a pasta roller, ingredients in containers. Mr. Dial wore a white apron, a corn necklace, and a shirt whose tribal seal peeked out on his chest. This evening, he would launch into a story about his grandmother’s chicken soup. When I first learned that this was the dish, I wondered if it fit into our theme as I had hoped—what did tradition mean, and was “chicken soup” Native enough? Mr. Dial’s story gave a resounding confirmation that rejected the very premise of the question. As a Lumbee person, I should have known better than most that such questions have nothing to do with what we do or who we are.
Chef Pat Dial talking with Nikki Locklear
His characters were several sharecropping families whose diverse backgrounds came together in the kitchen. There were Lumbee families, Black families including Gullah Geechees, a Scottish family, and a Creole family. “Can you imagine the recipes that were swirling around that place?” Mr. Dial asked. From one another, they learned new ways that they then incorporated into their own dishes. This cultural exchange is what created the chicken soup we were eating that evening. As Mr. Dial went about preparing the pastry that went into it, he painted a picture of culinary fusion as an inspiring, intimate, and impactful mode of connection. Through food, his grandmother was expressing her identity and practicing the adaptability that carried peoples of the Southeast through the last five hundred years of change.
“There had to be a bond there that surpassed color, that surpassed race, that surpassed culture. Food’s glue,” Mr. Dial emphasized as he told the story. The emotional understanding was audible in his voice. It was evident on the faces of the listeners. Sharing this culinary story showed how food makes us feel and connect, but it also asserted significance that went well beyond a moment family memory. Mr. Dial concluded with definitive observation, saying, “They shared recipes that were not Lumbee. They made it Lumbee.”
Through his recounting, the demo encapsulated what “restorying” as a concept could mean. Mr. Dial may run a catering business, but his passion for food sovereignty and preservation of culinary traditions runs deeper. In organizing the event, we imagined the culinary demo as a dynamic modeling of what “restorying” looks like in action. Food sovereignty is a big element of the revitalizing movement underway all around us; the demo showed how food could tap into our memories and stir our emotions just as well as it wafted appetizing scents and satisfied hunger. Food, like the land, holds history.
In this case, a fusion dish reflected a special community and symbolized something at the heart of Native identity here in the Carolinas. Mr. Dial explained how Native communities had moved away from their old ways and into a harmful yet all-encompassing way of living. “For thousands and thousands of years, we lived off the land,” he lamented. “Here in the last hundred years, we’ve been putting processed food into our bodies.” Around the room, people nodded their heads and murmured in agreement. His demo was a call to action. It defined restoration as, not going back to the past, but ensuring our ancestors recognize their values in the future we’re building. It reframed that work as a homecoming.
What Mr. Dial said as he wrapped up the demo summarized exactly that:
“When I was in this room with you today, there was nobody on any type of cell phone. You were so engaged. There was a happiness there. Y’all were catching up. I hated to even say anything because y’all act like it’s homecoming. And that’s the phenomenal part about reconnection, food. Now you ate, you’re ready to talk some more. […] I appreciate every one of you—there’s many folks in here that’s doing phenomenal work ... There’s so much success in this room … We are blessed people. We’ve got federal recognition—took us a hundred and forty years, but look what we learned in those hundred and forty years. We have been resilient, we have been trailblazers and, at the end of the day, when we walk away from this, we’re gonna be able to leave something for our families that they’re going to remember.”
No keynote speaker delivered a lecture. There was not a panel with a moderator. Instead, a lively group—practitioners, scholars, students, culture-keepers—took ownership of the space, letting their shared love for the Southeast and its peoples lead the way.
INDIANS DANCE ONE WAY, OUR PEOPLE DANCE ANOTHER
During a 2024 summer class visit to one of the region’s tribal nations, I was struck by an anecdote about revitalizing traditional dancing. This person’s vision—personally and as someone engaged in her nation’s history and culture—was to see a transition from pan-Indian traditions like powwow dancing to their own culturally specific practices. It wouldn’t be an easy dream to realize, she explained. There were technical obstacles. As she described it, choreographing the dances anew had to be done using descriptions from elders now passed. More significant would be overcoming resistance and contrary guidance from other tribal leaders, especially men with greater social capital and political power. This posed a peculiar problem in a Southeastern context. She wanted to fulfill the traditional duty of Native women in protecting and managing the cultural lifeblood of her people. Yet, twenty-first century Southeasterners too often remain somewhat estranged from those worldviews and lifeways that were unquestionably central to our ancestors’ daily, cultural, and political existences.
Summertime exploration of the contemporary Southeast’s cultural landscape inspired my proposal that became, almost two years later, this public scholarship event about storytelling and cultural revitalization. This striking anecdote represents a larger happening in our corner of Indian Country. We are living within a hopeful era seeking to reunite Carolina peoples with their ancestors in what I consider the closest manner yet. For the first time in generations, Carolina Natives are publicly speaking languages their ancestors understand, playing games they recognize, uncovering histories they remember, and reintroducing themselves to the land they stewarded. I heard the term “blood memory” used more than once by those doing this work. It resonated. The activities you can find everywhere from Lumbee land to Catawba country and all along the riverine paths our ancestors knew well are familiar in a marrow-deep, timeless way. These activities are expressions of creative and scientific knowledge built over the course of, not decades or centuries, but millennia. Too many ancestral ways have lain fallow for two centuries, although the intervening generations tended the seeds as best they could. Now, in this new age, they’re starting to sprout.
