A University of California at Berkeley anthropologist known for her work on food justice in Native American communities is under fire after she long claimed she was Indigenous and has conceded that she is in fact white – fueling calls for her resignation.
Elizabeth Hoover, who was hired as an associate professor in 2000 researching Native American food sovereignty, published a letter of apology on her personal website earlier this week.
She noted that she had claimed her Native American heritage her “whole life” and benefited from her self-identified Indigenous background in the forms of “academic fellowships, opportunities, and material benefits that I may not have received had I not been perceived as a Native scholar”.
Hoover stopped identifying as a person of Mohawk and Mi’kmaq descent last year following inquiries into her background, the Los Angeles Times reported. She had conducted research into her ancestry but found no records verifying that her family members had tribal ancestry.
“I am a white person who has incorrectly identified as Native my whole life, based on incomplete information,” Hoover wrote.
“In uncritically living an identity based on family stories without seeking out a documented connection to these communities, I caused harm. I hurt Native people who have been my friends, colleagues, students, and family, both directly through fractured trust and through activating historical harms.”
Hoover’s concession fits into a continuum of white Americans co-opting racial and ethnic identity for personal gain and claiming tribal heritage in what critics call “Pretendians” at a time when Americans are increasingly self-identifying on the US census as Native American. Members of Indigenous communities argue that this phenomenon capitalizes on their tribal ancestry for personal gain and acts as colonialism by another name.
Four years ago, ahead of her run for presidency, Senator Elizabeth Warren apologized to the Cherokee Nation after backlash following her release of DNA results in an attempt to prove that she had Native American ancestry from her family’s generations in Oklahoma.
Last year, following the death of the activist and actor Sasheen Littlefeather, who famously stood in for Marlon Brando to refuse the best actor Oscar in 1973, family members claimed that Littlefeather had faked her Native American ancestry. Before her death, Littlefeather, whose birth name was Marie Louise Cruz, received a formal apology from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for mistreatment she faced at the Oscars decades earlier.
