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The Native Scholar Who Wasn't
More a decade ago, a prominent academic was exposed for having faked her Cherokee ancestry. Why has her career continued to thrive?
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It was a Thursday morning concluding September, and J. Kehaulani Kauanui had just woken upwardly. She was reading a story on her phone in bed, a confession written by a woman named Jessica Krug, when, quite suddenly, it yanked her into the past.
"To an escalating degree over my developed life, I have eschewed my lived experience as a white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City," wrote Krug, a history professor who had for years identified — and published — equally a Black and Latina scholar. "I have thought nearly ending these lies many times over many years," she connected, "merely my cowardice was always more powerful than my ethics."
Kauanui checked the time. The confession was posted simply minutes before, but already six friends had forwarded her the link. It was that kind of story, the kind that spreads then fast so far information technology soon seems that anybody has read information technology, and anybody has had a reaction: daze, cloy, anger, entertainment. But Kauanui wasn't thinking almost Krug; she was thinking near Andy.
"It was a fantasy piece," she told me the beginning fourth dimension we talked, last November. "When I read it, the very first thing that came to my mind was: Oh, my God. If merely Andy would do this."
Andy is Andrea Smith. She and Kauanui met almost 25 years earlier, when Kauanui was a 28-twelvemonth-old graduate student in the history of consciousness plan at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Smith was a young divinity educatee who planned to become there for her Ph.D. Kauanui served on the department's admissions committee that year, and she still vividly remembers Smith's application: how passionately she wrote about gender politics but besides how conspicuously she divers her ethnic identity. "She positioned herself as Cherokee," she told me. "She had something in the application that talked about what it meant for urban Native Americans away from homeland."
Kauanui is Kanaka Maoli, or Native Hawaiian. But she grew up in Southern California, and she knew what it felt like to belong ancestrally to one place but be raised somewhere else. Role of her eventual dissertation, in fact, would expect at that question of identity within the context of Hawaii, specifically the state'due south comparably strict rules regarding who counts equally Native and who doesn't. The idea of having not just another Native pupil at Santa Cruz but a educatee who understood how complex and complicated Native identities can be was thrilling to Kauanui, and she pushed for Smith's acceptance and reached out to her as soon as she got in.
Over fourth dimension, the two became good friends just every bit Kauanui had hoped, though she apace realized that Smith didn't desire to talk about her family unit or her Native roots. For years, all she would tell Kauanui was that she was from Long Beach, Calif.; that her female parent was Oklahoma Cherokee, as were her grandparents; and that her dad, though out of the picture, was Ojibwe. In that location was a Cherokee customs in California, and Kauanui assumed for a while that Smith was part of that group. She assumed a lot, she realized in retrospect, filling in the blanks that Smith left in her story so that it would make sense.
Even 25 years subsequently, when she knew that and so much of what she first believed wasn't true, Kauanui still grappled with what to make of everything Smith had said — or hadn't said. When Krug confessed last September, her admission prompted the outings of a series of white people who had been masquerading in their fields over the years as Black, Latino or Indigenous — six in academia lone by the year'southward terminate. And yet, unlike Krug or the others who confessed and then disappeared from the public heart, Smith never explained herself or the lies she told. She has never really had to.
Rereading Krug's mea culpa subsequently that afternoon on a laptop at her dining-room tabular array, Kauanui thought about the reckoning that never took place. By then it had been years since she and Smith had been in touch on. Just on an impulse, she establish Smith's academy email address and, with a click, sent her a link to Krug's confession.
In the subject line, she wrote: "At present it's your plow."
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A Harvard graduate with long brown hair and pale skin, Andrea Smith began to make a proper name for herself in the early 1990s when she and her younger sister, Justine, moved to Chicago and started a local chapter of Women of All Red Nations, an activist organisation that grew out of the American Indian Move of the 1960s and '70s. (Neither sis responded to multiple requests for annotate for this article.) Although the sisters stayed in Chicago for but a few years, they fabricated an impression: They helped organize a protest of the Columbus 24-hour interval Parade and flew in Native activists to speak at community gatherings. And they likewise, says Katie Jones, a Cherokee woman who protested and organized alongside them, called out Native activists they thought weren't "legit."
"I watched them both go subsequently this woman named Constance," she told me. "Constance had showed up, she'd been living in Champaign and came to Chicago and tried to plug in with us, and they were like, 'She is Portuguese, she is Blackness, only she'due south not one of usa; she's lying, she's a fake.'"
Although the United States has a long history of white people "playing Indian," equally the scholar Philip J. Deloria calls information technology in his book of the same proper noun, the 1990s saw the first of what would somewhen be significant pushback by Native Americans against then-called Pretendians or Pretend Indians, including the successful passage of a national police prohibiting not-Native people from marketing their fine art every bit "Indian." Smith constitute her vox inside that protestation movement in 1991 when she published an essay in Ms. Magazine calling out white feminists and New Agers for co-opting Native identities.
"When white 'feminists' encounter how white people have historically oppressed others and how they are coming very close to destroying the earth, they oft want to disassociate themselves from their whiteness," Smith wrote. "They practice this by opting to 'become Indian.' In this way, they tin can escape responsibility and accountability for white racism. Of course, white 'feminists' want to go only partly Indian. They practise not desire to exist a office of our struggles for survival against genocide, and they do not desire to fight for treaty rights or an cease to substance abuse or sterilization corruption."
