Meet Dr. David Shane Lowry, the new anthropology professor at the University of Southern Maine, who teaches classes at the Gorham and Portland campuses. Lowry is a member of the Lumbee tribe of North Carolina, and is the first Native (Indigenous) tenure-track professor at USM.

Starting at MIT and finishing his doctorate at UNC Chapel Hill, Lowry went on to be the Distinguished Fellow in Native American Studies at MIT, and Visiting Senior Fellow in the School of Social Policy at Brandeis University, before accepting a tenure-track position at the University of Southern Maine.

During his undergraduate at MIT, he envisioned himself becoming an engineer, be it civil, mechanical, or chemical, but he couldn’t shake an idea that he “should begin to tell stories.” Like so many students, Lowry took one class that changed everything. In his case it was an anthropology course. He kept up with his science courses as well, studying and eventually working in healthcare before embarking on a doctorate.

Lowry recalls working in pharmacy in North Carolina in 2003 during the Iraq war, and seeing the maimed soldiers returning, “they were living side by side with Lumbee people who were also maimed from other conditions, different types of violence, different types of disease states etcetera.”

In the United States, Native American communities tend to be made into industrial dumping grounds and sites of environmental degradation. The effects of this on the health of Lumbee people that Lowry witnessed led to his doctoral research, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, studying health, healing, and dying in the Lumbee community. Lowry completed this doctorate degree in five years – a notable accomplishment by any measure, and indicative of his sense of purpose.

Lowry describes coming to Maine as an opportunity. Maine has a deep history as well as numerous contemporary issues that it is working through in regards to Native American communities who live here. Lowry is working to build bridges, raise awareness, create discussions, and be the best educator and resource that he can be for his students.

Lowry leads the Indigenous Relationship Lab (IRL) at USM, which focuses on issues of justice and remattering. That second word, ‘remattering,’ warrants a little explanation. Native people once mattered in this country, in that the United State’s founding fathers feared them and saw a need to clear them away so that their land could be taken and put to different uses by non-Native peoples. In the years since, Native American issues have too often fallen by the wayside; this has been so much the case that a 2018 study found that 40% of Americans didn’t know that Native people still existed or that they were oppressed. Remattering is in one sense the work of making this topic, and these people, matter again. Today, an estimated 2.5% of Maine’s population are Native people whose existence here goes back more than 12,000 – perhaps 125,000 years.

One current issue in Maine focuses on LD 2004, a bill which was vetoed in 2023, but would have restored access to federal protections for the Indigenous tribal nations that make up the Wabanaki Confederacy, and worked to reinstate their sovereignty. Tribes in Maine are currently treated as municipalities under the Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act of 1980, which makes Maine’s relationships with the tribes an outlier in the United States.

Essentially, of the small portions of land the United States government reserved or held in trust for Native Americans, what we call reservations, the Indigenous peoples of Maine, Wabanaki Peoples, have severely limited control over the land that is set aside for their nations.