If you asked the man on the street, he might say that the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina is controlled by roughly 300 of its 57,000 members. These numbers mean that almost zero percent of our enrolled tribal population is doing everything for themselves and nothing for 100 percent of our tribe.

I estimate that 99 percent of all Lumbee people are not interested or concerned with our tribal government. We feel our government to be unethical, immoral, dysfunctional and completely corrupt. We feel powerless to change it.

In 2012, four Canadian native women felt the same way about their tribal conditions and decided to do something about it. They organized grassroots communities to oppose efforts to weaken Canada’s environmental protection laws. In less than a year, Canada’s “Idle No More” has become a worldwide phenomenon dedicated to being “unified and standing together for indigenous sovereignty.”