Information technology was the kind of article that would accept gone viral, if viral had existed back then, and information technology hinted at the forceful voice that would define Smith's activism and scholarship. Patti Jo King, a Cherokee academic and later one of the first people to confront Smith about her identity, says she taught that essay in her academy classes for years. Before questioning Smith about her ancestry at a private coming together in 2007, King really opened by saying how much she had enjoyed her commodity calling out false Indians.
Smith's intensity and singularity of focus was obvious the moment she showed up in Santa Cruz in 1997. David Delgado Shorter, now a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, remembers that she was successful academically and quickly gained the ear of most of the professors, but she used that access to criticize a student Native Studies group that he was part of, complaining that it had no Native American leadership, and after that it roughshod apart. Kauanui said Smith'south zeal rubbed other students the incorrect mode. Simultaneously an "onetime guard Marxist," a built-in-over again Christian and an animate being rights activist, Smith was the kind of person, Kauanui said, who once commented multiple times on the feelings of shellfish afterward someone ordered shrimp at tiffin. Simply as the years passed, Smith mellowed. Kauanui thinks she realized that her dogma was off-putting. Easing up on her doctrinaire Marxism, she likewise adult a new fascination with celebrity gossip. "People in our program, they were doing cultural reads on Hollywood," Kauanui said. "But to get from in that location to talking almost which Hollywood star was bonking whom was totally another extreme. Then she really went there and actually committed. She knew about that stuff, and it was kind of her discussion forage at conferences. And information technology made people express joy."
It was in 2006, during their collaboration on a drove of essays by Native American women, that Kauanui first heard rumors nigh Smith'due south identity. By and so, the two had grown close, even as the trajectory of their careers had diverged. They had both graduated with doctoral degrees and landed jobs at well-regarded universities: Kauanui at Wesleyan Academy and Smith at the University of Michigan. But while Kauanui was developing a narrow expertise on Hawaiian indigeneity, Smith had become zero less than "an icon of Native American feminism," as the publication Colorlines later called her. She co-founded the national organization Incite! Women of Color Against Violence; was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for her advocacy work; and aligned herself with prominent activists, including her dissertation adviser Angela Davis and Winona LaDuke, who later on wrote the introduction for Smith'south outset book.
That fall, a friend of Kauanui's — aware of her friendship and ongoing collaboration with Smith — reached out and asked whether Smith was actually Cherokee. "Oh, no, she's totally Cherokee," Kauanui told that friend. She wondered whether the concern was that Smith was "not Native plenty" because she grew up off the reservation.
Just the next year, Kauanui was shown confidential emails that complicated the narrative. In early 2007, an official from the Cherokee Nation began emailing Smith, request about her connections to the Cherokees given that she wasn't enrolled — a discussion used for citizens in a tribal nation. Smith'due south responses were evasive, and reading them, Kauanui couldn't figure out why she didn't simply analyze who her relatives were. It was, she came to realize, the first moment she really doubted Smith. Only as and then many others would later do, she brushed her concerns bated.
In the months that followed, Kauanui was distracted by her work helping to organize a briefing that leap at the University of Oklahoma. The briefing was a step toward starting a national organisation to join scholars working on Native and Ethnic issues. Smith was at the conference, too, and one afternoon during a panel session, she pulled Kauanui outside, saying she needed to talk to her most something serious. "I just went home to Long Beach, and I found out from my female parent that I'm non actually enrolled," she said, according to Kauanui'south memory of the chat. "I have to try to figure this out because there are people from the Cherokee Nation who are going to meet with me here."
The two were on a bench on the Norman campus. Smith seemed anxious and Kauanui wanted to help, simply once more she was confused: From the emails, she knew that Smith had already been told she wasn't enrolled. Kauanui couldn't mention them — she'd been sworn to secrecy — and she withal idea there had to be an explanation. She told Smith to share the names of her relatives with tribal officials, sure that they would be able to straighten things out.
Just Smith told her that information technology wasn't that simple. And indeed, it wasn't. Being "enrolled" in an American Indian tribe essentially ways being a legal citizen of that tribal nation. It's a condition that can be passed downward by parents who are also enrolled but also one that can be claimed, depending on the citizenship rules of each tribe, if an individual tin prove he or she is a kid, grandchild or at times even dandy-grandchild of someone who was a tribal member. As the Cherokee genealogical researcher David Cornsilk would afterwards tell me, Smith couldn't fifty-fifty do that: She had known since the 1990s that her family had no identifiable Native American roots, considering Smith had hired Cornsilk to expect for them and he found nada.
Although he can no longer recall the exact dates, Cornsilk says Smith start asked him to research her mother's side of the family in the early 1990s, when she was working every bit a Native organizer in Chicago. Nearly the finish of the decade, she hired him again to look into her father's side — around the time she was starting graduate school at Santa Cruz and introducing herself equally Cherokee and also later on she accepted the first of two Ford Foundation fellowships then earmarked for underrepresented groups in academia.
After researching both sides of Smith'southward family tree, Cornsilk concluded that she had no identifiable Native American relatives, enrolled or unenrolled or even living near those who were once enrolled. He says he sent off his written report to her both times and never heard back. "She never said anything," he told me. "But they usually don't. Because near of the time they're not getting the answer that they wanted."
