Academic Apologizes for False Claim of Native American Identity

Elizabeth Hoover, a University of California at Berkeley anthropologist known for her work on food justice in Native American communities, has apologized for falsely claiming to be Indigenous and has admitted that she is white. Hoover had claimed her Native American heritage her “whole life” and benefited from her self-identified Indigenous background in the forms of “academic fellowships, opportunities, and material benefits that I may not have received had I not been perceived as a Native scholar”. Her concession fits into a continuum of white Americans co-opting racial and ethnic identity for personal gain and claiming tribal heritage in what critics call “Pretendians” at a time when Americans are increasingly self-identifying on the US census as Native American.