Native American campaigners are raising questions about the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s first ever curator of Native American art — claiming that she does not belong to a federally recognized tribe in the US, The Post has learned.
Patricia Marroquin Norby was hired with great fanfare in 2020, after what the museum said was “a long and competitive search,” as its “inaugural Associate Curator of Native American Art” in its American Wing.
For years, Marroquin Norby, 53, described herself — including in legal filings — as “Apache,” “Eastern Apache” and “Nde” as well as “Purepacha/Tarascan,” an indigenous group from the northwestern part of Michoacan, Mexico.
A year after her appointment, the New York Times described her as “the museum’s first Native American curator and its first curator of Native American art” in a glowing profile.
And in 2022, Marroquin Norby told NPR, “First, I should say,” before speaking briefly in an apparent Native language, then saying in English, “I am Purepacha. I’m Purepacha descent.”
But after Native American researchers disputed her claims to any indigenous heritage, The Met told The Post that she was Purepacha, a Mexican indigenous group. The museum declined to make Marroquin Norby available for interview.
On Monday, Marroquin Norby said in a social media post that she has been targeted by a group of Native American women who are trying to “cancel” her. She said she is proud of her “Purepacha and Nde (Mexican Apache) family roots from Mexico, northern Mexico and Texas. I am not going to hide my identity or family history in shame.”
A spokeswoman for The Met said, “Patricia Marroquin Norby is of Purepacha descent and also descends from Indigenous communities in what is now Texas.”
The Purepacha are a Mexican native group, which is not one of the 574 Indian tribes recognized by the US Department of the Interior’s Indian Affairs division.
But even the curator’s claim to be Purepacha is questioned by Native campaigners against so-called “pretendians” — people who falsely claim they are tribal members.
The most notorious examples are actress Sacheen Littlefeather, who claimed she was Apache and Yaqui when she addressed the Oscars in 1973, reading a boycott statement from Marlon Brando; and Canadian singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie, who claimed to be Cree.
Campaigners say both were white women who lied for decades, with Littlefeather’s fraud only emerging after her death.
“With all of the Native American scholars out there, we really wonder why the museum chose Patricia, who is definitely not Native American,” said Kathy Griffin, a member of the Cherokee Nation who compiled a genealogy of Marroquin Norby’s family that she shared with The Post.
The review of Marroquin Norby’s ancestry compiled by Griffin shows no evidence that any of her parents, grandparents or great-grandparents were enrolled members of a recognized tribe.
“It’s genocide again of Native Americans,” Griffin said. “Now [white people’s] descendants are colonizing us again by claiming to be us.”
Purepacha is not a federally recognized tribe in the US but has a diaspora community, a member of which told The Post: “[Marroquin Norby] wants to be the only Indian in the room and that doesn’t serve the community.
“It’s the first time that someone claiming to be part of our community has behaved this way.”
“With pretendians, we’ve noticed a lot of red flags,” said Native American writer and activist Jacqueline Keeler, who first exposed Sacheen Littlefeather. “One of those is shifting of Native identities. You can see that with [Marroquin] Norby and her shifting claims.”
Lianna Costantino, a co-founder of the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds, which tracks pretendians, agreed. The non-profit added the genealogical research compiled by Griffin to their web site on Saturday.
“They [pretendians] constantly shift from one tribe to another and claim to be indigenous from Mexico which is a lot harder to prove,” Costantino told The Post Friday. “She [Marroquin Norby’] has nothing to show that she has a connection to the Purepecha in Mexico.”
Marroquin Norby, 53, who grew up in the Chicago area, once described herself as “an urban Indian” who began to proclaim her indigenous roots as an adult.
In a 2006 article in Eau Claire, Wisconsin’s Leader-Telegram, she described being mocked in fifth grade when she spoke about her great-grandmother Maria Jesus Torres, who “healed people in the Purepecha Mexican Indian tradition.”
Public records show that Torres and her husband left Mexico in the 1930s and settled in Chicago.
Marroquin Norby married Nathan Norby, a veterinarian, in a Native American ceremony in Osseo, Wisconsin, in 2003, with the Leader-Telegram reporting that an elder performed a “sage blessing” for the couple and there were customs and guests from six tribes.
In 2010, Marroquin Norby was among a group in Osseo who sued the school district to try to force the removal of its “Chieftains” mascot, which depicted a Native American in a headdress.
In state legal filings for the suit, seen by The Post, Marroquin Norby is described as “an Osseo-Fairchild resident of Purepacha (Tarascan/Eastern Apache) descent.”
In 2013, Marroquin Norby graduated from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities with a PhD in American Studies for a thesis which analyzed how “European Americans have historically manipulated American Indian images to create a non-American Indian perspective.”
After receiving her PhD she became director of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the Newberry Library in Chicago, and a trustee of the city’s Field Museum, “where she advised on repatriation cases,” according to an online biography.
Before her historic appointment at the Met, Marroquin Norby was senior executive and assistant director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in lower Manhattan for 10 months in 2019 and 2020.
“The Met really needs to educate themselves about American Indian sovereignty,” Costantino said. “They are so obsessed with DEI [Diversity, Equity and Inclusion] that they are not doing their due diligence, and when they don’t do the work they are doing a disservice to the Native community, to people who have suffered erasure. They are just erasing them again.”