Circe Sturm


Circe Sturm is a professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Texas, Austin. She is also an actress, appearing mainly in films and commercials.

Background

Circe Dawn Sturm was born in Houston, Texas. She describes her father as being of Mississippi Choctaw descent and her mother as being Italian American. 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." An investigation published in 2025 by Tribal Alliance Against Frauds traced her genealogy, reviewing 888 of her relatives, and found no relatives that were of Cherokee or any Native heritage. Strum has not provided evidence to contradict the findings of the investigation or any proof of her claims of American Indian heritage.

Career

Sturm writes about Cherokee identity politics and race shifting. Blood Politics presents results of her ethnographic fieldwork in the Cherokee Nation from 1995 to 1998. Becoming Indian discusses the concept of race shifting in more detail. Sturm has been interviewed on issues relating to Cherokee identity, such as the Cherokee Freedmen controversy and Elizabeth Warren's claims to Cherokee ancestry.
Before joining UT Austin, Sturm taught at the University of Oklahoma. Sturm and Craig Cambell launched a project called Mapping Indigenous Texas, to created an interactive tool to teach about Native American tribes in Texas.

Awards and honors

In 2003, the American Council of Learned Societies named Strum as a ACLS Fellow for her project "Claiming redness: the racial and cultural politics of becoming Cherokee." In 2011, the Southern Anthropological Society gave Circe Strum a James Mooney Award for her book Becoming Indian: The Struggle over Cherokee Identity in the Twenty-first Century.
In 2024, the University of Texas at Austin awarded Sturm and Craig Campbell a 2023–2024 Research & Creative Grant for their project Mapping Indigenous Texas.

Selected publications

Books

  • Blood Politics: Race, Culture and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma
  • Becoming Indian: The Struggle over Cherokee Identity in the Twenty-First Century
  • Say, Listen: Writing as Care by the Black Indigenous 100s Collective, contributor

    Chapters

  • Journal essays

  • Articles

  • , peer-reviewed
  • , peer-reviewed
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