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In 1928, a forty-one-year-old woman named Adeline Ovitt, née Rivers, drowned in the Schroon River, in upstate New York. The circumstances of her death are largely unknown, but she left behind a husband and five children, including a ten-year-old son named LeRoy, who later had six children of his own, including a daughter named Anita. Anita eventually settled down with Robert Hoover, a pipe fitter for General Electric, in the town of Knox, about forty minutes west of Albany. In 1978, Anita and Robert had their first child together, a daughter named Elizabeth. Two more daughters would follow.
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.”
The Bucchinos and the Hoovers began to spend frequent weekends together. Elizabeth and Tammy taught each other the intricacies of the Fancy Shawl Dance, which involves elaborate regalia. (The dance emerged in the twentieth century, and it became a way to preserve Native American culture.) At powwows, the girls picked up ways of thinking and speaking that distinguished them from their white classmates in school. “Liz dances like her feet don’t even touch the ground,” Bucchino said. “She’s put her heart and soul into her own culture. Not many people do that.”
By the time Hoover was a teen-ager, she had taken on a Mi’kmaq name, Gomdineôeôeu Ôsaog, which she translates as Mountain Flower. She says she was given that name by a Mi’kmaq elder at a ceremony attended by her paternal grandmother. In 1996, Parade magazine collected statements from high-school students about racism and offensive mascots. “Being of Native American descent, I am annoyed at mascots like ‘Indians’ or ‘Chiefs’ or ‘Braves’—and the mock war whoops and chanting that often accompany these names,” Hoover is quoted as saying. The statement is signed “Elizabeth Gomdineôeôeu Ôsaog Hoover, 17, Knox, N.Y.”
Hoover was an exemplary student, and she enrolled at Williams College, in western Massachusetts, in 1997. She studied anthropology and psychology. As a sophomore, she organized a powwow that got a writeup in the student paper. The accompanying photo shows a nineteen-year-old Hoover, thin and tall, with dark-brown hair, close-set eyes, and two white feathers in her hair. She is described as “Elizabeth Hoover ’01, known as Wind Chaser and descendant of the Mohawk and Micmac tribes.” (Hoover says she has never gone by Wind Chaser.) Her senior thesis was titled “The Self-Identification of Mixed-Blood Indians in the United States and Canada.”
After graduation, Hoover went to Brown to pursue a Ph.D. in anthropology. A teaching appointment at Brown was followed by a tenured professorship at the University of California, Berkeley. By her early forties, Hoover had become one of the most successful Native American academics in the country, renowned for her work in food sovereignty, the idea that self-determination entails controlling one’s sources of nutrition. On Instagram, she posted envy-inducing pictures with her partner, a Crow photographer named Adam Sings In The Timber: Hoover, dressed in Fancy Shawl Dance regalia of bright blue and white, a goofy smile on her face; Sings In The Timber, handsome and dressed in black, a camera slung around his neck.
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.”
To outsiders, the term “Pretendian” might sound ugly or be discomforting. There is no universal standard for determining who is a “real” Native American and who is not. Native identity is a legal and political classification, based on filial lineage and tribal citizenship. Tribal nations have their own rules for enrollment, and some are more open than others. The Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe, for example, requires twenty-five per cent Akwesasne Mohawk blood; the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma mandates that an ancestor be on its 1937 roll and have an eighth Pawnee blood. The Cherokee Nation, one of the two largest Native groups in the United States, will accept anyone who can prove some lineal descent in specific records.
These rules have been informed by brutal histories. Blood requirements can be traced to “blood quantum” laws, which, beginning in the Colonial era, were used to disenfranchise Native Americans and to enforce racial distinctions that controlled everything from land claims to marriages. But such criteria can now be a way of insuring that often scarce tribal resources are divided among actual descendants, and to discourage impostors from claiming identities that they don’t possess.
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.
The word “complicated” always hovers in the stories of Pretendians. After centuries of colonization, displacement, and forceful assimilation, many Native Americans who grew up in their tribal communities can pass as white or as other races. People whose parents were adopted or sent to boarding schools as part of government programs to weaken tribal sovereignty may return to their communities, however removed they have since become. And a child may hear about some distant Native ancestor, then build an identity around what turns out to be a bit of family lore. There is a sympathetic—and, yes, complicated—version of Hoover’s story in which a white woman named Anita is so moved by the tale of a grandmother’s tragic death that she takes her daughters to powwows and encourages them to befriend Native kids.
