Review by Unmai M. Arokiasamy and Matt Schneider •
Outsiders have long struggled to make sense of a Lumbee Indigeneity that does not conform to colonial imaginations of Nativeness. It is against this backdrop that You Don’t Look Native to Me, by Maria Sturm, explores Lumbee culture and their long struggle for tribal recognition – a difficult task, to be sure. How does anyone, but especially an outsider, represent and situate modern Lumbee identity, and how does one do this while recognizing the long and continued history of U.S. colonialism? Can a photobook, such as Sturm’s, give voice to Indigenous groups, like the Lumbee People, while reckoning with the many ways Indigenous voices have been and continue to be silenced in the place now known as the United States?
As a Lumbee person from Robeson County (Arokiasamy) and a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke (Schneider), we were a bit wary of You Don’t Look Native to Me when we first encountered it. Sturm is a European photographer with limited connections to the Lumbee People prior to 2011, when she began her photography project in Pembroke, NC. According to Sturm, when she first heard of the Lumbee People, questions about federal recognition and Native stereotypes began to flood her mind. She decided to come to our community with questions about what “makes someone Native” and to explore Lumbee identity more intimately.
Sturm’s photobook foregrounds the viewer with images of place, people, land, and jewelry before introducing any text. After the first few pages (they are not numbered) and throughout the rest of the book, photos are supplemented by excerpts of transcribed interviews, state government documents, and news coverage of local events/politics (most significantly, the Lumbee Recognition Act of 1956). In a transcribed exchange between Johnathan Jacobs and Sturm, a perceived loss of history frames the beginning of You Don’t Look Native to Me. Jacobs and others throughout the book share that the Lumbee People have experienced a loss of their history, culture, language, ways of life, etc., and share opinions that sometimes conflict with each other. Cultural revitalization is a topic that follows, almost as a response to this first opinion, and Sturm shares pieces of oral history transcripts that investigate and reflect on the many layers of an ethnic renewal in Southeast North Carolina.
As the reader flips through Sturm’s photos of people, places, and artifacts in Robeson County, we also see snippets of conversations about discrimination, disunity, stereotypes, federal recognition, contemporary social and political issues, and a local awareness of how the Lumbee are perceived outside of the tribe. Taken together, we begin to uncover the social construction of the contemporary Lumbee Nation and the layered nature of Lumbee identity.
A major strength of You Don’t Look Native to Me is the transcribed interview excerpts and archival materials interwoven throughout the book, which provide the reader with a sense of social and political opinions relating to the Lumbee Tribe and Robeson County. Still, there were times at which more information or greater context would have been appreciated. Even when flipping to the front inside cover, the omission of family names was striking, because common surnames, including but not limited to Dial, Chavis, Hunt, Jacobs, Locklear, and Oxendine, are strong markers of identity and community in the Lumbee Tribe. Additionally, there are many interesting photos that would benefit from captions or relevant text. Picturing but not providing information about locally important historical figures like Julian Pierce, a Lumbee lawyer and local politician who fought for federal recognition until his mysterious murder in 1988, and Henry Berry Lowry, the leader of the Civil War/Reconstruction Era Lowry Gang, feels like a missed opportunity to provide readers with greater insight into Robeson County and Lumbee history.
On one hand, Sturm does well to capture photos that speak to Lumbee culture and sense of place. There are several photos of the Lumbee River, portraits of young families and groups of friends, and depictions of other important local symbols, such as the University of North Carolina at Pembroke’s “Braves” logo, elderly hands opening to show a fistful of pecans, red-tailed hawk feathers pinned to a baseball cap, and pow wow regalia. Sturm’s photos also highlight the ways in which Lumbee identity and culture continues to be shaped by forces external to Robeson County. Sturm, for example, photographs multiple interior living spaces that have on display feather headdresses, dreamcatchers, and books with titles like, Native American Clothing, The World of the American Indian, and A Song for Mother Earth, suggesting a generalized or panethnic Native identity. Interestingly, this same desire to represent the Lumbee’s relationship to a wider social world also results in photographs that present contradiction, such as an image of a Lumbee man dressed in a jacket and hat emblazoned with Washington Football Team’s racist former logo. This desire to portray the Lumbee in ways that challenge white cultural imagination and stereotypes about Indigenous peoples is commendable, and for this reason, it is not hard to see why Sturm’s work has been featured in outlets like CNN and exhibited in New York, Rhode Island, and the Netherlands.
