Pacific Northwest photographer documents all federally recognized tribes in the United States

In 2012, photographer Matika Wilbur sold everything in her Seattle apartment and set off to document the 562 federally recognized indigenous tribes in the country. Over a decade and hundreds of thousands of miles later, she has released a new book called “Project 562.” We talk to Wilbur about her journey, her book, and her mission to provide Native Americans images that are more “useful, truthful, and beautiful.”

This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. In 2012, the Swinomish and Tulalip photographer and storyteller, Matika Wilbur embarked on an enormous project; to travel the country talking to and photographing people from what were, at the time, 562 federally recognized tribes. She ended up traveling 600,000 miles over a decade, visiting all 50 states, and gathering the stories and images of more than 1,000 Indigenous people. Wilbur’s North Star for the project was to counteract the one-dimensional stereotypes and caricatures that have dominated the representation of Native people for centuries. “My dream,” she has said, “is that our children are given images that are more useful, truthful, and beautiful.”

Wilbur’s new book is called “Project 562: Changing the Way We See Native America.” Matika Wilbur, it is an honor to have you on.

Matika Wilbur: Well, hello. Hi. I’m so grateful to be here. I’m Matika Wilbur. I’m from the Swinomish and Tulalip Tribes, coming to you today from Samish country. So thank you for having me.

Miller: I want to start with that description I mentioned, images that are “more useful, truthful and beautiful.” What does it mean to you for an image to be “useful”?

Wilbur: If we believe that story shapes the individual and that she who wields the pen crafts the constitution and the treaties and the public policies, as you all were just talking about, then story is everything, right?  I had this great editor who one time told me, “The one-liner in the picture is what changes the world.” And I actually fundamentally believe that the stories that we come to believe about ourselves, whether it’s by creation story or the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves, even on a daily basis, those are the stories that come to be our reality, our living truths, what we ascribe to.

And so, I believe that images deeply impact Native psyche. And for far too long, images of Native people have been stereotypical representations of Native people that are leathered and feathered on the prairie. And we’ve told a story that doesn’t uplift the contemporary complexity of our Indigenous intelligence or our strength or our resiliency or our contributions to the society, but rather a pre-1900s narrative that’s deeply damaging to the psyche of our youth. So we need different images. We need positive images for our own youth to be able to see themselves differently.

Miller: When did you decide you would take this project on?

Wilbur: Well, like you said, the project is titled “Project 562: Changing the Way We See Native America.” And I want to just address for a moment what you said about federally recognized tribes. That was certainly, when I started the project, I did want to visit all of the federally recognized tribes, which at the time were 562. But I didn’t realize that, along the way, I would also go visit state recognized tribes and urban Indian centers and meet with folks whose status had been stifled by Congress. You know, because Congress still has the plenary power over who is and who isn’t considered a tribal member.

We’re still card-carrying Native people. We’re still quantified in a very racist way by our blood. And that is not necessarily at the core of our identity. So I often say that I visited over 500 tribes in the United States because I would realize on my journey that I would also visit with many more. But for me, the turning point, and when I decided that it was important for me to visit with tribes, was when I was a teacher at the tribal school. I taught here in Tulalip and I was given the task of creating curriculum that we could use in our own tribal schools to be able to teach our students about themselves.

And I wasn’t able to find a comprehensive visual literacy curricula that I could use in my classroom that would actually help our students to understand what’s happening in the Dakotas or about the Haudenosaunee, how they crafted the modern American democracy, or about the Miccosukee, or our Diné relatives that live within the Four Sacred Mountains, and so on and so forth. And there wasn’t a book like that. So I went to my elders, back to the principal of my school, and I said, “You know, there really isn’t something that I can teach. There aren’t the materials. They don’t exist. And I can’t use these images that I found on Google. And I certainly can’t use these terrible images created by Edward S. Curtis. So what should I do?” And they said, “You should go make the book then.” And so, you know, I sort of was just doing what I was told.

Miller: What kind of reactions would you get at the beginning when you would tell people about your plan?

Wilbur: Initially, I went to folks at the Seattle Art Museum and other places and asked for institutional support. And people just laughed at me. They just were like, “It’s not realistic, Matika. People have tried, people like PBS and National Geographic have tried to go visit all of the tribes and they’ve failed. It’s not a realistic quest. Why don’t you try something a little smaller?” And so, yeah, a lot of people laughed at me and told me it wasn’t possible. So initially I had to go to crowdfunding to find the resources.

So this project was supported by Kickstarter. The average donation was $20. The first Kickstarter raised $35,000 in 20 days and it was all from community. And many of our contributors were Native people who really believed in the mission, in this idea that Indigenous people deserve to see themselves reflected and to not be made invisible by society.