Kauanui knew none of this that twenty-four hours in Norman. All she knew was that, afterward Smith came dorsum from her coming together with a tribal official and Patti Jo Rex, the Cherokee academic, she said she had agreed to end identifying publicly as Cherokee. Smith unsaid that her enrollment condition was a mistake and that she was still Cherokee, simply not officially so. It was an explanation that made lilliputian sense to Kauanui, but she believed it because she didn't want to consider the other option: that Smith was lying to her.
In the months that followed, all the same, Kauanui's doubt grew into something harder, something she might have eventually verbalized if in February 2008 Smith hadn't institute herself in the middle of another crisis. She learned that the University of Michigan had denied her tenure, a conclusion in academia that is akin to existence fired. The reasons were non stated — tenure decisions are confidential, and no one I've talked to knows why — but Smith's supporters were outraged. They organized a petition to overturn the decision and held a one-day conference in Ann Arbor, with Angela Davis as a invitee speaker, to highlight the difficulties faced by female scholars of colour. At that bespeak, very few academics exterior of Kauanui knew of the rumors about Smith'south identity, and a briefing news release described her as "one of the greatest Indigenous feminist intellectuals of our time."
Their organizing didn't change the tenure conclusion, but it did draw the attending of a Cherokee bookish named Steve Russell, who learned that Smith was not enrolled. He decided to write near her in a column for Indian Country Today — the outset of many times she would be "outed" over questions well-nigh her identity. He titled the column "When Does Ethnic Fraud Matter?"
Kauanui assumed that Smith would finally defend herself or at least explicate her identity claims. At one indicate, she and another contributor to the Native book project even tried to sort out Smith'south genealogy themselves so they could assistance her reply. They'd heard that she once claimed a connection to a famous Cherokee named Redbird Smith, so they dug effectually to run into if he might exist an ancestor. They wondered if her mother might have been a production of rape, incest or something else that Smith didn't want to talk nigh. "Nosotros were running these hypotheticals considering we were trying to do the piece of work for her," Kauanui said. "We were trying to help her narrate, but she wouldn't tell us what was going on."
Simply eventually Kauanui could no longer append her disbelief. She called Smith and asked her directly how she knew she was Cherokee, and specifically Oklahoma Cherokee. Smith said she didn't know. Kauanui asked her who her mother's grandparents were, and she said she didn't know. She said her mom didn't know, either. "How can her parents both be Cherokee if y'all tell me that you mother doesn't know who her grandparents are?" Kauanui asked.
Smith was crying by and so, but Kauanui couldn't let it go. "I had been so fed upward," she told me. "I was really interrogating her. There is no other discussion for information technology. I was grilling her. And she merely kept saying, 'I don't know.' She was whimpering, like a canis familiaris, similar an injured fauna. It was atrocious. It was a horrible telephone call. I was crying, and she was crying, and I said: 'You are basically telling me you don't even have a lineal descendancy claim. You lot've got nothing."'
After that chat, their book project fell apart. It was originally conceived equally a project written and edited solely by Native American women. It had been almost ready to go to printing, but when it became clear that Smith wasn't going to step down every bit 1 of the editors, Kauanui pulled out. She says that some of the contributors, many of them friends, supported her, but others were upset, and she felt as if they were blaming her, non Smith, for the fallout. One of them, the Diné/Navajo scholar Jennifer Denetdale, emailed Kauanui questioning the focus on Smith's identity. "I'm biased, and I stand past [Andy's] commitment to Ethnic peoples and recognize that she has done the footwork," she wrote.
When I spoke to Denetdale recently, though, she told me she stayed with the project not considering she supported Smith just considering she didn't want to let down the other contributors. "Some of them were junior scholars," she said. "They needed this publication for their career."
Robert Warrior, an Osage professor at the Academy of Kansas and a friend of Kauanui's, remembers another scholar telling him afterward why she couldn't carelessness Smith. "She's like an organ, you can't go rid of her," he recalled the woman maxim. "She'due south like an organ to what we practice."
"Nobody is an organ," he responded. "We're just people."
Prototype
If this were like the other cases of ethnic fraud in academia, Smith'due south story would stop at this indicate. These stories have become common enough at present that we tin can predict their narrative arc: They begin with a confrontation that then leads to a revelation, followed by outrage and sometimes an apology before the guilty party slips into obscurity. Simply with Smith the story merely keeps going. She was chosen out, yes. She retreated briefly and even told Kauanui that her new ten-year plan was to "live a private life and piece of work church bake sales." Simply then she came back.
By the fall of 2008, Smith had a new job equally an banana professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California, Riverside, and had turned her attention to a different book project, a drove called "Theorizing Native Studies," with the Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson. Her affiliate for that book critiques personal confession as a style of truth-making and argues that accountability in bookish and activist circles should favor the collective over the individual — an argument that substantially says personal identity shouldn't matter inside social-justice movements.
Simpson, at present a professor of anthropology at Columbia University, told me that she stuck with that projection even after Smith was confronted by Kauanui in part for the aforementioned reason Denetdale had earlier: to protect the work of the other contributors. But besides because she, like Kauanui before her, kept thinking Smith would eventually tell the truth. "I want to exist very articulate that I do non support ethnic fraud," she wrote in an electronic mail. "I assumed that she would sort herself out and/or brand herself accountable to the Cherokee Nation and to all of us in the field at some point, but she did not."
