Maria Sturm, You Don't Look Native to Me

You Don't Look Native to Me

Maria Sturm

Publisher
Void
Year
2023
ISBN
978-618-5479-30-5
Specifications
Hardcover
22 x 29 cm
112 pages
500 copies
Design by João Linneu, Myrto Steirou
Shortlisted The Book Awards Prix du Livre d'Auteur 2024 – Le Rencontres d'Arles
First Prize PhMuseum Women Photographers Grant 2018
Winner Daylight Photo Award 2020

In 2011, Maria Sturm began to photograph the lives of young people from the Lumbee Tribe around Pembroke, Robeson County, North Carolina. Through the process of documenting their lives, Sturm began to question her own understanding of what it means to be Native American. Her new book 'You Don't Look Native to Me' combines photographs with interviews and texts to preconceptions and show Native identity not as fixed, but evolving and redefining itself with each generation. Pembroke is the tribal seat of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, the largest state-recognised tribe east of the Mississippi River. Although the Lumbee Tribe is state-recognised, they are federally unrecognised and do not have a reservation nor receive financial benefits from the federal government. The Lumbee name was voted for in 1952 to unite all tribes in the area in an attempt to gain federal recognition. On closer inspection elements of hybridity between heritage and contemporary life are revealed—a street named 'Dreamcatcher Drive', a 'Native Pride' baseball cap with feathers, Halloween fangs on a Tuscarora child in regalia. The presence of Native symbolism—on street signs, pictures on walls, on cars, on shirts and as tattoos—shows how a stereotypical image is often presented back to them.

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