Miller: Was there a point when you realized that this was going to work, that you could sustain this financially? It seems like maybe there was evidence early on that there would be community support, but logistically and even emotionally, that you could do this?

Wilbur: [Laughter] Are you asking me like, why are you so crazy to think this was possible?

Miller: No, no, I mean, you did it. No, I’m wondering when you realized you could or maybe it’s maybe that you’re saying you never thought you couldn’t?

Wilbur: [Laughter] Oh, there were certainly times of doubt. Yeah, certainly times of doubt. I don’t know. I think I just sort of took it one day at a time. This project was started in ceremony. We asked permission. We put up the tipi. We prayed throughout the nighttime. And the Road Man told me, in the morning time when I was bringing in water, “If you have the courage to walk this path, all the ceremonial people will help you.” And that was true for me. Everywhere that I went, I encountered the kindness of strangers and the kindness of our Native people. People let me stay on their couch, they fed me, they talked story with me. They introduced me to their relatives. And it was really that enduring kindness that gave me the strength to continue traveling.

I’m an adventurer at heart. I think we all are, you know. I think we all have this desire to bless our eyes with something new. And for me, the road calls to me and I love being in new places, experiencing new cultures, and meeting new people. There’s certainly times where it’s bleak, like where I’d run out of money or wreck my car or break my leg and all the terrible things because I was on the road for 10 years. One time I set my RV on fire. There was an intern in the front, driving going 70 miles an hour down the freeway and taking a turn, the bacon grease went flying while I was in the back cooking. The whole thing caught on fire. Things like that made me feel like, “What am I doing?”

Miller: What did you do in that moment?

Wilbur: Baking soda.

Miller: OK. Cool head under fire. How much freedom did you give your subject in terms of what they would wear or hold or where they would be?

Wilbur: I think it’s critically important to share agency in projects like this. I didn’t want to do as my predecessors had done, which is really the way that Western journalism approaches storytelling from a very capitalist colonial viewpoint. [It] is that if I hold the camera and I click the shutter, I own the image. That is rooted in colonial belief systems and it’s damaging. It’s a damaging way of telling stories and it’s traumatizing for the subject. And so I wanted to try to do this in a way that would be in good relation.

I wanted to be a good relative as I was doing this work. So I would ask people where they wanted to be photographed, how they wanted to be photographed, what they wanted to be wearing, what they wanted to talk about in their interview before interviewing them. Because I think it’s very patriarchal and colonial to believe that I know what would be the best thing to ask them. So I did all those sorts of things beforehand. And before I published the book, I sent every person in the book a copy of their image, a hard copy and also the copies of their pages and asked them if they wanted to make edits. I think sharing agency is critically a part of this work.

Miller: If someone had come to you, if somebody else did this project and they came to visit you as one of the subjects, do you have a sense for where you would have taken them, how you would have wanted to be presented?

Wilbur: Sure. Yeah. Well, that’s really interesting because I have had people come and take my photograph.

Miller: And obviously there are self-portraits as well, even in this book.

Wilbur: Right, I think of myself as a Person of the Tide and I think of myself as my grandmother’s granddaughter. My mother has this tree on our family property. We live on Wilbur Lane. It’s really our family property and it’s where my afterbirth has been placed and also my daughter’s afterbirth, my mother’s, my grandmother’s. And so that cedar tree is really important to us. So I think maybe I would want to be photographed there or maybe near that property in some way because I think my identity, who I am, is very much connected to those women, to those matriarchs in my life.

Miller: Can you describe the conversation that you had early on with a legendary activist named John Trudell in San Francisco?

Wilbur: Yeah, John Trudell is, for those of you who don’t know, Lakota and is quite famous for his work with the American Indian Movement [AIM] to take over Alcatraz in the 1970s. But also Wounded Knee, and [he] was really part of the civil rights movement in the 1970′s to advocate for the civil rights of Indigenous people. And John Trudell served the ultimate sacrifice. His family, Tina and their three children, were actually burned alive in their home where it was boarded up and they passed away. John, in his conversation with me, told me that he believed that that was done by the federal government and that it was an act of war.

And so his life as an activist was forever changed. And he said to me, when I was taking his photograph and asking him what it means to be an American Indian? He said, “I think you’re asking the wrong question, because the only thing that an Indian has ever known is termination, relocation, assimilation. I think you need to ask what it means to become human in our own languages. What does it mean to be a human being? What does it mean to be who we are, in our own languages.”  And he said, “I think that’s the question you should be asking people.”