After 2008, Smith no longer identified as Cherokee in her official bios, only she continued to identify as such for the panels, interviews and lectures she oftentimes spoke every bit a representative of Native American views and causes. At the same time, her younger sister, Justine, had begun building a career of her own in academia based, in part, on claiming a Cherokee identity. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee — where she received support from the McNair Program, which helps college students from underrepresented backgrounds — Justine began a doctorate in organized religion at Harvard University. In 2010, she was offered a visiting kinesthesia position at the St. Paul School of Theology. A news release announcing the rent identified Justine every bit Cherokee and noted, "It is believed that she also will exist the first full-fourth dimension Native American woman to serve in any full-time faculty position in theological educational activity in North America."
'I causeless that she would sort herself out and/or make herself accountable to the Cherokee Nation and to all of us in the field at some signal, only she did not.'
The Cherokee Nation reached out to St. Paul subsequently learning nigh Justine'southward hire and discovered, according to an email I reviewed, that she had "obtained a Cherokee Nation citizenship card and had contradistinct information technology." St. Paul said that Justine was suspended after the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma raised concerns regarding her identity claims and was employed by the higher for only three months.
Richard Allen, then a policy analyst of the tribal nation, tried to competition Andrea Smith'due south identity claims equally well, but seemingly with less success. In 2012, before a lecture by Smith at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, Allen emailed the organizers and explained that "Andrea Smith'due south claim of beingness Cherokee is fraudulent and [it] is likely that she is not American Indian at all."
The lecture went on as planned. A spokeswoman for the university told me that kinesthesia there did slightly adjust their introduction of Smith after the email, merely only because they "didn't want to direct energy toward that issue." A faculty member from the university, who didn't desire to be named because of the sensitivity of identity problems, offered the following argument: "Andrea Smith is a valued educator who does of import work. The room was full because of her work, and she is a really good speaker."
Things might accept continued that way — with Smith'southward misrepresentations an open secret, known only past a small circle of Native American scholars — if, in June 2015, a Goggle box crew hadn't shown up to interview a piffling-known activist and part-time academic in Washington named Rachel Dolezal. When the reporter asked Dolezal on camera if she was African-American, she looked shocked, said she didn't understand the question and then walked away. It was a confrontation that, as a news station in Houston later put it, "triggered a fascinating national conversation on race and identity."
"It is a central rule of social identity that people have the right to call themselves whatever they want," wrote the author Gary Younge a few days subsequently in the Guardian newspaper. "But with this right comes at least one responsibleness: What yous telephone call yourself must be comprehensible to others."
His comments were a nod to a mutual understanding of race as a social construct and thus the meaning and the consequences of our individual racial identities are largely adamant by the collective. Yet the phrasing Younge used also raises an of import question: When he wrote "comprehensible to others," who counted as "others"? Information technology was clear with Rachel Dolezal that "others" meant just about everyone. But with Andrea Smith, the bulk of "others" nevertheless saw her equally Cherokee — even though Cherokee officials and some Native scholars said she wasn't.
A couple of weeks after the Dolezal news bankrupt, a graduate pupil named Annita Lucchesi forced the issue when she posted about Smith on her Tumblr account: "Andrea Smith is not Cherokee," she wrote. "omg. this is not new information." Her minor protest presently inspired a much larger and more than prominent project: an anonymous Tumblr titled "Andrea Smith Is Not Cherokee" that collected stories and documentation disputing Smith'due south identity as well as her sister'due south. That attending prompted David Cornsilk to speak publicly about his genealogical work for Smith; and with him every bit a central source, The Daily Beast ran an article calling Smith the "Native American Rachel Dolezal."
Kauanui remembers thinking, as she read those pieces, that people would finally "become it," which is to say they would sympathize what she and others had known for years: that Smith had been lying, and non just to her colleagues and friends. Smith's beginning book, "Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide," had relied on stories of rape and sexual assault that Native women shared with her while she was identifying equally Cherokee. Kauanui was certain that at least some of those women would take felt differently if they had known they were talking to a white adult female. To her, Smith's refusal to be honest about her "positionality," as academics sometimes phone call it, meant that she was non just being dishonest to those within her social circumvolve just was lying within her own piece of work.
Enough people agreed with Kauanui this fourth dimension that she and eleven other prominent Native American female scholars published an open letter in Indian Country Today near Smith, clarifying that the issue wasn't about existence punitive or exclusionary but about asking her and others like her to account for their identity claims. "Andrea Smith allows herself to stand in as the representative of collectivities to which she has demonstrated no accountability," the letter read. "Her lack of clarity and consistency in her self-presentation adds to the vulnerability of the communities and constituents she purports to represent."
Kauanui might have expected a real reckoning this time effectually, but not everyone did. That June, the Lenape scholar Joanne Barker, who too signed the open alphabetic character, predicted on her blog that Native academics and activists would disagree most what to practice nearly Smith and non-Native people would "dismiss the sources and documentation of Smith's fraud as crass or too-complicated identity politics."