On the other hand, this photobook, assembled by a Romanian photographer from Germany, exists against a historical backdrop in which Indigenous peoples have not been allowed, by and large, to represent themselves. On some level, it is clear that Sturm recognizes this, and chooses to include excepts that call for greater Lumbee sovereignty and a need for Lumbee unity. Yet, this photobook (hopefully) encourages readers to question how and why outsiders, Sturm included, are “needed” to orchestrate such a project, especially given the fact that there is no shortage of Lumbee people and other locals working to document Lumbee history and culture. Many Lumbee elders, including Dr. Lynn Jacobs who is quoted in this photobook, continue to act as storytellers and knowledge keepers, passing down Lumbee tradition and history to future generations. Additionally, scholars, such as Dr. Ryan Emanuel, Dr. Malinda Maynor Lowery, and Dr. David Wilkins, have and continue to write about the Lumbee people in both historical and contemporary contexts. Still more, UNC-Pembroke, which was originally founded as the Croatan Normal School to train Native teachers, continues to take seriously its relationship to the Lumbee Tribe, maintaining, for example, a Lumbee History and Culture Collection in their Special Collections and Archives and the Museum of the Southeast American Indian.
In the end, You Don’t Look Native to Me, is a provocative read, raising more questions than answers. The book itself is very satisfying to engage with, the hardcover is attention grabbing, and the arrangement of the photos is visually stimulating and compositionally thoughtful. As a work of documentary photography, the book might serve well as a useful first introduction to the Lumbee for readers outside of North Carolina, hopefully pushing them to question common cultural assumptions and stereotypes about Indigenous peoples in the United States and toward deeper engagement with the history and culture of the Lumbee (see suggested further reading below).
Further Reading
Hail to UNCP: A 125-Year History of the University of North Carolina at Pembroke by David K. Eliades, Lawrence T. Locklear, and Linda Oxendine.
“Breaching Barriers: The Fight for Indigenous Participation in Water Governance” by Ryan Emanuel and David Wilkins. Water.
“Stories We Tell: Unpacking Extractive Research and Its Legacy of Harm to Lumbee People” by Ryan Emanuel and Karen Dial Bird. Southern Cultures.
“Water in the Lumbee World: A River and Its People in a Time of Change” by Ryan Emanuel. Environmental History.
“Down by the Ol’ Lumbee: An Investigation into the Origin and Use of the Word “Lumbee” Prior to 1952” by Lawrence Locklear. Native South.
The Lumbee Indians: An American Struggle by Malinda Maynor Lowery. UNC Press.
Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation by Malinda Maynor Lowery. UNC Press.
“Telling Our Own Stories: Lumbee History and the Federal Acknowledgment Process” by Malinda Maynor Lowery. American Indian Quarterly.
“We Are the Original Southerners” by Malinda Maynor Lowery. The New York Times.
“Henry Berry Lowry: Champion of the Dispossessed” by David E. Wilkins. Race, Gender & Class.
“Vampires Anonymous and Critical Race Practice” by Robert A Williams, Jr. Michigan Law Review.
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Unmai M. Arokiasamy is a student in American Indian Studies at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. They are an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe.
Matt Schneider is a photographer and sociology professor at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. He resides in Whiteville, North Carolina.
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Maria Sturm – You Don’t Look Native to Me
Photographer: Maria Sturm (born in Ploiești, Romania; lives in Berlin, Germany)
Publisher: Void, Athens, Greece
Language: English
Hardcover, 22 x 29 cm, 112 pages; limited edition of 500; ISBN 978-618-5479-30-5
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