Anita Hoover brought up her daughters to care about being Native; not even Hoover’s critics dispute that. Hoover, in her formal statements and in the conversations I had with her over the course of nine months, has repeatedly insisted that, until people began questioning her identity, she had never carefully researched her genealogy. She knew that she was not eligible for tribal enrollment, she says, and so she didn’t bother. This explanation seems to take for granted that there was little else to be gained by knowing more about the specific people she came from. You might wonder if, at some point, she began to have her own suspicions and avoided getting to the bottom of them. Or you might believe that Hoover must have traced her family tree, found it wanting, and decided to keep going with a story that had given her the life she had—in which case, you will have to conclude not only that she lied in her two formal statements but that she lied for years about who she was.
Jennifer Weston first met Hoover around the time that Hoover began her graduate work at Brown. Weston, who is Hunkpapa Lakota and was born and grew up on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, had gone to Brown as an undergraduate, and she had recently returned to Providence to organize the small number of Native students on the campus. Hoover was with her boyfriend at the time, who is Wampanoag. They told Weston that they had connections to nearby tribes. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life,” Hoover told me. Her boyfriend worked in a museum. “So I was, like, ‘Well, I’ll go get a degree in museum studies.’ ”
She matriculated at Brown in 2001, shortly before the arrival of a professor named Evelyn Hu-DeHart, a historian whose family immigrated to the U.S. from China when she was a girl. Hu-DeHart studied Latin American and Caribbean history and wrote extensively, at the beginning of her academic career, on the Yaqui, a Native tribe with roots in northwest Mexico. She was hired to build up the school’s ethnic-studies program, and to run the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America.
Early in her time at Brown, Hu-DeHart remembers noticing a striking young woman who wore beaded earrings and hung around with the kids in a Native American student group. Hoover “figured out very early how to project her Native American identity,” Hu-DeHart told me, noting that many Native people can pass for white. (“They don’t necessarily have physical features or even a skin color that immediately marks them,” she said.) She added, of Hoover, “At Brown, she organized an annual powwow. We brought in drums from the different tribes around. We had dancers, and Liz would always have a beautiful regalia, gowns, and beautiful beaded jewelry.” The ethnic-studies department did not have a full-time Native American faculty member, a fact that weighed on Hu-DeHart. The university eventually began a job search for a Native-studies scholar. In the meantime, Hu-DeHart asked Hoover to serve as a graduate instructor for an introductory Native-studies course that Hu-DeHart planned to offer.
In Hoover’s first few years at Brown, she and Jennifer Weston ran into each other often. Weston recalls Hoover saying that the Mohawk side of her family was from “north of Kahnawà:ke,” a territory in southern Quebec, and that she wasn’t sure about her Mi’kmaq side. In the summer of 2005, Hoover took a trip to Kahnawà:ke to attend a powwow; afterward, in an e-mail, she reported running into “people who knew people i’m related to so that was nice.” She went on to explain that her family “left kahnawake a few generations ago” and had lived in New York ever since. (Hoover said that this connection fell through and that she never pursued it further.)
A month later, Weston got married. Hoover offered to make her a pair of moccasins to go with a traditional buckskin dress. Although Hoover would later maintain that she never found her relatives, Weston insists that, at the wedding, Hoover told people that she had found them—and that, contrary to what she had believed before, they were actually from Kahnawà:ke proper. Weston remembers feeling a great deal of happiness for her friend.
The Akwesasne Mohawk reservation straddles the border between New York and Canada and sits along the St. Lawrence River, which, for generations, carried effluents from nearby industrial sites, contaminating everything from local food to breast milk.
Hoover began spending a lot of time on the reservation not long after she started her doctorate. Through mutual Ivy League acquaintances, she’d met the son of a scholar and midwife named Katsi Cook, who, in the nineteen-eighties, had conducted a groundbreaking study of industrial pollutants in breast milk. Cook’s son introduced Hoover to his mother, who quickly saw a use for this young, eager student from Brown. Cook wanted someone to look through the health records of participants from her study and to follow up with them, in order to gather information for how future studies could be improved.