That's more or less what happened. A 2d blog called "Confronting a Politics of Disposability" was created in July to defend Smith, and six scholars and students who place as Native American argued there that the scrutiny of Smith was either premature, likewise belatedly or inappropriate. "In the end it is upward to our families and communities to determine our identities," wrote Andrew J. Jolivétte, an Atakapa-Ishak scholar. "So let us elevate our discussion to focus non on individuals but rather on institutions and structural practices that continue to marginalize Native peoples."
The University of California, Riverside, likewise issued a argument praising Smith as a "teacher and researcher of loftier merit," noting that information technology could not, by law, consider ethnicity when making hiring or promotion decisions. In response to my request for clarification regarding that statement, a spokesman told me that the "university does not comment on the ethnic backgrounds of specific employees."
Smith'due south only response was a brief post to her personal blog in July, which was afterwards taken downward. "I have ever been, and volition always be Cherokee," she wrote. "There accept been innumerable false statements fabricated about me in the media. Only ultimately what is most concerning is that these social media attacks transport a chilling message to all Native peoples who are not enrolled, or who are otherwise marginalized, that they should not publicly work for justice for Native peoples out of fear that they too may one 24-hour interval exist attacked."
By that point, Kauanui said information technology felt similar 2008 all over once more, only the blowback this time was worse. People were upset over legitimate issues — including the historically racist enrollment policies of some tribal nations and the oppressive part the Us played in deciding which tribes receive federal status — just those had no direct connection to concerns about Smith's deception. "We were chosen ableist, anti-Blackness, jealous, Cointelpro, you proper noun it," she said. "I was an exposed nerve."
When I began researching this article, I wanted to sympathise why stories like these seem to boss i manufacture — my industry. As a white academic, I watched, aghast, as other white academics were outed for pretending to be scholars of colour, both in real life and online. It seemed cool to me at the time but also horrifying — in part because the outings coincided with a moment of national reckoning on questions of race and representation, and a number of universities, including mine, had recently committed to hiring more scholars of color. I kept wondering, as the former academic Cerise Zelzer posted on Twitter in September, "Academia, do we have a problem?"
It started concluding April, when the writer H.K. Carrillo, a former and much dear banana professor at George Washington University, died of complications from Covid-19. The Washington Mail ran an obituary that recounted the story he always told others in his developed life: that at 7, he fled Cuba with his family and landed in Michigan. But after the obituary ran, Carrillo's sister contacted the newspaper. He wasn't Afro-Cuban, she said. He was a Black man from Detroit, and his given name was Herman Glenn Carroll.
A couple of months after that, BethAnn McLaughlin, a white former banana professor of neurology at Vanderbilt University, apologized for pretending under the Twitter handle @Sciencing_Bi to exist a bisexual, Native American scholar at Arizona State University, where I at present work. @Sciencing_Bi had often Tweeted in support of McLaughlin'due south career, including when she was denied tenure at Vanderbilt. She was also active in online discussions on sexual assault and social justice, and many of her followers realized she was an invention but in July when McLaughlin announced that @Sciencing_Bi had died of complications from Covid-19 and others on Twitter started looking for a public discover of her death.
'These people kind of hide out in academia where the organization is not dealing with them and the only style to deal with them is to shame them, to permit them know that you know they are a fraud.'
Then in September, Krug posted her confession, which received by far the nearly attention, including write-ups in The New Yorker, The New York Times and eventually Vanity Off-white, and was followed a few days subsequently by the outing of a University of Wisconsin, Madison, graduate student, C.V. Vitolo-Haddad, who was white but had presented as Black for years. Later that calendar month, Craig Chapman, a white assistant professor of chemistry at the Academy of New Hampshire, was outed for, similar McLaughlin, creating a Twitter account purporting to be a woman of colour that he used to criticize minority groups and social-justice arguments. Then, a few weeks afterwards that, Kelly Kean Sharp, an assistant professor of African-American history at Furman Academy who had identified as Chicana, resigned later on she was accused of having no Mexican ancestry at all.
All of this was a picayune bewildering to watch from the sidelines. Academia is an manufacture, like journalism, that defines itself in large part past its upstanding standards; we're supposed to brainwash people and produce knowledge. So what does it mean that we're also a oasis for fakes? Even more disturbing for me, every bit I began to learn near Smith'south story, was hearing like stories that had gone untold — or, peradventure more accurately, unheard. Talking with Cornsilk, and with some of the Native scholars who signed the open alphabetic character, I learned about other academics falsely claiming to exist Native American who came earlier or after Smith. It was the aggregating of such stories, non just Smith's lonely, that finally pushed many to speak out.
"There are so many fakes in academia," said Kim TallBear, a Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate professor at the University of Alberta who said she was scared at first to sign the 2015 open letter. "It merely felt like we needed to recognize the pervasiveness of the problem."
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It's a problem that has been known at least since 1992, when, in an early on use of the term "ethnic fraud" in a newspaper, The Detroit News published an investigation into what were then known equally box-checkers: students who identify as Native American on their college applications. "Thousands of students misrepresent themselves to proceeds archway and scholarships to U.S. universities, costing existent American Indians access to higher teaching," the article reported. Information technology was accompanied by a shorter piece almost similar lies by Native-identified faculty. Of the 1,500 academy educators listed equally Native American at the fourth dimension, said Beak Cross, who helped found the American Indian/Alaska Native Professors Association, "we're looking realistically at one-third of those being Indians." The most prominent example of this is Senator Elizabeth Warren, who was listed as Native American past both Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania Police School when she was on the faculty at those institutions and has since apologized for claiming that identity.
