In Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), the Cherokee tried to remain neutral, but Confederates threatened to foment insurrection if they didn’t join the cause. Members of the Creek Nation who tried to flee to Kansas were chased down. Those who made it out of Confederate territory were left to starve by Union troops.

Meanwhile, in Minnesota, the Union furthered the quest for Manifest Destiny by executing Indian resisters. In Arizona and New Mexico, the Union Army forced Indian men, women and children to march 400 miles to an internment camp.

The Confederacy’s commitment to slavery and the Union’s commitment to expansion were different versions of the same story of imperialism.

Tribes who remained east of the Mississippi approached the war with ambivalence. Eastern Band Cherokees formed a Confederate Army regiment, but a small group of Lumbee men led a multiracial gang of outlaws to violently resist Confederate assaults. Known as the Lowry War, this uprising helped send the Confederates packing and continued into Reconstruction.

When Radical Republicans gained control of the government in North Carolina, they came courting sympathetic Lumbee voters. Yet Republican authorities executed my great-great-grandfather for a murder he did not commit that was connected to the Lowry War. By hanging him, Republicans proved they cared more about their “law and order” reputation than they did about justice for their Lumbee constituents.

When slavery ended it took a widespread counterrevolution — election fraud, segregation laws and lynchings — for whites to re-establish control. In Oklahoma in 1898, a howling mob burned two Seminole teenagers alive after they were falsely accused of murdering a white woman. In North Carolina, my parents went to segregated Lumbee-only schools.

Indian communities defied the logic of racial segregation; their very existence belied whites’ insistence that there were two races, never to be mixed. In 1924, the Virginia legislature passed the Racial Integrity Act, which outlawed interracial marriage, in part by reclassifying American Indians as “colored.” The act erased the distinct identity that people like Chief Branham are still today trying to protect.