Hoover began travelling back and forth between Providence and Akwesasne. On the reservation, she helped out with farming projects and in the community library. At Cook’s urging, she decided to write her dissertation about industrial pollution as well as gardening. The perception of reservation-wide contamination had made people at Akwesasne afraid to grow crops, an activity that was vital for their self-reliance. Within a year, Hoover had conducted sixty-three interviews, which, along with the records Cook had given her, provided much of the basis for her dissertation.
In the community garden, Hoover met Jean Laffin, who runs a small farm. Laffin doesn’t recall Hoover ever explaining her background, but she always assumed that Hoover was Native. “It was the way she spoke,” Laffin said. “She just blended right in with people here.” She eventually took to calling Hoover her “chosen daughter,” and came to consider her part of the family.
Kahnawà:ke is about an hour and a half’s drive from Akwesasne. Hoover had been there at least once, before Weston’s wedding, and Katsi Cook’s mother was from Kahnawà:ke. Given the close ties between the two Mohawk communities, Cook could easily have started Hoover on a path to finding her relatives, no matter how distant. So why didn’t Hoover take the short drive in order to find them? And why didn’t she ask Cook for help?
Audra Simpson, an anthropology professor at Columbia and a member of the Mohawk Nation at Kahnawà:ke, met Hoover at a Native-studies conference before Hoover had embarked on her Akwesasne project. Simpson was there with a Mohawk curator and scholar. “Liz Hoover approached us and introduced herself very enthusiastically,” Simpson told me. “She was quite friendly. And she said she was from Kahnawà:ke.”
Simpson began asking about Hoover’s family, as she would any Native person with overlapping heritage. “I’m looking to make a connection,” Simpson explained to me. “I’m looking to find out if we’re related, because if you claim that you’re from Kahnawà:ke then you’re potentially related to me somehow. There’s so few of us.” Hoover gave her the name Brooks. Simpson thought she must have misheard. It wasn’t a name she knew.
Over the years, Simpson occasionally heard about Hoover and spoke with other academics who had noticed the vague way that Hoover talked about her ancestry. Simpson was also slightly suspicious of Hoover on account of the volume of beadwork and Native American signifiers that she was known to wear. (Hoover insists that this is exaggerated, but others described her in a similar fashion. “It looked like an Etsy shop exploded on her,” Simpson said.) On a visit to Kahnawà:ke, Simpson asked around to learn if there was a family named Brooks. There was. “It’s a tiny, tiny family,” Simpson told me. “There were two people still alive.” She asked cousins of the family if Elizabeth Hoover was related to them. “Nobody had ever heard of her,” Simpson said. The next time she saw Hoover, at an American Anthropological Association event, she asked her a direct question: “Who are you?”
“I was not warm,” Simpson recalled. “She looked at me like a deer in the headlights and then she sort of scuttled away.” (Hoover disputes this account.) Simpson has known people whose families were from Kahnawà:ke and who had become disconnected from their pasts. “Some of us were forced to live off the reserve,” she told me. “Even the ones forced out, we still know them and claim them.” Such stories were not new to Simpson. “There are people who returned home, and maybe they don’t feel one hundred per cent welcome, but they are brought back in,” Simpson said. “I don’t think Elizabeth Hoover ever made that journey.”
Hoover completed her dissertation in 2010. When Jennifer Weston read it, she noted a mention of Kahnawà:ke in Hoover’s description of her background. She assumed that Hoover had successfully traced her family, but, when she asked her friend about it, Hoover said she still didn’t have much information. “I remember thinking that was weird,” Weston told me. Hoover did say that she had learned who her family was. It wasn’t the Brooks family. She was from the Rivers family, she said. She believed they had shortened the name from Two Rivers.
By 2012, Brown University’s search for a Native-studies scholar had been going on for several years. Candidates were flown to Providence and asked to give “job talks,” during which the scholar meets students and presents research. Some candidates who were brought in dropped out voluntarily. Others were passed over.
Annette Rodriguez was a graduate fellow at the center toward the end of this period. She told me about a Native scholar who gave a job talk wearing a three-piece suit with a distinctively patterned tie. Someone asked him about the pattern, expecting that the design had come from his tribal community. The scholar said it was from Barneys. “He wasn’t going to fuel the fantasies of the white imagination of what an authentic Native person was,” Rodriguez said. “Liz was very happy to do that.”