Many academic administrators experience there'south piddling they can do to prepare things without, as Daniel Schwartz, the history department chair at George Washington Academy and at i point Krug's supervisor, put information technology, launching into a "new McCarthyism" of interrogating people's race. Universities are also hesitant to start vetting identity claims, in role because of the fear of lawsuits but also, according to a number of scholars I talked to, because doing then would force them to confront the real problems they face when it comes to outreach and support of students and faculty of color. And yet academia as well doesn't make information technology easy for people with concerns to speak out, in large part considering academia is a hierarchical industry, one in which a modest minority of those with secure jobs or tenure have huge sway over decisions almost job security for the remaining majority. And a vast majority of those making those decisions are white. According to a 2020 report past the American Association of University Professors, Black, Hispanic and Indigenous scholars are all grossly underrepresented in academia, especially the farther up yous become in the hierarchy. Blackness scholars account for only 6 percent of all full-time faculty; Native Americans less than 1 percent.
In the absence of any real policy for dealing with ethnic fraud, what academia is left with is a risky marketplace of accusations — ane in which those doing the labor of researching someone's background are often also those about harmed by the trespass in the first place, and their only real power to effect change is past means of what others so dismiss as cancel culture. Those who exercise speak out risk exactly what Kauanui gave up back in 2008: friendships and relationships with colleagues, but also opportunities for scholarship.
"These people kind of hide out in academia where the system is non dealing with them and the only manner to deal with them is to shame them, to let them know that you lot know they are a fraud," said Jacki Thompson Rand, a Choctaw professor at the University of Iowa. "That is the boosted work that Indigenous scholars have to decide if they are going to engage in or not."
Figuring out Andrea Smith's family history wasn't piece of cake, but halfway into my reporting I became determined to do that work, if only to clarify the facts amid the larger political and cultural debates that at times overwhelm discussions of her identity. I had asked Cornsilk for help, but he said he no longer had records from the 1990s, and he didn't remember either of her parents' names. Neither Andrea nor Justine had written annihilation about their parents in the acknowledgment department of their dissertations, and and so at that place was the effect of their maddeningly mutual last name: Smith. But eventually, I was able to figure out their female parent's maiden name — Wilkinson — and using census records, birth and death certificates and obituaries, I began to piece together the story Smith had for and so long refused to tell.
Smith's female parent, Helen Jean Wilkinson, was born in a small town in Indiana to what appear to be heart-class parents: Her begetter was an engineer co-ordinate to a death document, and her mother was at one signal a trustee for Luce Township, a farming boondocks of a little more than 2,000 on the Ohio River near Evansville. Their ancestors appear to take been mostly farmers and laborers in Kentucky and Indiana going dorsum generations. Some of Helen'southward Kentucky ancestors fought for the Confederacy in the Ceremonious War, and a couple owned slaves. A bully-grandpa on her mother's side, Lyman Five. Pierce, was ane of the starting time constabulary chiefs of Owensboro, Ky., a man whose story of killing a romantic rival was narrated recently in that urban center's "Voices of Elmwood" tour. But neither Helen, nor her parents, nor her grandparents, nor her bang-up-grandparents, nor her great-nifty-grandparents are listed in demography records I establish as anything other than white.
Helen went to Indiana University, where she worked on the yearbook staff and majored in concern education. At some betoken afterwards graduating, she moved to California, where she married a man named Donald R. Smith. They had two children, Andrea and then Justine, and divorced in 1968. Helen died in 2014, but as far as I could tell, Donald Smith was all the same alive. But finding him was even harder.
And then one twenty-four hours, Kauanui mentioned that someone one time told her that Smith used to spend summers with her male parent in Virginia. I searched for people with his birth twelvemonth who had ever lived in Virginia, and somewhen found an obituary for the father of a Donald Smith who was survived by two granddaughters named Andrea and Justine.
I mapped out Donald's family tree and found a relative with a working phone number. Afterward I explained what I was looking into, the woman on the other end of the line exhaled. "Yeah, nosotros heard virtually that," she said, "and we just kind of shook our heads."
Donald R. Smith is alive, the woman confirmed, and he isn't Ojibwe. He is a white homo from Chicago who, similar his daughters, is very smart. He was a nuclear physicist with the Pentagon earlier he retired, the relative told me. He has a degree from G.I.T. His family are mostly of British beginnings, and no, he didn't want to talk to me, but his relative wanted me to know that I was doing a expert affair writing this article. "Honestly, integrity is everything in academics," she said. "Then permit the truth out."
But what is the truth? Or rather, what is truth enough to convince those "others" that Gary Younge referred to in his essay in The Guardian? After I had evidence that Smith's genealogy was only every bit Cornsilk had claimed, I talked to a friend of mine, the feminist historian Emily Skidmore, and she pointed out that ethnicity listings on census records aren't always accurate. That wasn't what I wanted to hear, only if I was interested in clarifying the facts, I realized I needed to do more reporting.