And when I started asking folks that question, everything changed for me. People started telling me about their land-based identities, about how they live within the Four Sacred Mountains or they are the People of the Tall Pine Trees and those identities and coming to understand those traditional identities that were in place pre-colonization are still in place. [It] would impact me in ways that I couldn’t have imagined. So John was really important for me in my journey.

Actually, I met him in San Francisco and one of his youngest sons was there with him. And his son had made this funny joke while I was there. [He] was like, “How are you even finding all these Native people?” I said, “Well, Native people are everywhere.” And he’s like, “I can’t find them.” And I said, “Why don’t you come with me? I’ll introduce you to some.” And then he came with me. So I had John’s son with me for about three months on the road and he came with me to Canoe Journey and he fell in love with one of my cousins. And so I actually got to talk with John quite a bit because I had his son and he became a good friend of mine and I really do miss him.

Miller: That seems like one of many examples that you write about in the book of deep connections, friendships or people who you come to think of as family members or a co-host of a podcast, in the case of Adrienne Keene. I’m just curious what working on this project meant for you in terms of just your own personal connections?

Wilbur: Well, I certainly expanded my understanding of Native America. Before doing this project, I was very ethnocentric about Coast Salish tribes, you know. And I would find on my journey that almost all Native people are like that. You go to Indian territory in Oklahoma, and they say, “We’re the heart of Indian country. We’re Indian territory.” You go to Alaska, and they say, “We are really the real Native traditional people because we were colonized last and we still sustain our ways by eating traditional foods”' And then you go to Pueblo country and Pueblo say, “Well, there’s 19 of us, so we’re [the real Natives].” So everywhere that I went, I found that Native people were very ethnocentric, and all believed that they were the center of an Indian country. And I certainly wasn’t any different when I started this project.

Miller: It also seems like you’re describing something distinctly human that all of us can’t help but think that we are deep down the center of the world?

Wilbur: [Laughter] Right. Right. And so that experience for me, traveling around Indian country, just really opened my eyes to the complexity of Native identity. We’re certainly not a monolith. There are so many different ways of being Native and singing and ceremony and language and food and everyday culture. That was really eye opening for me.

Miller: There are people of all ages in your book from elders to babies, but there is such joy in a lot of your portraits of young people. I kept being drawn to them, not to the exclusion of others, but I would turn the pages and then there would be another just radiant young person. I’m curious how you thought about youth as you were working on this project over a decade?

Wilbur: Well, a lot of youth are less problematic than adults, you know, at a time of cancel culture. So-

Miller: Oh, you mean literally, if you’d been around for six decades, it’s possible that you, as a photographer, would find a reason that you didn’t want to include them in the book?

Wilbur: Oh yeah. Like there was this one chairman that I photographed who I found later had disenrolled half of his Tribe. And of course, I didn’t put his photo in the book. Yeah, I mean there were people that I would encounter that represented themselves one way. And then later I would find out that they, in fact, were not a great person to be photographing and that was heartbreaking for me. It’s certainly worthy of addressing, but I’ll answer your question about young people. Not just that, but that I have centered my work around young people, young Native people. I very much wrote this book for young Native people. Since we launched the book, we’ve given away over 3,000 copies to young Native people.

In my tribe, in Swinomish and Puyallup at the AISES [American Indian Science and Engineering Society], we gave away copies to all. Young Native scholars in STEM come from all over the country and we gave them all the books. We gave books away at Parsons, at Berkeley, at USD. At the end of the month, I’m going to Unity, which is a massive gathering of thousands of Native youth who are all in leadership and we’re giving books to them.

For me, I believe that the next generation holds all of our hope and certainly in this last week I’ve been celebrating my niece and nephew who just graduated from the University of Washington and seeing them, their joy and their accomplishment you know, gives me so much hope. So, what is it all for, if not for the kids? Right?

Miller: Can you describe one photo among hundreds in the book that’s just full of joy. It’s these sisters Isabella and Alyssa Klein.

Wilbur: Isabella and Alyssa Klein are standing outside. They live in Utah, in Salt Lake City. So we’re there in the Bonneville Salt Flats, isn’t it? It’s a beautiful shot. Their mom brought me out to speak at the university there. And so I was hanging out with them and I said, “Do you guys want to go do a photoshoot?” And they were like, “Yeah, take it out here.” And then as we were on our way out there, we had heard that the Keystone pipeline had been opposed, which had been a major fight in Indian country. And so we were explaining it to the kids and then when we got out there into the Salt Flats, they said, “Let’s put our fists in the air and you could put this on your Instagram for Keystone.”

