Last week, UC Berkeley professor Elizabeth M. Hoover released a “Letter of Apology and Accountability” on her website for having “incorrectly identified as Native” her whole life after genealogical research found no evidence of tribal descent on her part.
When Hoover reported this information to her sisters and parents, they, too, were “shocked and confused,” having had their lives “structured” by Native culture. The professor was raised attending powwows, fancy shawl dancing, and bead working, organized campus powwows and ran the Native student organization during her time at Brown Univeristy and Williams College, all of which she says “strongly shaped” her “work as an advocate for and scholar of environmental justice and food sovereignty.”
Hoover only mentions those details of her upbringing in a “Statement about Identity” from October 2022, which she identified as harmful in May but chose to keep on her website “to be transparent about” her “impacts.”
Hoover’s 2023 letter is much less forgiving. More than twenty times in the letter, she refers to the “harm” and “hurt” she has caused by professing “an identity based on family stories” while she “lived in different Native communities,” by receiving “access to spaces and resources” she “would not have otherwise,” such as identity-based “programs” and “funding opportunities,” and by entering “ceremonial and social spaces reserved for Native people.”
On Twitter, there have been calls for Hoover to be fired from UC Berkeley and, as well as accusations of her deliberately lying “for professional gain.” Others have called her a “pretendian.”
Yet this situation does not seem like a run-of-the-mill identity fraud. Based on her October 2022 letter, it appears that Hoover’s parents, not Hoover, provided her with a false family history and integrated her into Native culture. With this in mind, Hoover herself (if anyone) should be the one enduring “grief” as she writes about the people associated with her. She seems to have dedicated her life and career to Native causes, and we have no reason to think that she did so with malicious intent.
Instead, Hoover is left literally to “put away” and “give away” her “dance regalia, ribbons skirts, moccasins, and Native jewelry.” Does she really need to do that? To her, Native culture is precious and deep, regardless of her bloodline. Tribe members accepted her and called her their “chosen daughter, auntie, and friend.” Her race does not eliminate those lived experiences – many a relationship has been through much worse. Moreover, she has committed herself to restorative-justice processes and continued contributions to Native causes, thereby doing much more than just continuing the “harms caused by white people on Native communities.” For her critics (and herself), will it ever be enough?
Hoover should not lament for long about blood ties if what she has built surpasses them. If the individuals she treasures share those sentiments, I don’t see why she can’t return to what she grew up with — even if now just as someone who appreciates it deeply, not as someone who is tied to it by blood.