Another Pretendian? She's either a pathological liar or was mistaken. But even a folklore professor wouldn't believe a tall tale like hers. Odd that she didn't conduct genealogical research until after her identity was questioned. There's also plagiarism involved. Along with other darker stuff.
A Professor Claimed to Be Native American. Did She Know She Wasn’t?
Elizabeth Hoover, who has taught at Brown and Berkeley, insists that she made an honest mistake. Her critics say she has been lying for more than a decade.
Elizabeth Hoover, who is now forty-five years old, describes her childhood as “broke”—her father worked odd construction jobs and was periodically unemployed—but idyllic. “I spent most of my time running around outside,” she told me recently. “My dad said I could head anywhere as long as I took a dog, a walking stick, and a knife.” Much of her youth was spent harvesting vegetables, butchering meat, and chopping wood for the winter.
As Hoover and her sisters grew older, they began to find a sense of purpose and identity in a story that Anita told them about their family. Their great-grandmother, she said, had been a Mohawk Indian, and she had drowned herself in order to escape her drunk and abusive French Canadian husband. The girls were also told that they were Mi’kmaq on their father’s side. Anita began taking the girls to powwows across western New York and New England, where Native Americans would play music, share crafts, and dance. These gatherings are held throughout the country. They are intertribal and offer opportunities for Native Americans who have become disconnected from their people to be welcomed back in.
Tammy Bucchino met Hoover at a powwow in the early nineties. Bucchino’s mother, a German woman, took Tammy to the powwows for the same reasons that Anita Hoover took Elizabeth: she wanted her child to feel a connection to her heritage. Bucchino’s father was full-blood Mi’kmaq, but she wouldn’t get to know him until later in life. “We clicked because she said she’s Mi’kmaq, like me,” Bucchino said of Hoover. “And she said she had Mohawk background, and my stepbrother has a Mohawk background as well.” ...
Then in October of 2022 Hoover published a statement on her Web site: “As a result of recent questions about my identity, I, along with others, conducted genealogical research to verify the tribal descent that my family raised me with, digging through online databases, archival records, and census data.” These searches, she explained, had turned up no evidence of Native American lineage. “Essentially what I am currently left with is that I do not have any official documentation to verify the way my family has identified.”
Several months later, after this statement had been met with great skepticism and online furor, Hoover, in consultation with the Restorative Justice Center at Berkeley, published another statement: “I am a white person who has incorrectly identified as Native my whole life, based on incomplete information.” ...
Such fraud seems particularly rife in academia. In just the past few years, several scholars have been accused of being Pretendians, including Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, a former judge and law professor in Canada who has said that her father was Cree, and Qwo-Li Driskill, a professor of gender and queer studies at Oregon State University who claims to have Cherokee, Lenape, Lumbee, and Osage heritage. (Turpel-Lafond denied the accusation, in 2022; Driskill’s attorney characterized the accusation against his client as intrusive and false.) Ward Churchill, one of the country’s best-known Native-studies scholars, has been accused, throughout his career, of telling false stories about his Cherokee ancestry; when asked for proof of it, he claimed that such inquiries were the tools of colonialism. In January, 2023, Andrea Smith, a major figure in the field of ethnic studies, agreed to resign from the University of California, Riverside, effective this August, following questions about the veracity of her Cherokee heritage. (Both Churchill and Smith deny lying about their identities.)
There are likely many other cases. Kim TallBear, an enrolled member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate tribe and a professor of Native studies at the University of Alberta, guesses that a quarter of those who have checked the box for Native American in the academy are what she calls “self-Indigenizers,” people who either invent a Native heritage wholesale or play up a tenuous connection. “Most of the cases haven’t been made very public yet,” TallBear said. ...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/...-to-be-native-american-did-she-know-she-wasnt