And so I did and then I wrote this little poem for them. It says, “We will not rest, hoping is not enough. Our resilience shall prevail together. We rise, our ancestors always behind us.” I think that this image of these two is one that just gives me deep hope for the future. You know, there was a time when our young people weren’t able to wear regalia, when our young people weren’t able to speak their language, when our young people didn’t have access to these traditional cultures.

So any time I see a young person actively practicing their culture, it makes me feel like our next seven generations are going to be ok. You know, we’re gonna be alright.

Miller: You have a chapter called “Protect Native Women,” or I can call it an essay as well. Interspersed among the photographs and oral histories or interviews. You have a number of essays and you wrote this: “If you read nothing else in this entire book, read this. Native women deserve safety.” Can you give us a sense for the scale of the gender-based violence that you heard about as you traveled the country?

Wilbur: It goes on to say, “Our mothers have been robbed of the comfort of that radical piece of body. The level of violence that our Indigenous sisters, daughters and aunties experience is a public health emergency. Native women are 2.5 more times more likely to be raped or sexually assaulted than any other population group in what is now known as the United States. Native women are murdered at 10 times the national average and more than four out of five Native women experience violence in their lifetime. For many Native sisters this is not a question of if, but when.”

I certainly have not escaped this reality myself. I have three sisters. Many of my sisters have also experienced this sort of violence. I heard from many women on my travels about this reality, including one grandma who was a language teacher at her res [reservation]. And for her whole lifetime, she taught Cheyenne language. And one day the police came down to the school and they said, “We need you to come down to the station.” And they asked her to identify a body, and it was her daughter. She’d been brutally attacked and violated and left on the side of the road. And she had passed away. And after that happened, that grandma had a massive heart attack. She said she was dying of a broken heart. And when I asked her what she wanted me to tell people when I showed their photos, she said, ‘Tell them what’s happening to our women. Ask them if they care. Ask them if they’ll stand with us. Ask them if they’re willing to do something about it.”

So when I wrote this book, I thought it was really important to talk about this even though it was very difficult for me to discuss. There is a disproportionate amount of media coverage for when a white woman goes missing versus when a brown body goes missing. And that’s something that we as a society have to remedy and have to question why it is that we’re more willing to tune in when a white woman goes missing versus when a Woman of Color goes missing.

Miller: You started this project before you were a parent, before you had a daughter. But now you do have a daughter [who] is three years old now and you dedicate the book to her. I’m curious if becoming a parent changed the way you thought about this project?

Wilbur: Yeah, of course. I mean, becoming a mother changes everything, right? Or maybe you know, but it certainly changed me. I started critically evaluating what it means to put these Indigenous value systems into practice on a daily basis. We’re Sduhubš, the honorable people. We’re for the People of the Tide. How do I raise her to have a relationship with the tide? And how do I raise her to have a relationship with this place that she comes from? And how do I do that on a daily basis?

And so it really made me question my values and my ethics and made me think about what it means to have those ceremonies for her and to be disciplined in my own practice to make sure that I’m the type of person that can foster that relationship and create that place-based identity for her.

Miller: Not too long ago, we just have about a minute and a half left, but you took your book to the Swinomish and Tulalip Councils on your mom’s and dad’s sides. Can you describe those meetings?

Wilbur: When I first got the copy, the first copy of the book, I went to the Swinomish Council and I asked them if they would support the book. They said yes, and they bought 500 copies to give away to each one of the tribal members. And then I went to the Tulalip, my dad’s tribe, and I went into the boardroom. I hadn’t ever asked the tribes to support the work financially. I thought it was the responsibility, of myself and of different philanthropic organizations to fund the work. And so when I went in I said, “You know, I’ve never come in here and asked you for money for this project. But I really want to be able to give this book to our students.” And I gave a whole presentation.

At the end, the chairwoman of the tribe stood up and she said, “You know, we’re proud of you and we stand with you and we raise our hands to you.” And everybody in the boardroom stood up and clapped. And then my Auntie Judy was there and she said [to me], “My grandmother was a judge and she had wanted to publish a book her whole life and had received rejection letter after rejection letter. And her books were never published.” And she said, “It was her lifelong dream to be an author. And here you are making that come true. And I can feel her here with us and I can feel that she’s so proud.” And it just made me feel so loved and supported and accepted by great community. I certainly feel really blessed by that. So they bought 1,200 copies and we gave one of them away to all the schools in Snohomish County, which is so cool.

Miller: Thank you so much and congratulations.

Wilbur: Thank you. Appreciate it.

Miller: Matika Wilbur is a photographer and storyteller. Her new book is called “Project 562.”

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