Circe Sturm is a professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Texas, Austin.
She identifies her father as being of Mississippi Choctaw descent and her mother as being Italian American.
[4] The Tribal Alliance Against Frauds wrote that they, in Sturm's word's, "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.
[7] Becoming Indian (2011) discusses the concept of race shifting:[8] 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.