Professor who’s claimed Native ancestry admits she’s ‘a white person’

Professor who’s claimed Native ancestry admits she’s ‘a white person’ - The Washington Post

When Adrienne Keene saw Professor Elizabeth Hoover on a list of alleged “pretendians” — people falsely claiming Native American ancestry — she reached out in February 2021, offering to defend her close friend and colleague. Keene said her own Cherokee ancestry had been repeatedly questioned over the years, something she described as “extremely painful.”

But when Keene later spent a year researching to try to back up Hoover’s claims, the story of her friend’s ancestry unraveled. That led Keene to demand the “full truth” from Hoover, an associate professor at the University of California at Berkeley, who has spent her career studying Native American food culture.

“I need to be able to address this, learn the truth, and move on,” Keene wrote in a June 20 email that she published as part of an open letter to Hoover in the online forum Native Appropriations. “Now I need you to look at me and tell me who you really are.”

Last week, Hoover published a letter admitting she is “a white person” and apologizing for falsely identifying as a Native American, something she said she did based on family lore. Hoover said she claimed Mohawk and Mi’kmaq descent her “whole life,” starting when she was growing up in Upstate New York. She conceded that identifying as Native American afforded her professional opportunities and access to funding she wouldn’t have had otherwise.

“I caused harm,” Hoover wrote in the letter. “I hurt Native people who have been my friends, colleagues, students, and family, both directly through fractured trust and through activating historical harms.”

UC Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, where Hoover started working in 2020, according to her résumé, did not immediately respond Sunday to a request for comment from The Washington Post. She remains on staff at the university.

But in an October 2022 open letter in which she first addressed the controversy about her identity, Hoover said she grew up believing that she descended from the Mohawk and Mi’kmaq. That belief grew out of family stories, specifically her mother recounting that Hoover’s grandmother was a Mohawk woman who married a French Canadian man who was abusive and an alcoholic. After her grandmother died by suicide, her children were raised by someone else, “a traumatic aspect of my mom’s family background that impacted her connection to her grandmother’s heritage.”

As an adult, her mother wanted to reclaim her Mohawk heritage and share that with her children, Hoover said.

“She took my sisters and me to ceremonies and powwows as kids to connect us to our heritage,” she wrote in October. “For us, being dancers, and being invited into sweats was a way to connect with and contribute to this broader community.”

Hoover’s father’s family claimed that his grandmother was Mi’kmaq, a connection she and her sisters were proud of but “never quite as close to.”

While an undergraduate at Williams College, where she graduated in 2001, Hoover helped run a Native American student organization and organized the first powwows to be held on campus, she said in her October letter. At Brown University, where she studied as a graduate student starting in the early 2000s, earned a PhD in 2010 and worked as a professor from 2011 to 2020, Hoover she also helped organize powwows and worked with the school’s Native American student group for nearly two decades. As an anthropological researcher, she has studied the Akwesasne community for some 15 years, something she described as “incredibly important to me.”

“I have been grateful to the people of Akwesasne who took me in called me their chosen daughter, auntie, and friend, and who put me to work. When people told me ‘welcome home’ when I would come to visit, that meant something to me,” Hoover wrote in the October letter.

“In short, this identity has shaped my entire life and guided my work.”

Public doubts about Hoover’s identity first surfaced in February 2021, when she was included on a list of alleged “pretendians” accused of falsely claiming that they descended from Native American tribes. Keene responded, she wrote, describing how she reached out to Hoover when her name appeared on the list, offering “to help her to write a statement about her identity to clear things up.” Hoover declined, and Keene said she “pushed the questions away.”

When a Native American group accused Hoover of “taking resources from Native people for years and lying about her ancestry” a year later, Keene said, she was more direct, asking Hoover for family names and ties to the tribes from which she claimed to have descended.

Confused and unsatisfied with Hoover’s answers, Keene said she started researching, using genealogical databases online gravesites and obituaries. On June 20, she sent Hoover a letter, outlining her research, which found no ancestral ties between Hoover and the two tribes she had claimed for years.

On Oct. 20, Hoover wrote on her personal website that she had done her own genealogical research and found “no records of tribal citizenship for any of my family members in the tribal databases that were accessed.” Hoover said that she shared the results of her investigation with her parents and sisters, and that the lack of evidence establishing their Native American ancestry left them “shocked and confused about what this information means for us.”

On Nov. 11, a group of Indigenous scholars and former students of Hoover responded by describing their former professor’s statement as “absolutely appalling” and “wholly unacceptable.” They demanded she acknowledge the harm she had caused, admit she is White, resign her position at Berkeley and apply for a new job based on her “true identity.”

Hoover’s letter published last week does not reference a resignation. She said she recognizes the debate around her identity has “been very harmful to people associated with me.”

In her June letter, Keene told Hoover she started digging into her ancestral past to vindicate her, “to help you tell your family story in a way that protected what you had described as a hurtful, embarrassing, and messy story.” Instead, the findings instead left her “ devastated, enraged, and exhausted,” Keene tweeted last week.

“The waves of harm extending from this are immense and difficult to even capture,” she said. “So many actual Native people have been caught in the web.”