A California professor who claimed to be Native American all her life has revealed she is white, apologizing for betraying the trust of the indigenous communities she lived next to.
Elizabeth Hoover, b associate professor of environmental sciences and the Department of Policy Management at UC Berkeley, said she had “incorrectly identified herself” based on “incomplete information, based on a press release sent to her personal website on monday.
“By indiscriminately living an identity based on family stories, without looking for a documented connection to those communities, I even have done a disservice,” Hoover said.
Hoover, who has published books and articles on Native American food sovereignty and other issues, said she never had proper documentation to support or disprove her claims of being Native American.
“Growing up, I didn’t query who I used to be told I used to be or how I identified,” said Hoover. “But as an adult, as a scientist, I must have done my due diligence to verify that my ancestors were who I used to be told.”
Hoover Twitter account, which has not been tweeted since 2020, features many Native American protests the professor has been an element of and plenty of food summits she has attended.
By identifying as Native American, she has revealed that she has access to resources that she wouldn’t have if she only identified as a white person.
“Before participating in programs or funding opportunities that were related to identity or aimed toward underrepresented people, I must have made sure that the communities I applied for requested me in return,” added Hoover.
Hoover claimed descent from the Mohawk and Mi’kmaq, whose tribes hailed from the northeastern United States and Canada.
Hoover also said that she at all times presented herself as “someone of mixed Mohawk, Mi’kmaq, French, English, Irish and German ancestry and identity.”
In the unique statement Hoover detailed how she grew up believing her great-grandmother was Mohawk and was taken to “pow-wows, ceremonies, and food summits” to feel connected to her mother’s family.
Hoover said that in her profession as a professor at Elizabethtown College, St. Olaf College and Brown University faced many accusations regarding her heritage.
After the apology, Adrienne Keene, an assistant professor at Brown University and a Cherokee Nation citizen who claims to have been friends with Hoover, wrote a letter on her blog saying that Hoover’s story quickly fell apart when Keene first began over wondering about it. a yr ago.
“I’ll say that this job was not particularly difficult or required numerous expertise – its story fell apart in a short time, inside a couple of clicks, but the next months were spent searching by all means something that might explain her theorems, triangulation and triple checking, searching through recent databases, finding more recent documents, or going back a generation.” Keen wrote.
A petition demanding Hoover’s resignation received greater than 350 signatures last November The Each day Californian.
Hoover added that her false claims not only hurt the indigenous communities she claimed to be an element of but in addition the scholars she taught as she researched her specialties in “Native American food systems, Native American environmental health movements” and indigenous uses of “fire.”
Hoover admitted that her apology was long overdue and would have done little but was adamant that it may very well be a stepping stone for change and help her make amends.
“I’m hurting indigenous individuals who have been my friends, colleagues, students and family, each directly through broken trusts and by activating historic damage,” she said. “This wound has also disrupted the lives and careers of scholars and school. I admit that I could have prevented all of this by researching and confirming my family’s histories earlier. For that, I’m very sorry.”