Maria Sturm – You Don't Look Native to Me

The paradox of otherness is at the core of Maria Sturm’s ‘You Don’t Look Native to Me’. Her subjects belong to the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, the largest tribe in the region with around 55,000 members, with their name taken from the Lumber River of Robeson County. Starting in 2011, Sturm spent time photographing their daily lives. It opened up questions about visibility, identity, and stereotype in the US, where Native Americans are romanticized yet often dismissed. Many tribes remain officially unrecognized, though the sense of identity within the communities is very strong.”

Charlotte Jansen — British Journal of Photography

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. Their tribal status remains one of the most debated in the United States.