Matika Wilbur

Matika Lorraine Wilbur is a member of the Swinomish and Tulalip tribes of the State of Washington where she was raised in a family of commercial fishermen. Before focusing on photography as a tool for social justice, Matika received her teaching certification and worked in primary education at The Tulalip Heritage High School for 5 years. There, she experienced firsthand the lack of educational resources to teach indigenous intelligence and dismayed that the curriculum being taught did not provide Native youths with positive imagery and understanding. Thus began the momentum behind Project 562.

Life

Wilbur was born on April 28, 1984. She grew up in La Conner, Washington and graduated from La Conner High School. She received her bachelor's degree from the Brooks Institute of Photography in 2006.

Art career

Wilbur's three initial photographic projects include We Are One People, a photograph collection of Coast Salish elders; We Emerge, a photograph collection of Native people in contemporary settings, and Save the Indian and Kill the Man, a collection of Native youth expressing their identities. Her other work includes "iHuman", presenting images interwoven with cedar bark.

The artist specializes in hand-tinted, black-and-white silver gelatin prints. She plans on publishing a book about her photography.

Project 562

Project 562 is Wilbur's fourth major project to document contemporary Indigenous peoples. She began traveling throughout the US in November 2012 with the goal of photographing members all US tribes on their tribal lands. She has traveled 250,000 miles documenting indigenous people. She raised over $35,000 for her expenses in a Kickstarter campaign. The title Project 562 refers to the number of Indigenous North American tribes officially recognized by the United States at the time Wilbur began the work. That number has since changed, reflecting the ongoing legal efforts of individual tribes to regain legal status after the decimation of tribal status under the United States Termination policy. Wilbur notes that her grandmother came to her in a dream suggesting she do this work of photographing a member from every federally recognized tribe. She works collaboratively with tribal leaders and members to create the photographs. Wilbur conceives of Project 562 as an answer to Edward Curtis' photographs, a century earlier, of Indigenous Americans. Project 562 shows Indigenous Americans through the lens an Indigenous American photographer.

Podcast

Wilbur also hosts the podcast "All My Relations" with Adrienne Keene. The podcast's purpose is "to explore our relationships— relationships to land, to our creatural relatives, and to one another. Each episode invites guests to delve into a different topic facing Native peoples today as we keep it real, play games, laugh a lot, and even cry sometimes."

Selected exhibitions

• 2014: Photographic Presence and Contemporary Indians: Matika Wilbur’s Project 562, Tacoma Art Museum, Washington
• 2014–2016: As We See It: Contemporary Native American Photographers, Ekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts, Ekaterinburg, Russia; The Fifth Biennial of Contemporary Photography; Novosibirsk State Art Museum, Novosibirsk, Russia; 516 ARTS, Albuquerque, NM
• 2016: Seed of Culture: The Portraits and Stories of Native American Women, Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University