San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Pretendianism too common in academia
UC Berkeley professor built well-paying career on false claim of Native American heritage
Nearly three years ago, Stanford’s Institute for Diversity in the Arts, accompanied by a message wishing viewers a “Happy Indigenous People’s Day!” shared on its YouTube channel a 2019 lecture given by Elizabeth Hoover, then a Stanford fellow teaching at Brown University.
“She: kon (hello, pronounced saygo). Skennen’kó: wa (great peace — skanadoga),” Hoover solemnly intoned in Mohawk. “My background is Kahnawà: ke (formerly Caughnawaga, pronounced Ganawhaga) or Mohawk and Mi’kmaq (pronounced Miguma) from the northeastern part of what is now the United States and southeastern Canada.”
Attired in the latest dress from Crow fashion designer Bethany Yellowtail and wearing beautifully embroidered boots and large Native American earrings, Hoover’s dark brown hair, bright inquisitive eyes, tan skin and slim figure helped her look younger than her 41 years. She proceeded to give a talk describing decades of work by Mohawk women to document the effect of St. Lawrence Seaway pollution on their bodies, breastmilk, children and traditional foods.
With her media savvy and impressive academic pedigree, Hoover used appearances like this to become a celebrity of sorts in the realm of Native American academia. Best known for her 2017 book, “The River Is in Us: Fighting Toxics in a Mohawk Community,” an ethnographic study of the 40-year struggle for environmental justice by Mohawk women on the Akwesasne reservation that straddles the Canadian border, her reputation as a Native researcher helped her gain entry to spaces that other, more experienced academics were denied.
In her doctoral thesis at Brown on “relational accountability” — a term to describe when a researcher uses clear and honest communication with an indigenous subject or group to gain access to their knowledge and experiences — Hoover noted that she was allowed the special privilege of participating in Longhouse ceremonies and assisting with the coming of age ceremonies for girls. “Because I am of Mohawk and Mi’kmaq descent, (my mother has ancestors from Kahnawake, a Mohawk community to the east of Akwesasne, and my father has Mi’kmaq ancestors from Quebec), I was invited to attend Longhouse events.”
These are normally closed to non-Natives because of, as Hoover described it, “acquired distrust that Mohawks have for academics at their ceremonies.” That concern would prove warranted, and Hoover would arguably be the one to violate it most egregiously — because she isn’t Native at all.
On May 1, 2023, Hoover posted a mea culpa on her website, declaring herself a white woman who mistakenly built a career on being of Mohawk and Mi’kmaq descent. Titled “Letter of Apology and Accountability,” her confession claimed that she had “uncritically liv(ed) an identity based on family stories without seeking out a documented connection to these communities,” and only recently became aware of questions regarding the authenticity of her identity. She noted that while many Native scholars had questioned the veracity of her tribal claims for years, she dismissed these doubts as “jealousy” by other less accomplished American Indians. Now she was finally coming clean.
Native graduate students at UC Berkeley, where she is an associate professor with a specialty in Native food systems, put together a list of demands for accountability that garnered over 300 signatories. One of these demands was that Hoover resign from her position and put herself back on the market as a white woman.
Yet a year later, despite her admission that “identifying as a Native person gave me access to spaces and resources that I would not have otherwise, resources that were intended for students of color,” Hoover has not resigned, and has not indicated that she intends to. Nor has the university suggested that it will force her to do so.
Instead, both UC Berkeley and Hoover are riding out the storm, as is Brown University, where Hoover built her career.
Hoover has promised to donate some of the proceeds of her book — which currently retails for $112 for a librarybound copy — to support Native efforts at self-determination. However, the University of Minnesota Press, the book’s publisher, told me in an email that the book went out of print on March 24.
Many Native American scholars and community members, of course, have questioned the improbability that someone with a doctorate in anthropology would not have been able to ascertain her lack of Native ancestry before building a career on it.
University administrations, however, appear content to lean on Hoover’s dubious explanation that this was an innocent mistake born of misguided family lore, even as a recent New Yorker investigation credibly questioned whether Hoover actively knew she was misrepresenting her claims to Mohawk and Mi’kwaq identity for professional gain. The magazine reported that Hoover claimed she never meaningfully researched her genealogy, telling reporter Jay Caspian Kang that because she knew she would be ineligible for tribal enrollment, she never bothered.
The excuse that Hoover was so immersed in her pursuit of access that she failed to interrogate her heritage is nearly as offensive as if she had lied. If her story is to be believed, a doctorate holder in anthropology penetrated and profited from sacred ceremonies while failing to do even the most basic due diligence.
Despite this, Janet Gilmore, senior director of strategic communications for UC Berkeley, told me via email that the dean of Hoover’s college, Rausser College of Natural Resources, David Ackerly refused to comment on whether the university planned to even launch an investigation.