Hoover had returned to Brown as a visiting scholar in 2011, after another attempt to fill the full-time position had failed. The American-studies department, which had absorbed the ethnic-studies program, then decided to alter the job description, calling for a scholar earlier in her career, and quickly hired Hoover. Hu-DeHart was on leave at the time, but Rodriguez saw her hand in it. Hu-DeHart was Hoover’s patron, Rodriguez said. It’s common—arguably, even required—for young faculty to have champions in their departments. But such a prestigious job doesn’t often appear so suddenly for an academic who has not yet published a book or had a tenure-track job elsewhere.
Rodriguez saw a connection between Hoover’s swift rise and how ardently she signalled her supposed Native identity. “I was never in a meeting where she wasn’t beading,” Rodriguez said. “She had different beads in little plastic containers or bags, and she would take them out and start beading during our faculty meetings or when someone was giving a presentation.”
In Rodriguez’s view, Hoover was performing a kind of fantasy of the Native scholar for the non-Native faculty around her—she was what they wanted to see. “She got grants, and she got fellowships, and she checked boxes, and she got positions,” Rodriguez said. “And so she exploited the system. But I think the system also was very happy to have her as the visible Native.”
In 2016, thousands of people gathered at the Standing Rock reservation to block the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Weston, who had returned home to take part in the resistance, got a message from her old friend. Hoover was planning on coming to Standing Rock, and a group of students were getting money together so that they could join her. They wanted to get the lay of the land before coming and hoped that Weston could fill them in.
The students created a GoFundMe page for the trip. They also drafted a funding proposal, with Hoover’s knowledge, that suggested they would bring back items to donate to a museum. This seemed to violate key tenets of Native studies: you should not extract from a community and you should respect the sovereignty of its people. Weston was baffled that Hoover would fail to grasp something so fundamental. She explained these concerns to Hoover, who acquiesced, and they remained on friendly terms. Weston sent Hoover slides to use at Brown chronicling the Lakota’s treaties with the U.S. government and Standing Rock’s history of resistance. After Hoover’s dissertation was published as a book, “The River Is in Us,” in 2017, Weston helped organize a launch party at a bookstore in Providence.
A short while later, the department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at Berkeley started a hiring search. The department was under some pressure to diversify the faculty after a Black professor was denied tenure. A handful of people in the department advocated for Hoover, including a professor named Kathryn De Master, who had met Hoover earlier in her career and was impressed by her work. Hoover got the job, and she and Adam Sings In The Timber moved to Berkeley in October, 2020. He was hired as a photographer for the university. Hoover connected with students over Zoom and began figuring out her niche in the sometimes dramatic and frequently petty forum of department politics.
That December, Joe Biden appointed Deb Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna, to lead the Department of the Interior. A writer named Claudia Lawrence, who identified as Native, wrote an Op-Ed in the Times offering Haaland advice. After the column ran, the Times was informed of a claim that Lawrence had no Native ancestry, and determined that Lawrence could not prove otherwise. (Lawrence could not be reached for comment.) In the wake of the dustup, a journalist named Jacqueline Keeler created the Alleged Pretendians List.
Keeler had been on a campaign against Pretendians for several years. In 2015, she wrote a piece about the phenomenon for the Daily Beast, after Dartmouth, her alma mater, hired a woman named Susan Taffe Reed, the president of Eastern Delaware Nation, as the director of its Native American Program. The writers of an irreverent blog called FakeIndians had discovered that Eastern Delaware Nation was not a recognized tribe but a nonprofit, and that Taffe Reed did not appear to have Delaware tribal ancestry. (Taffe Reed did not respond to a request for comment.) Keeler began working with a team of scholars and genealogists to expose Pretendians, prompting bursts of attention in the press—most notably when she challenged the identity of Sacheen Littlefeather, the actress and activist who declined an Academy Award on behalf of Marlon Brando, in 1973, in an effort to protest Hollywood’s portrayal of Native Americans.
Keeler shared the Alleged Pretendians List with a select group of scholars and community members, who could contribute the names of people they believed were faking their heritage and add notes detailing whatever evidence they had. The list was quickly screenshotted, downloaded, and shared. The ancestries of some people on the list were ultimately verified and marked accordingly. But many people I spoke to expressed discomfort with Keeler’s methods, saying that she assumes guilt, requiring the accused to prove themselves innocent. What’s more, critics say, the campaign encourages cultural chauvinism—tribal strength and sovereignty depend on a community being able to determine whom to invite in, not on the watchful policing of sometimes arbitrary genetic boundaries.
