East Carolina Native American Organization

🎓 SENIOR SPOTLIGHT 🎓

👨🏽‍🎓 Nehemiah Maynor

Nehemiah has remained heavily involved on campus throughout his undergraduate studies. He served as a great role model for Native students going through college and pushing to get that higher education! We are so proud of you and will continue to support you through your future endeavors. .maynor

ECNAO End of Year Celebration was a success!! 🎉

The evening was filled with laughter, snacks, games, getting to know each other, sharing what ECNAO means, and a fun giveaway!

Our giveaway eligibility was open to everyone who attended the meeting and showed that they followed us on Instagram…
Our $20 Doordash gift card winner:

We played a few games that consisted of:
• Take a picture in front of ECU Letters, someone with an ECU shirt, and doing a Pirate pose on the lawn
• “Zip Zap Zop” - don’t mess up the order!
• “ABC” storytelling
• Bring back the longest blade of grass (Earth Day)
• First person to bring someone outside of the room to say what ECNAO is
Our game sequence winner:

This year’s Culture Fest was a success!!

Thank you for including us in the amazing celebration and allowing to host a round dance! The evening was filled with food, connection, music, and dance! We met so many other great organizations as well! Already can’t wait for next year 🤗

ECNAO Graduation Celebration!!

Come join us to celebrate our seniors as well as an amazing year! Refreshments will be provided!!! EVERYONE is welcome!

Happy Easter from ECNAO!! 🐰🥚

ECNAO’s final official meeting of the Spring 2026 semester! Thank you all for attending and finishing us off very strong with a great discussion on the importance of Minority Health Month.

We are so excited to celebrate in a few weeks with everyone! More information will be shared soon!

Join ECNAO tomorrow for our April Meeting to hear from David Shane Lowry!

David Shane Lowry is an anthropologist and enrolled citizen of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. He grew up in the Lumbee community in Robeson County, North Carolina after moving from St. Louis, Missouri. He is married to Nichol Brewer-Lowry, a former Park Scholar at NC State.

In 2022-2023, he was Visiting Senior Fellow in the School of Social Policy at Brandeis University.

In 2021-22, he was Distinguished Fellow in Native American Studies at MIT. He taught and mentored first and second year medical students at Chicago Medical School. He also taught and mentored students at Biola University (Los Angeles).

David is a graduate of MIT (SB) and UNC-Chapel Hill (MA and PhD). His graduate work (in the Lumbee community) was funded by the National Science Foundation
Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF GRF). His recent book, Lumbee Pipelines: American Indian movement in the residue of settler colonialism, is a product of that work.

At University of Southern Maine (USM), David is Assistant Professor of Anthropology. At USM, he is leading IRL (Indigenous Relationships Lab) as a place for
and commitment to justice and re-mattering of American Indian and other Indigenous peoples from Maine, to Massachusetts, to North Carolina, to Hawaii.

David’s podcast, “Returning the Land”, is available on Apple, Spotify, and other podcast platforms

Trillium Health Resources 🍃

Thank you to Trillium who hosted there THRive event downtown Greenville, NC and invited us to share the ECU Land Acknowledgment. Our indigenous pride had been all over Greenville this year, and ECNAO has been ecstatic to share! Shout out to Kay Freeman and Sheena Richardson our Tribal representatives for Trillium!

Thank you to the North Carolina Association of Educators for inviting us to speak at this year’s Convention! 📚

With this year’s focus on “Building Union Power in the South,” it was an honor to contribute to such an important dialogue and to represent the East Carolina Native American Organization. The ECU Land Acknowledgment is especially important to not only ECU, but Greenville as a whole. It was a privilege to share our culture and history with such a great group of educators!

🎉 April Meeting 🎉

Join us next Wednesday for our April ECNAO meeting! We will vote for our 2026-2027 ECNAO board, hold a discussion on minority health month, and play some “April Fools” games!

Anyone is encouraged and welcome to join!