“FOOD’S GLUE,” SO WE ALL STICK TOGETHER
Once it became a reality, we knew this event had to honor this figurative springtime ushered in by the love and labor of our people. Restorying the Native Southeast became a preconference dinner held on the opening evening of the Southeast Native Studies Conference. The University of North Carolina at Pembroke hosts the conference each year, and our contribution aimed to give attendees a chance to talk too much, laugh too loud, and eat good food before immersing themselves in panels and talks. It was an interinstitutional effort organized by collaborators at UNCP, UNC Chapel Hill’s American Indian Center, and Duke's Forum for Scholars and Publics at the Franklin Humanities Institute. Its ultimate lack of facilitation was intentional. We wanted the dinner to be what academia rarely is, which is horizontal. There were guests invited to enrich the evening with their experiences beyond just Mr. Dial; Teryn Brewington (Sappony), Kim Pevia (Lumbee), and Hayes Alan Locklear (Lumbee) all brought perspectives shaped by their own contributions to the moment, including in health, art, advocacy, and other areas. No keynote speaker delivered a lecture. There was not a panel with a moderator. Instead, a lively group—practitioners, scholars, students, culture-keepers—took ownership of the space, letting their shared love for the Southeast and its peoples lead the way.
As Mr. Dial predicted, they were ready to talk plenty more about that shared love by the time the demo portion wrapped up and their soup bowls were empty. The event’s key element, aside from enthusiastic participation, was the seating. We arranged several large round tables with a ton of chairs, and we labeled them with what I consider the constituent parts of this “restorying” effort: storytelling and memory-keeping, place and ecology, healing and foodways, learning and education, art and material expression, leadership and advocacy. I thought this kind of structure may inspire conversation, raise questions, perhaps facilitate connections. However, the several dozen people carrying on together for those three hours defied the plan of labeling and categorizing their interdisciplinary, wide-ranging interests. People sat where they pleased with the keywords as passive prompts that the gathering, happily, hadn’t needed after all.
Although there were the typical last-minute decisions, harried errands, and logistical hiccups once the day arrived, I find any annoyances tend to fade into the background of happy memories. What I remember most several weeks out is not the planned agenda or set-up process. I remember how it felt to be there. I remember my hands shaking with excitement as I recorded the demo. I remember when an elder hopped into Mr. Dial’s talk and turned it into a conversation. I remember when Dr. Lou Brown, whispering, asked how we might end the back-and-forth and transition. To paraphrase, I replied, “An old person does this every time, and we have to sit and listen until they’re finished!” I remember how the room later shifted back from collective attention to a dozen overlapping discussions. I remember the noise, the cheer, the contagious warmth spreading. I remember rushing bowls of soup and slices of pie all around the room, occasionally interrupting to beg the attendees to walk off with the leftovers. I remember bright smiles, hugs, reunions and first meetings. I remember how everyone looked—how at home they were. I remember that when the event was officially over, a handful of people stuck around for a while because they were too deep in conversations. When it felt like the evening had run its course, I remember that they helped me move the tables and turn off the lights, too.
BLOOD MEMORY, LIKE BEING INDIAN, IS SCIENCE AND SPIRIT
As we traveled the Carolinas like John Lawson in June of 2024, my summer class met an incredible cast of men and women animated by blood memory. They told stories about projects underway that were exciting and invigorating if also frustrating and upsetting. They had throughlines. Funding and official—or colonial—red tape slowed down progress and limited how these creative, hardworking people might manifest their visions. Yet, they took us out to their waterways, to their historic sites, to their workspaces, and we could see all they had accomplished despite every limitation. A few were there, two years later, eating chicken soup. Their presence reminds me that we can now stand on Native lands, listening to Native voices sing Native songs, knowing that Native hands are busy reclaiming our homelands and creating new traditions from the old ways.
I wept as I listened to a few Coharies singing that summer. Moments before, Dr. Mary Ann Jacobs had pointed out that the end of their historic canoe then displayed before us, one that was six hundred and fifty years old, resembled a conch shell. That had been the first instance of blood memory in our class—that a member of our tribe had taken to blowing conch shells well before such horn was discovered at our Buie Mound archaeological site. When I returned home after that trip to learn the Coharie story of restoration and revitalization, I noticed something in the yard I hadn’t noticed before that particular day.
It was a conch shell.
Small coincidences may be meaningless, but I find our people tend to think otherwise. Dragonflies, representations of ancestors gone, were everywhere as we listened to our relatives tell about the sprouting, or the reawakening, happening in our world. They danced at ancestral mounds, darted alongside restored waterways, hovered near medicine plants and berry bushes. Everywhere I looked, signs waited to confirm what I already knew: it’s always a good day to be Indigenous, but we live in an exceptional time when new generations of Native communities are preparing for the full bloom of those seeds protected centuries ago and planted in living memory.
In my dissertation, I write about how our ancestors survived the end of the world. They thus protected the metaphorical seeds that subsequent generations planted. I think of those generations as the ones who emerged from isolation and invisibility to reassert themselves, which they did by building schools, daring to name themselves, and demanding acknowledgment from the colonial entities who believed the vanishing had been real. They lived in a time where being Indigenous was harder—when it was shameful and marginalized, especially in the Southeast with its oppressive triracial society and the resulting strain of virulent racism. Yet, these people insisted on reawakening history and culture in the ways they knew how. Decades of struggle have passed since then. We have new ways of knowing, and those new ways are helping us take even further the mission of reconnecting our shared past to our collective future. Going from the end of the world to today’s world of possibility should inspire gratitude for those who came before as well as pride in those who will come next.
As I looked around that conference room in March, that’s exactly what I saw.
2025-26 | Nikki Locklear, Ph.D. candidate in History
NIKKI LOCKLEAR is a PhD candidate in history at Duke University. She was the 2025-26 Anne Firor Scott Graduate Fellow in Public Scholarship.
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