Still, even some of Keeler’s sharpest critics say that she is, as one grad student put it to me, “problematic but necessary.” Prior to Keeler, Pretendians had cosplayed for years without any real repercussions. Kim TallBear, the professor of Native studies at the University of Alberta, supports Keeler’s work unequivocally. “Jackie being out front has opened a door that a lot of other people have walked through,” she said. “I am disgusted when people throw her under the bus.”
Jennifer Weston sought out the list to see if anyone she knew was on it. Many of the names were unsurprising, the subjects of years of rumor. Then she saw Hoover’s name. She got in touch with her, expressing surprise and confusion. “When I asked her about it, she said that she was just going to keep doing her good work until they came for her,” Weston told me. (Hoover disputes this account.) “And now I’m wondering if that’s one of the only true things she’s ever said to me.”
Early in 2022, accusations that Adam Sings In The Timber, Hoover’s partner, was a sexual predator began circulating on social media. Soon, a Native organization, the Chi-Nations Youth Council, which had worked with him in the past, posted a statement denouncing him as “a groomer and a rapist.”
One of Sings In The Timber’s accusers was a student and an aspiring photographer named Tena Bear Don’t Walk. Bear Don’t Walk, who is Crow, was eighteen when she first got to know Sings In The Timber. They began exchanging Instagram messages in 2018, and the following year Sings In The Timber, who was in his early forties, told her about a talk he was giving in Seattle. Bear Don’t Walk met him and Hoover there.
When Sings In The Timber made another visit to Washington State, months later, he met Bear Don’t Walk for dinner. After dinner, he bought some alcohol, and they drank together in his hotel room. Then, while she was asleep, she says, he sexually assaulted her. Bear Don’t Walk reported the alleged assault to the Tulalip Tribal Police Department three years later; after a brief investigation, the Tulalip prosecutor’s office decided not to pursue the case. (Sings In The Timber did not respond to a request for comment. In an Instagram post, from 2022, he denied ever having nonconsensual sex with anyone.)
After the allegations began circulating, Hoover privately defended her partner. She told an acquaintance, David Smoke-McCluskey, that the accusations had been “completely made up,” and that Sings In The Timber was working on a statement with a mediator and with “the woman who fabricated” the story. There would be a ceremony, she said, at which Bear Don’t Walk would apologize for “publicly slandering” Sings In The Timber, and he would apologize “for hurting her feelings.” A Crow woman named Nina Sanders had, indeed, been approached about handling the situation in a Crow way, and had explained that this would involve a ceremony, but she claims she never proposed a joint apology or characterized the allegations as false. Hoover says the messages reflected her understanding of the situation at the time, but Smoke-McCluskey believes that Hoover lied to him in order to cast doubt on Bear Don’t Walk’s story.
Bear Don’t Walk went public in April. Another young woman had posted a story about Sings In The Timber behaving inappropriately, and the allegations were written up in a couple of Native publications. Hoover posted a statement on Instagram, insisting that she was “completely unaware of Adam’s harmful interactions with the two women who have come forward, until everything came out on this very public forum.” This is an overstatement at best: the mediation involving Sanders was proposed shortly after the accusations were made, in February. Hoover later deleted her Instagram account.
As this was going on, Hoover went to her colleague Kathryn De Master’s house and broke down. De Master felt overwhelmed, she told me. She considered Hoover a friend and an ally—the two had ridden out much of the early days of the pandemic texting jokes back and forth during department Zoom calls. And all the attention had made the whispers about Hoover’s identity harder to ignore. When people wrote about Sings In The Timber’s alleged behavior, they generally noted that his partner’s Native identity had been contested. This wasn’t news to De Master, but, like many of Hoover’s colleagues, she had wanted to believe Hoover, and so she did.
Perhaps none of Hoover’s colleagues were as upset about the rumors as Adrienne Keene, whom Hoover had mentored at Brown. Despite years of close friendship, Keene realized that Hoover had never told her the “full story” of her family. (Hoover denies keeping anything from her.) Keene reached out to Hoover and “asked her directly for family names and ties,” she later wrote, and “was left confused and unsatisfied by the answers.” She decided to investigate the matter herself, searching census records and reading through newspaper archives. Keene, who did not respond to several requests for an interview, has insisted that she began her investigation with the goal of helping her mentor by putting the questions to rest.