Of course, the idea that U.S. American Indian tribal identity is “too complex” to prove, even by people using the claim professionally, has been in vogue in academia and other fields like publishing and Hollywood for decades. This has left an enormous opening for con artists to exploit.
And they do. Particularly in academia.
Former UC Riverside Native Studies professor Andrea Smith, for example, was once lauded by her dissertation adviser Angela Davis as “one of the greatest Indigenous feminist intellectuals of our time.” Smith had claimed to be Cherokee, but research into her family tree that found no Native lineage spurred 13 of her faculty colleagues into filing charges that she violated academic integrity.
The university ultimately agreed to a separation agreement with Smith, avoiding a costly investigation of the allegations against her and allowing her to retire early with full benefits.
“Our administration basically ‘punted’ and left it to a few faculty to file charges,” one of the 13 faculty members explained to me. “I got no joy from having to get involved with the whole thing. However, the (reporters covering the story) chose to emphasize the conflict of the situation and not the pain it caused.”
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So how does someone like Hoover with no Native ties get away with using a false heritage to infiltrate some of the most rarified professional spaces in America? And who pays the price when they do?
In Hoover’s case, the answers to these questions are shocking and yet somehow unsurprising.
Doug George is a Mohawk elder from Akwesasne, the tribe Hoover claimed descendence from. He described to me the way someone who has lost their ties to the community traditionally broaches a reentry.
“The preference is for subtlety and patience,” he said. “Wait at the edge of the territory, light a fire and then people see the smoke and they approach you and they bring you into the community.”
Instead of immediately absorbing his people’s cultural norms and traditional teachings, George said people should fully learn their familial connection and demonstrate that connection to community members. Family is the root everything else is grafted to.
That was not how Hoover did things.
He said that when she arrived in their community no one could find her family at Akwesasne or Kahnawake, despite those communities being quite small. Doubt arose, yet some backed her up and let her into the Longhouse, a sacred space generally not open to outsiders. There, she witnessed cultural ceremonies she would not have had access to without her false claims.
Hoover generally declined to participate in this story, but she did say in an email statement: “Despite false assertions made by some people in the media recently, my story about my family never changed — I have always shared the same story about my family that my parents shared with me.”
One thing that’s not in dispute is that the information Hoover gathered in Awkwesasne bestowed an authenticity upon her that opened doors.
When Devon Mihesuah, a Choctaw professor at the University of Kansas and an accomplished author of more than 20 books, went looking for a co-editor for her book “Indigenous Food Sovereignty,” she asked the relatively inexperienced Hoover to coedit.
In that book, Hoover reasserted her Mohawk claims, writing: “Our mountains were adjacent to the Mohawk Valley, the original home of some of my mother’s Mohawk ancestors before settlers pushed them north.”
Yet as the book neared publication, Mihesuah found herself studying a new promotional flyer the publisher sent her — which included changes requested by Hoover. At first, Mihesuah couldn’t spot any actual changes. Finally, she told me in an interview, she realized Hoover had removed all claims to a tribal identity, which Hoover didn’t deny to the New Yorker.
Mihesuah was ultimately robbed of enjoying the book’s success once she realized her co-editor’s tribal claims were suspect. She is now speaking to her publisher about removing Hoover from the book in future editions.
When the book was first published, however, it made Hoover a hot commodity, ac
cording to a UC Berkeley faculty member in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management who participated in Hoover’s hiring and wishes to be unnamed over fear of reprisal. “It was an open search, and she did rise to the top.”
Contrary to some reports, Hoover was not a “cluster hire,” the faculty member said, which is when several new faculty members identified as members of a minority or historically disadvantaged groups are brought aboard simultaneously — a method has been championed at UC Berkeley to make “an immediate and substantial impact far greater than a few isolated hires.” That said, “She took this job as an Indigenous person,” the faculty member told me. “We never asked her — never hired her because of her identity, but we assumed because of her identity.”
Another faculty member involved in the hiring process told me Hoover “was one of five or six candidates. She did a great job. Her scholarship was super competitive.”
When asked how competitive Hoover’s scholarship was if you took her professed identity out of the equation, however, the faculty member said that increasing diverse perspectives in the department was also a factor that weighed into the final decision.
The faculty members I spoke with said no enrolled Native American candidates made it to the top of the pool with Hoover. Berkeley thus found itself in a bidding war for the young “Native” academic, as Brown University raised its offer to keep her at the Ivy League school.
As a result, said one Berkeley faculty member, Hoover makes far more per year than most associate professors. According to Transparent California, a searchable database maintained by the Nevada Policy Research Institute, in 2021, Hoover made $165,817 in regular pay and $31,840 in “other pay.”
