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Circe Sturm
American academic from Texas, U.S. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Circe Sturm is a professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Texas, Austin.[1] She is also an actress, appearing mainly in films and commercials.[2][3]
 | The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's notability guideline for academics. (April 2023) |
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Background
Circe Dawn Sturm was born in Houston, Texas. She identifies her father as being of Mississippi Choctaw descent and her mother as being Italian American.[4] However, the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds wrote that they, in Sturm's words, "can find no evidence of my having Choctaw or Cherokee ancestry..."[5] In Blood Politics, Sturm wrote, "I had always known that my paternal grandmother was Mississippi Choctaw on her mother's side and very distantly Cherokee on her father's side."[6] In 2025, she wrote that by 2011, "I had dropped the Cherokee descent claim entirely..."[5] She wrote that her aunt and great-aunt told her that "Lizzie Wesley, my great-great grandmother, was the daughter of a full blood Mississippi Choctaw women" but neither aunt knew her name.[5] Her great-grandmother was born in Ellisville, Mississippi.[5] Sturm hired three genealogists to help her find Choctaw roots, but she writes, "None of them were able to find early records for Lizzie..."[5] Professor Kim Tallbear, an expert in Indigenous identity fraud, called the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds' investigations "courageous" and agreed with their conclusion that Sturm has no American Indian ancestry.[7][8]
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Career
Sturm has written two books on Cherokee identity. Blood Politics (2002) presents results of her ethnographic fieldwork in the Cherokee Nation from 1995 to 1998.[9] Becoming Indian (2011) discusses the concept of race shifting:[10] how a rapidly growing number of people in the United States are self-identifying as Native American – usually, as Cherokee – without any documentation to support their claims.[11] Race shifting is not just confined to the United States, but has also been observed in Canada.[12][13] Sturm has been interviewed on issues relating to Cherokee identity, such as the Cherokee Freedmen controversy[14][15] and Elizabeth Warren's claims to Cherokee ancestry.[16]
Before joining UT Austin, Sturm taught at the University of Oklahoma.[17]
Sturm and Craig Cambell launched a project called Mapping Indigenous Texas, to created an interactive tool to teach about Native American tribes in Texas.[18]
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Selected publications
- Blood Politics: Race, Culture and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma[9]
- Becoming Indian: The Struggle over Cherokee Identity in the Twenty-First Century[11]
- "Reflections on the anthropology of sovereignty and settler colonialism: lessons from Native North America."[19]
- Say, Listen: Writing as Care by the Black Indigenous 100s Collective (2024), contributor[20]
See also
References
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