“I did this work from a place of love, which makes what I found even harder for me to understand,” she wrote in a long e-mail to Hoover, in June, 2022. “I wanted your story to be true. I wanted to give you the tools you needed to prove everyone wrong.” The e-mail goes through several generations of Hoover’s family tree, finding no ties to any Indigenous community. Keene later posted the e-mail on her blog.
In October of that year, Hoover published the first of her two statements about her identity. In response, three Native students who had studied with Hoover—Ataya Cesspooch, Sierra Edd, and Breylan Martin—wrote an open letter demanding her resignation. “As scholars embedded in the kinship networks of our communities,” they wrote, “we find Hoover’s repeated attempts to differentiate herself from settlers with similar stories and her claims of having lived experience as an Indigenous person by dancing at powwows absolutely appalling.” Hoover, they went on, had “failed to acknowledge the harm she has caused and enabled.”
This question of harm—of whether and to what extent it has actually been done—is central to debates about racial fraud, particularly when the person accused has done good work in the community. With academics, harm is often, though not entirely, a matter of stolen opportunities. Martin told me about the difficulties she has had paying for her education, and about the necessity of fellowships and financial-aid opportunities aimed at Native students. Hoover had seized such opportunities her entire academic life, Martin said.
Edd suggested that Hoover’s lofty career was symptomatic of a larger identity problem within the academy. “There’s a prevalence of white people and white-passing people within ethnic cultural studies, whether you’re talking about African American studies, Latino, Asian American, or Native American,” she said. “There is a centering of whiteness that is felt within the fields, within the academic discourse, but also within the institutions who hire the people who make up these departments.”
I heard versions of this point from several of Hoover’s former students and colleagues. Hoover dressed the part, they said, but was also able to ingratiate herself with senior faculty—who may have subconsciously gravitated to someone who, behind the beads and the regalia, was just like them. “People who either have a story of a Cherokee ancestor or maybe actually have one in 1820, but who code as white, and come from a middle- or upper-middle-class background, there’s a certain kind of white privilege that opens doors for you,” Kim TallBear told me. “They’re more comfortable for people.”
Nearly four hundred people have signed the students’ letter. Hoover’s department asked the university’s Restorative Justice Center to work with students who felt betrayed, and also with Hoover, to discuss the harm she’d caused. Hoover then released her second statement, titled “Letter of Apology and Accountability.” In it, she writes, “I was first directly challenged in my Indigenous identity when I began my first assistant professor job.” The word “harm,” and its variants, makes thirteen appearances. Hoover never says that she lied, but she refers multiple times to “broken trust” and insists that she is deeply sorry. “I have put away my dance regalia, ribbons skirts, moccasins, and Native jewelry,” she writes. “I’ve begun to give away some of these things to people who will wear them better.”
Reading this second statement, Kathryn De Master thought back to a visit she and a colleague had made to Hoover’s house months before, to ask Hoover about her past. If De Master and others in the department were going to support Hoover, they needed to have a full accounting of the facts, and they needed to hear them from her. The three colleagues sat together on Hoover’s porch. De Master asked Hoover if there had ever been questions about her Native heritage before she arrived at Berkeley, and Hoover emphatically said no. (Hoover denies saying no.)
I first contacted Elizabeth Hoover in May, 2023, the day after she published her second statement. We met shortly afterward, in a coffee shop in Berkeley. Living in a college town, one meets more than one’s share of academic narcissists, but Hoover didn’t come across as that type. Her charm and intelligence were obvious. She spoke of the wreckage of her life with a dark, engaging humor.
I told Hoover that others remembered her speaking of a connection to a family named Brooks, and then to the Rivers and Two Rivers families. If she had never researched her family, as she claimed, where did these names come from?
“I’ve had one story, which is the story that my mother gave me,” Hoover insisted. “My mom’s grandma was Adelaide Rivers, and she was under the impression that it used to be Two Rivers and she shortened it.” The Two Rivers family does in fact exist, though Hoover has no connection to it. She denies mentioning the name Brooks to anyone.