So in March, I began calling people who had lived in and around Luce Township, the farming town where Smith's mother, Helen, grew up, and eventually I found a cousin of Helen'southward on her father's side, a woman named Margaret Jane Wilkinson. She told me that Helen had never identified as Native American. Only, she said, the family unit ever claimed her grandad on her mother's side — the son of the police master who shot a man in Owensboro — was American Indian.
Hearing that, I wondered if this was perhaps the proof of Native beginnings that Smith had never produced. But I also knew by then how mutual these family stories are, and so I began calling up the grandchildren of that grandfather. I recognized, as I left the fifth or sixth message, that I'd become a niggling obsessed, only I couldn't let it go. I thought of Kauanui and how her concerns weren't heard, and of Smith saying that the media got the facts wrong.
Eventually I found a woman named Barbara Smith, Helen's cousin on her mother'due south side, who remembered her grandfather — Mr. Pierce, as she called him. He wasn't Native American, she said without hesitation, but there were rumors of Native ancestry in her family. She'd believed them, too, until she took a genetic test a couple years agone.
"Nosotros're mostly Scandinavian," she said.
When we hung upward, I felt for a moment that I'd tracked downward the truth about Smith. Yes, she had stories of Native American ancestors in her family, but like a lot of such stories, they weren't based in fact. But then I caught myself. I'd done enough reporting and talked to enough Native American scholars by that point to know one thing: Native identity is non reducible to genetics. That's a fallacy that tribal nations spend a lot of fourth dimension trying to dispel. What it is about depends on whom you talk to, but it tends to boil down to this: Are you lot claimed by the community that you merits? If anyone needs proof that Smith wasn't Cherokee, it has been there since 2008.
In Native Studies at that place'southward a concept called "settler colonialism" that Smith has written about. It includes the conviction felt by non-Natives that the country, but as well the knowledge, cultural heritage and identities of American Indians belong to the residuum of the states. In "Playing Indian," the book by Deloria, he argues that white people in this country have been co-opting Native identities since the Boston Tea Political party. "Playing Indian is a persistent tradition in American culture," he writes, "stretching from the very instant of the national large bang into an ever-expanding present and future."
In other words, this might feel like a new story, but it's actually quite onetime. For Kauanui, that long history is function of what's so unsafe about Smith and others like her. By refusing to acknowledge their identity theft, these people make invisible those they are stealing from. And past refusing to apologize, they imply that their trespass is not that big of a deal.
John Stevenson, a professor at the Academy of Colorado, Boulder, told me that when his former colleague, the activist and bookish Ward Churchill, was accused of ethnic fraud, the university couldn't do anything because of a policy it had preventing information technology from considering ethnicity or race in hiring or firing decisions. This was true even later on The Rocky Mountain News ran an article in 2005 reporting that Churchill's family unit had no identifiable Cherokee connections. (Churchill notwithstanding claims he is Native American and has criticized the newspaper's genealogical research.) "If Ward proved anything," Stevenson said, "he proved that if yous wanted to say you were XYZ, the style y'all do information technology is keep maxim that and don't apologize."
What somewhen led to Ward'southward firing, in fact, was not the small outrage well-nigh ethnic fraud in some Native circles. Instead it was a much larger outrage over something he wrote after 9/11 — an essay that referred to people killed in the Twin Towers equally "little Eichmanns" because, he argued, they "formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of American's global financial empire."
"I'chiliad thinking about what galvanizes the nation, but that happened here," Stevenson told me earlier we got off the telephone, and I said I'd been thinking near that recently, too: what outrages people, but besides what galvanizes them to make change. And, past dissimilarity, what we cull to ignore.
In researching Smith'southward past, I talked at ane point to a old high school classmate of hers, who told me she didn't remember Smith'south ever identifying as Native American in loftier school, just added that "we wouldn't accept talked about that back then."
The adult female was white, and we had a brief chat about identity and ethnicity, including forays into 23andMe and how that genetic test has challenged and possibly expanded modes of self-identification. But later she wrote asking that I not use her name, because, despite existence in a club with Smith in high school, she didn't remember she knew her that well; she too questioned, it seemed to me, the premise of the story itself. "As important every bit this consequence is, there are so many millions of people, mostly men, who are church leaders, school presidents, clergy leaders, philosophy professions, theologians ... who have molested their children and grandchildren," she wrote. "Their pictures however hang on the walls with the other, primarily white, men. These atrocities seem more pervasive."
When I asked sources why Smith's story turned out differently than those of Krug or Dolezal or others, many of them said it was because she faked a Native identity instead of a Black or Latina one. We care less every bit a culture almost Native Americans, they argued, so the theft of Native identities means less, as well. Others said we romanticize American Indians and that so many people have stories of a long-lost "Indian" antecedent (once more, think of Elizabeth Warren) that we're not shocked when someone claims a Native identity under dubious grounds.
Cornsilk told me that it is also a affair of pragmatics. To prove that a person isn't Blackness, you usually but accept to talk to their parents. To prove that a person isn't Native American, you sometimes have to become back generations. That makes telling a story like this one more than complicated, peculiarly in a globe where every narrative is supposed to fit in a sound bite and every audience expects to have an instant reaction, sometimes 1 that'southward formed before they accept even finished reading.