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Last year, after Hoover’s initial statement about her lack of Native ancestry, University of Alberta professor Kim TallBear, a Sisseton-Wahpeton tribal citizen and a former assistant professor at UC Berkeley, wrote in a now-deleted tweet: “While I very much appreciated my Society & Environment colleagues, UCB as a whole was a difficult place for me as an actual Native person. Incredibly erasing environment. It’s a major reason I left.”
In an email, TallBear reiterated to me her disappointment with her former department, where she taught from 20082013, and its leadership for not seriously sanctioning Hoover. “Their weak response so far is in keeping with the broader Native tokenism and erasure I experienced when I was at Berkeley.”
She also noted that she was grateful to be teaching in Canada now, even though her tribes, the Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota in South Dakota, and the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma, are in the United States.
“Unlike at Berkeley and many other U.S. institutions, Indigenous demands and pushback against pretendianism is not so easy to ignore at (Canadian) universities,” she said. “At my university and in others, we are already deep into discussing policies for going beyond Indigenous selfidentification in admissions and hiring. This is difficult ethical, bureaucratic and legal work. Systemic change in institutions to slow the onslaught of identity fraud will take time, even once we get started having difficult conversations.”
This conversation, she said, has yet to meaningfully begin at U.S. universities.
“What I’ve seen in U.S. universities so far is widespread denial that Indigenous identity fraud and resource appropriation from the poorest demographic in the country is a problem.”
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UC Berkeley isn’t the only institution that boosted Hoover’s career with a failure of due diligence. She did her doctoral research at Brown University, where an institutional review board, a research ethics committee, would have approved the parameters of Hoover’s work with the Mohawk community. This committee would have been responsible for reviewing her work again once completed and determining if she committed fraud by introducing herself to the community as of Mohawk descent. Instead, they effectively rubber-stamped her identity, which is deeply problematic given the sacred nature of the ceremonies Hoover partook in as part of this research.
A-dae Romero-Briones, Cochiti/Kiowa, is the director of programs at First Nations Development Institute and has worked in Hoover’s field of study, Native food systems, for over 20 years. She told me that the importance of fighting for Native foods goes far beyond gardening, cookbooks or academic turf.
“It’s a story of loss and reconnections, all the things that go into a healthy food system, water, intergenerational connection. People are trying to reclaim not only land and water but the knowledge that includes food systems.”
She noted that Native play actors sometimes advocate in ways that are not in accord with the legal needs of the times. And as they are not accountable to these “domestic dependent nations” (as preexisting Native nations are described in U.S. constitutional law), they claim to represent.
“I haven’t even fully accounted the damage that has occurred just yet,” she said. “Because the damage hasn’t been fully expressed or accounted for yet.”
Founded in 1980, the First Nations Development Institute has dispersed $55 million in grants to Indigenous communities in the United States and U.S. territories like American Samoa. Unlike American universities, the institute has a reputation for being careful in its granting process to prioritize authentic Native projects. So how do they do it? “We do ask for tribal affiliation, and we primarily fund in rural communities so the Native-led nonprofit has to be connected somehow to the community,” Briones explained. “Our policy is that 51% of the board has a tribal affiliation and connection to the community served.”
Despite this commitment to diligence, however, the organization published some of Hoover’s photographs in its cookbook, “Cooking Healthier with FDPIR Foods” — demonstrating the difficulty of preventing identity fraud even for those who are rigorous. Universities like Berkeley that fail to develop meaningful checks and balances against pretendianism have almost no chance of weeding out fakes.
Academic institutions have regularly cited Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which makes it illegal to discriminate against someone based on race, color, religion, national origin or sex as a reason not to confirm claims of American Indian identity. However, tribes are exempt from Title VII under the Indian exception amendment if the preference for American Indian hires occurs on or near a reservation. Some land grant universities like Michigan State interpret this as reservations within commuting distance. UC Berkeley meets this interpretation, but it’s unclear how the university regards Title VII.
Hoover continues to teach at UC Berkeley and to be involved in Native communities and their environmental practices. In 2021, she took part in a controlled burn conducted by the Miwok, North Fork Mono and Chukchansi tribes in Northern California. Native scholars have expressed concern over this and pointed out that a couple of her UC Berkeley colleagues already specialize in this field. She recently changed her Facebook background photo to depict a prescribed burn.
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“The Return of the Native” is not only the title of a book, the very phrase evokes someone lost finding that warm place — a Longhouse with its fire burning and the people inside together.
Hoover was almost there, and then it fell from her grasp. The truth intruded. The Ph.D. who claimed she was unable or unwilling to do basic genealogy research was forced to embrace her real European settler ancestors. She promised restitution but none seems forthcoming.
Meanwhile, a bigger question looms: Can white-dominant institutions find a place for real Native Americans? Or will they continue to hold their shiny redface objects close?