PEMBROKE, N.C. — The Lumbee Tribe waited 137 years for the federal recognition that would give it the legal right to build a casino. Then its members voted not to build one.
In a special election held Tuesday across 21 voting precincts in Robeson County and by absentee ballot, more than 9,000 enrolled tribal members rejected a constitutional amendment that would have cleared the way for the Lumbee Dark Water Resort and Casino, a proposed development on 240 acres of Interstate 95 land that tribal leaders had quietly purchased months before Congress even finished the recognition bill. CBS17 reported the final count as 5,553 against, 3,363 in favor. Roughly 62 percent voted no.
Tribal Chairman John L. Lowery, who simultaneously serves as a member of the North Carolina House of Representatives, had placed his leadership explicitly on the line. “If the amendment passes, the Lumbee Tribe will pursue gaming,” he told members before the vote. “If it does not pass, we will not.” On Tuesday night he kept his word. He posted on social media that the majority’s decision was “historic” and that he would not bring the issue forward again over the remaining 18 months of his term.
What the amendment would have done was narrower than its critics often characterized and more consequential than its sponsors acknowledged. The existing Lumbee tribal constitution requires a member referendum for gaming decisions, a provision that functions as a democratic brake on large-scale economic development. The proposed change would have transferred that authority to the tribal chairman and council. Proponents argued the referendum requirement was a structural impediment to the kind of fast decision-making the casino market demands. The opposition coalition, which organized under the name Lumbees United for Accountability, argued the amendment concentrated power in too few hands and dismantled the democratic check that tribal members had placed in their own constitution.
The I-95 corridor may be the most valuable unfilled casino real estate in North America. Between the gaming resorts of South Florida and the slot parlors of suburban Virginia, a stretch of highway covering roughly a thousand miles, there is no freestanding casino. The Lumbee land sits near the South Carolina border, approximately 110 miles south of Raleigh and 75 miles north of Myrtle Beach, at the geographic center of that gap. Tribal leadership had assembled 240 acres there by December, paying $6.8 million for two properties, five days before the federal recognition bill cleared the Senate. The resort concept they built around the land called for multiple hotels, a golf course, a convention and entertainment center, and a casino floor. None of it is currently moving forward.
The December recognition bill ended a formal campaign of 137 years, longer counting generations who fought for the same result without organized lobbying structures to do it. It arrived embedded inside a national defense spending bill signed by President Trump, the culmination of what lawmakers from both parties described as long-overdue corrective legislation. Under the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988, the federal statute that governs tribal casino operations, land must be taken into federal trust before a tribe can offer gaming on it. The Lumbee had already filed their first land-into-trust application when Tuesday’s vote intervened.
Their situation differs from other tribes navigating the same legal landscape this month. In Maine, the Wabanaki Nations recently finalized their first online casino agreement with Caesars Entertainment, a commercial milestone that followed their own recognition milestones. In North Carolina, the same set of federal rights produced an opposite outcome: not because the tribe rejected what recognition offered, but because the question of who gets to exercise those rights on behalf of the membership became a dividing line the vote could not paper over.
The $6.8 million spent on I-95 land is now in an unresolved position. Whether the tribe holds it for future development, sells it, or pursues a gaming operation through a different constitutional mechanism, one that does not require the centralization of authority the rejected amendment demanded, remains unanswered. Tribal leaders are scheduled to meet Thursday to discuss next steps.
The vote also arrived in a week when gambling regulation was moving simultaneously in several directions. Indiana is shutting down sweepstakes casino operations as a ban takes effect July 1, while a federal court case in Kentucky over prediction markets has reached a new phase. The Lumbee outcome complicates whatever narrative anyone was drawing about gambling’s direction in 2026, the story of a tribe that spent more than a century acquiring gaming rights and used its first genuine opportunity to exercise them democratically to decline.
Lowery offered a brief statement. “This decision by the majority of Lumbee voters is historic and ensures we will not move forward with gaming,” he wrote. Whether Tuesday settles the casino question permanently, or only until a new tribal chairman raises it again, is something the Lumbee constitution, and the 9,000 members who just exercised it, will eventually determine.
