SALISBURY — Native American, Indigenous People, Indian — they are all ways to refer to the same set of people, and in many cases, the general population still doesn’t know the correct history.

But a small but dedicated group of the Lumbee Indian tribe is working to change that.

On Saturday, June 17, a group of performers gave two presentations of both their native dance and drum routines along with an educational talk at the Rowan Museum on North Main Street in the hopes of helping people learn that what has been presented in films and on television is not the true history or the true current day behavior of their people.

Kaya Littleturtle spent more than an hour, twice, talking with those who attended the events about what Indian life was, and is, like.

“I was raised by my grandparents, and when they were growing up, being Indian was not cool,” he said. “But they began to try to recover traditions, and to teach them to me. Our traditions have not been lost, but have been dormant. And I am, in turn, teaching my children those traditions.”

He said he and his family live as traditional an Indian life as possible, rising each day to smudge their home in a cleansing practice, then engaging in singing and dancing practice together as part of their daily routine.

Littleturtle pointed out that North Carolina has the largest indigenous population east of the Mississippi River, and of all tribes in the state, the Lumbee is the largest. It is the ninth largest tribe in the country.

He explained that there is a difference between a powwow, which is an intertribal gathering of which there are many every weekend, and a performance, which is a more focused, planned presentation to an audience. He said his group can typical have more than 30 who attend a powwow, but only a dozen will participate in performances. His own children do participate as they are learning, and on Saturday, his son danced with another adult performer and drummer, Caleb Burnett, and a female dancer, Makala Braveheart.

Littleturtle said the Lumbee people have been multi-linguistic, but he himself has learned just the Tuscarora language at present.

“I had to work at it,” he said, “but it’s important. My biggest thing is to be conversationally fluent.” He wants his children to hear it and speak it naturally as well as English.

For the group, the goal is not only to teach people an accurate history of the Native American people, but to give them a view of what contemporary life is like. While they do wear tribal attire to performances and for specific events, Littleturtle is careful not to call the clothing costumes.

“A costume is what you wear when you are pretending to be someone else, but this is what we wear as we really are,” he said. “I think we need to make sure that our story is being told across time, because if we don’t, we forfeit our individualistic identity, and that’s dangerous, because we relinquish our story to others to tell, and it isn’t correct.”

Littleturtle has been the Lumbee cultural director for 10 years and continues to act as a consultant on the state level. He encourages people not only to not use the internet to get information on the history of Indigenous People, “Google is bad,” he laughed, but to attend a powwow or two themselves to learn first hand what the history and the present-day life of Indians involves.

Rowan Museum Director Evan Burleson said he was thrilled when the museum had the opportunity to host the group, and he is hoping it is another step in expanding the educational opportunities the museum offers. Part of his goal is to widen the range of local history presented by the museum, he said.

Between the two performances, there were close to 100 attendees on Saturday, and Littleturtle said he was happy with the turnout considering the number of local events taking place that day.