At some point after I contacted Smith, her original weblog postal service went back up: "I have been and e'er volition be Cherokee." I take that to mean that she yet identifies as Cherokee, but because she hasn't responded to my requests for comment, I tin can't say for certain. I know that as recently as 2018, she identified in an online essay every bit a person of colour. Her sister, Justine, who at present has 2 Native American children and is a pastor at a Methodist Church in Norman, Okla., was identified in an interview final year as "of Cherokee and Ojibwe descent." She finished her dissertation in 2018, acknowledging the support of the United Methodist Women of Color Scholars Program in addition to the McNair Program.
Even though most Native Studies scholars no longer work with Smith, she has begun publishing within side by side fields, like ethnic studies, and has slowly built back a reputation. This past leap, she came out with a new coedited collection from Duke University Printing, the same press that published and after condemned Krug.
"Thank you for your ethical opinion on the Jessica Krug issue," tweeted the Ojibwe scholar Jean O'Brien, a historian at the University of Minnesota. "What are your thoughts on what you should do most your author Andrea Smith's fraudulent claims and your responsibilities near them?"
'Academia, do nosotros accept a problem?'
Smith's book, edited with Tiffany Lethabo Male monarch and Jenell Navarro, is an anthology chosen "Otherwise Worlds: Confronting Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness" that is meant to examine means that Native Studies and Black Studies might observe common basis and by extension how Black and Native activists can collaborate rather than compete. But it lies on shaky ground by including Smith every bit an editor, said Joseph Pierce, a Cherokee academic at Stony Brook University, who too tweeted well-nigh the apparent double standard. "That Knuckles, which has and so much legitimacy on critical scholarship, would allow her to make major interventions in the field of Native Studies, even after all the work that has been done by Native women to decline Andrea Smith, was then messed upward to me," he told me.
Neither Male monarch nor Navarro responded to my requests for annotate on their collaboration with Smith, simply equally her proper noun has surfaced again in online discussions of Krug, some people have come to her defense. "Andrea Smith clearly responded to attacks on her identity by stating that she has always known herself to be Cherokee," tweeted Nandita Sharma, a professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, in September. "She doesn't need my support only she has it 100 percent notwithstanding."
Kauanui says another reason she thinks people still don't believe that Smith lied, even after the facts are staring them in the face, is considering they don't desire information technology to exist true. "Non-Natives didn't want their Indian existence taken away from them," she told me.
Or every bit Annita Lucchesi wrote, in her Tumblr post outing Smith in 2015: "Nigh Native scholars that are connected to their cultures/communities take questioned her for a very long fourth dimension. But non-Natives go so comfortable using their one token get-to Native feminist to quote that those questions don't get heard or understood."
I recognized that sentiment when I talked to a white academic who had been duped by BethAnn McLaughlin this past summer. Michael Eisen, a biologist who attended a Zoom memorial service for @Sciencing_Bi and was credited in many media accounts for exposing McLaughlin's fraud, told me that Native scholars on Twitter actually sounded the alarm earlier, but he and others didn't pay attention. "We should accept realized that the intersections for those identities in academia, while it should exist large, is not," he said.
In other words, these hoaxes, though they reveal a lot almost the people who carry them out, as well say something about those who autumn for them in the beginning identify.
1 of the concluding times I heard from Kauanui, she emailed to say that she was "super anxious." She's worried that she'll come off as if she'southward obsessed with Smith in this article, and she fears that what happened in 2008 and again in 2015 volition exist repeated here. I wrote back to say that I don't recall of her every bit obsessive. "You've fabricated decisions that weren't necessarily advantageous to your career," I said, "but yous did and so because you ethically felt like yous had to."
What I didn't say was that, when information technology comes to her second concern, I share her fearfulness. Not about what will happen to Smith specifically, but more broadly what will happen with stories similar hers. I heard recently from a Native scholar who had a skillful friend, a colleague, who had always identified every bit American Indian based on family stories of Native ancestry, but then, not too long ago, this person decided to investigate those claims, and found out they weren't true.
Trying to be respectful, that person pulled out from some Native American projects and told a few people near the discovery, merely the Native scholar I know is encouraging her friend to get public likewise. She said that kind of transparency — the transparency that Kauanui and others were pushing for in 2015 — could actually change the way we talk about identity and power in academia, but also elsewhere. The final I heard, that person, whom I asked to interview for this article, still hadn't decided what to practice. Information technology seems as if, in many ways, academia hasn't either.
Hannah Arendt said that anytime nosotros lie, we tear a hole "in the fabric of factuality." But when we don't acknowledge those lies, when we pretend that those pointing them out are obsessed or deluded, we also surrender the opportunity to ever mend that tear.
As I was finishing writing this story, I got an email from Duke University Press in response to my questions virtually their conclusion to publish Smith's contempo book. Gisela Fosado, the editorial managing director, sent me a long statement that included the following:
"For months now, we at Duke Academy Press have engaged in difficult conversations near how we can do a better job of considering ethical concerns as we make our publishing decisions. In the past, our considerations of works to be published did not ever include serious engagement with questions of ethics outside of those raised in the peer review process. That has inverse. Our publication of Smith's most recent work did harm by undermining the brave calls past Native scholars and others asking for accountability, transparency and honesty. Our publication of her work continued to provide her with a platform and became a legitimation in itself, allowing others to ignore the damage she caused. We are sorry."
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/25/magazine/cherokee-native-american-andrea-smith.html
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