I asked why she didn’t enlist the help of Katsi Cook—who, despite all the allegations, still loves Hoover—in order to find her people in Kahnawà:ke. She reiterated her point about not meeting the criteria for enrollment. “I know other people who have been rejected in this way,” she said. “There’s not an ethos of ‘Yes, please come home and reclaim.’ People, when I would reach out, were prickly towards me.” She added, “I should have put myself out there. I should have just sucked it up.”
At one point, Hoover suggested that she didn’t investigate things further because the great-grandmother she’d heard about was not inspiring. “When people are, like, ‘Oh, draw on the strength of your ancestors,’ mine weren’t,” she said, alluding to Adeline Rivers. “She cracked and killed herself and abandoned her kids. So I lived in the present. And I went with the people that took me in and taught me and accepted me and didn’t provide this kind of resistance.”
How does one square these statements with Hoover’s reference, in an e-mail about Kahnawà:ke, to “people who knew people i’m related to”? Or with what she allegedly told friends at Weston’s wedding? Does it seem plausible that Hoover, a budding anthropologist, would have arrived in Kahnawà:ke, come so close to finding answers about who she was, and then just walked away?
Some of Hoover’s friends and colleagues have come to distrust her over time. In 2019, Hoover co-edited a book of essays about food sovereignty with a scholar at the University of Kansas named Devon Mihesuah. In the book’s original biographical materials, Hoover listed herself as Mohawk and Mi’kmaq. But after another of the book’s contributors was accused of being a Pretendian, Hoover, without alerting Mihesuah, contacted the publisher and asked to have her tribal affiliations removed from this material. Mihesuah doesn’t understand why Hoover would do this unless she doubted the veracity of the affiliations. (Hoover says that including her affiliations alongside Mihesuah’s felt inappropriate given that, unlike Mihesuah, she wasn’t an enrolled citizen.)
That same year, Hoover published an article in the Review of International American Studies titled “ ‘Fires were lit inside them:’ The Pyropolitics of Water Protector Camps at Standing Rock.” When Jennifer Weston read it, she saw that language had been lifted, without attribution, from the slides that she had given Hoover years before. She confronted Hoover, who said it had been an innocent mistake and asked the journal to issue an erratum. Later, Weston said, Hoover sent her a long handwritten explanation for what had happened. The letter came wrapped in “some kind of greenery,” Weston told me. “I don’t know if she put cedar or something in there with it. I guess she was intending to communicate some sort of healing energy or whatever.”
When Weston eventually read both of Hoover’s statements of identity, she could not recognize the person described there. “As someone who has known Elizabeth for twenty years, both of her statements are fraught with misinformation and misrepresentation,” she told me. Weston refuses to believe that Hoover never researched her genealogy. “She did look,” Weston said.
Although Hoover has support from some professors, the leadership of her department has turned against her. When the current school year started, two of her three graduate students refused to work with her. One of them, a Native student, had put aside community work to study at Berkeley with Hoover’s encouragement. She has switched advisers. As Hoover’s own career demonstrates, mentorship is crucial to academic success.
“I’m not going to be driven out, because I still have usefulness,” Hoover told me. “I still did all that work. I did the research, I did all the learning, I did the teaching. And I’m not going to have all of that just cancelled and thrown away because people are upset about this.”
For a long time, Hoover continued to show up to every department meeting, even to parties and retreats where her presence wasn’t mandatory. Some of her former students and faculty friends began to dread running into her. Eventually, the chair of her department announced via e-mail that Hoover would stop attending these events; the department’s administration also quietly tried to make sure that Hoover no longer worked in Native communities, as she had promised in her statement of accountability. (Hoover says she has upheld her promise without any administrative intervention.)
Almost immediately, however, rumors circulated that Hoover was breaking that promise, taking part in cultural burns—the lighting of controlled fires to manage Native land—and posting photos of herself at these events on Facebook. Hoover denies that the burns are part of her scholarly work and says that she had been invited by the tribal chairperson who hosted the burns. (The tribal chairperson did not respond to a request for comment.)
One day last fall, the Native grad student who had paused her community work was feeling overwhelmed by the turmoil in her new department and went to a cultural burn up north. She wanted to be around people who weren’t embroiled in the drama surrounding Hoover, she told me. When she got to the burn, which was crowded, Hoover was there. The tribal chairperson acknowledged Hoover, announcing that she had given him a beaded medallion a year or two before. “And then she was at the campfires, laughing really loud, like how Native women usually laugh,” the grad student said. “It’s weird she laughs like that.” ♦