‘I am a White person:’ UC Berkeley scholar says she realized she wasn’t Native American last year

After Elizabeth Hoover was hired as an associate professor by UC Berkeley in 2020, the anthropologist was mentioned in the campus media as one of the small but growing number of Native American scholars who could help make the campus a more welcoming place for learning and research into Native American history, culture and contemporary issues.

But that promise is now mired in controversy, with Hoover admitting she’s “a White person” who “incorrectly” claimed to be Native American for her “whole life.” The situation has prompted calls for Hoover’s resignation and sparked concerns among her students and Native American scholars about UC Berkeley’s academic integrity and respect for authentic Native identity.

On Monday, Hoover issued an apology that confirmed what other Native American scholars and activists had been saying about her for more than than a year — that the Ivy League-educated expert on environmental health and food justice in Native American communities is a White person who long presented herself as a Native American academic, as she built a high-flying academic career and gained a position at one of America’s top public universities.

“I am a White person who has incorrectly identified as Native my whole life,” Hoover said in a lengthy statement posted on her website. In her statement and in an interview with this news organization, Hoover said she always assumed she was Native American because that’s what she was told while growing up in upstate New York. She said she never knowingly falsified her identity or tried to deceive anyone. “I’m a human,” she said. “I didn’t set out to hurt or exploit anyone.”

#elizabethhoover #pretendian pic.twitter.com/rbtyvy5l6c

— NOTORIOUS-INUK (@WokeIndigenous) May 2, 2023

Her case comes amid heightened attention and intense discussions in Native American circles about the complicated nature of Native identity and follows allegations that another well-known Bay Area resident, the late activist Sacheen Littlefeather, spent the past half-century falsely claiming to be White Mountain Apache and Yaqui.

For much of Hoover’s career, going back to the 2000s, she told people she descended from the Mohawk and Mi’kmaq peoples of eastern Canada and the United States. She referenced this ancestry in news accounts and while researching her doctoral dissertation for Brown University.

Meanwhile, she won prestigious jobs, grants and fellowships, published books and papers and became a mover and shaker in the “food sovereignty” movement, according to the news site, Indianz.com. But in recent months, she’s been labeled a “Pretendian,” a high-profile figure in academia, publishing or entertainment who is accused of using a false Native American identity for money, fame or professional opportunities.

In her statement, Hoover apologized for the “harm” she caused by betraying the trust of colleagues, collaborators, students, colleagues, friends and members of different Native communities. “I have negatively impacted people emotionally and culturally. For this hurt I have caused, I am deeply sorry.”

Hoover said she doesn’t plan to resign, despite a call for her to do so from more than 360 people, including other Native American scholars and activists, as well as current and former students from UC Berkeley and Brown. UC Berkeley said in December that it didn’t plan to remove her from her position. University officials told this news organization this week that it couldn’t comment on personnel matters.

Scholars at Columbia and UCLA echoed the views of those who say the university is justified in firing her, with Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson, an anthropology professor at Columbia, arguing that Hoover’s professional history shows she “lacks the requisite ethical and academic integrity to be a professor or a social scientist.”

The call for Hoover to resign first came in November after she issued an initial statement about her identity. At that time, she made no apology but explained that her background included family lore about great-grandmothers who were Mohawk and Mi’kmaq. Her mother also took her and her sisters to powwows to connect them with their heritage. But last year, Hoover said she and others concluded that they couldn’t verify any ties to the groups she claimed to belong to. She said this discovery left her and her parents and sisters “shocked and confused about what this information means for us.”

At that time, campus spokesperson Janet Gilmore said the campus considers Hoover’s identity a “a deeply personal matter,” the Daily Californian reported. In a statement Wednesday, Gilmore referred to a step Hoover said she is taking to repair her relationships with colleagues and students. Hoover explained that she had been working with “restorative justice facilitators to better understand how members of the UC Berkeley campus community have felt harmed and betrayed, and ways I can work to meaningfully make amends for this.”

Gilmore said the campus  is “aware of and supports ongoing efforts to achieve restorative justice in a way that acknowledges and addresses the extent to which this matter has caused harm and upset among members of our community.”

Josh Sargent, a member of the Akwesasne Mohawk community in upstate New York, where Hoover researched the impact of industrial contamination in the St. Lawrence River for her dissertation, said she’s “a good person and always welcome here.” Debates about her identity seem to be taking place in the “bubble of academia,” he said, while the real challenges facing Native people are being overlooked. He said her book, “The River Is In Us,” accurately depicted the harm from environmental degradation in his community. “I hope people read it.”

But Hoover’s apology or talk of making amends has not silenced those who believe she should resign or be dismissed. “The waves of harm extending from this are immense and difficult to even capture,” tweeted Adrienne Keene, an assistant professor in American studies at Brown University, author of the online forum Native Appropriations and former close friend and colleague of Hoover. Desi Small-Rodriguez, an assistant professor in UCLA’s Sociology Department and American Indian Studies Program and a member of the Northern Cheyenne tribe, called Hoover’s apology a “cop-out” and a form of “gaslighting.”

It makes no sense that Hoover waited so long to interrogate her own background, given her professional research skills and her decision to build her career around being Native, Small-Rodriguez said. Hoover said she initially dismissed inquiries into her identity as “petty jealousy.” Small-Rodriguez said an average person could get away with accepting family lore, but Hoover “is PhD from an Ivy League Institution. It’s totally unacceptable.”

Simpson also had harsh words for the idea that Hoover’s issue is “personal,” saying the controversy could could hurt Berkeley’s scholarly reputation in Native American circles. “This is a matter of misconduct with wide-reaching effects,” Simpson continued. “Whether intentional or not, she has committed a form of fraud (and) she has benefited enormously from doing so.”

It’s possible that Hoover took away jobs, fellowships or grants that could have gone to authentic people of color, Simpson and others say. Hoover said she wasn’t hired by Berkeley as part of an effort to attract faculty with expertise in Native American issues but instead responded to an open call for scholars on environmental and food justice. Nonetheless, she acknowledged that she “received academic fellowships, opportunities, and material benefits that I may not have received had I not been perceived as a Native scholar.”

According to Simpson and Small-Rodriguez, Hoover also crossed a line when she misrepresented herself as Native American during her research projects, including when she embedded herself in the Akwesasne Mohawk community in upstate New York for her dissertation on residents’ views on health and the environment. Hoover acknowledged she wrongly gained access to ceremonies and other “social spaces” that are specifically reserved for Native people. “People invited me into these spaces with the understanding that I was a Native person, and I deeply regret the pain I have caused to some by entering those spaces,” Hoover said.

In response to Hoover’s apology for misrepresenting herself to research subjects, Small-Rodriguez put it another way: “That’s a violation of research ethics alone.”