Scott Siskind, Elizabeth Hoover, and What it Means to Belong

The New Yorker ran a weird story by Jay Caspian Kang a few weeks ago about Elizabeth Hoover, the latest "Native American" professor to be unmasked as entirely white. Scott Siskind was disturbed by it and wrote a long response. Siskind's essay is good in that he probes at important questions about identity in America; we put huge cultural and some legal emphasis on ethnic and other identies that mostly lack any clear definition, and that creates pain and suffering. But he misunderstands what it means to belong to a traditional community.

I'll let Siskind summarize the story:

A woman named Adeline Rivers drowned under mysterious circumstances in 1928. By the time her granddaughter Anita was growing up, family legend said that Adeline was a Mi'kmaq Indian who committed suicide to escape an abusive white husband. Anita leaned into the family legend and taught her own daughter Elizabeth to be proud of her Native American heritage.

As a kid, Anita would take Elizabeth to pow-wows (Native American ceremonial gatherings) where she would play with all the other young Native girls. As she grew up, many of her closest friends were Natives, and she practiced Native American dance. By the time she was a teenager, she had taken a Mi'kmaq name, wore Native clothing, and was involved in Native political causes. In college, she wrote a thesis on Native American issues in the US, then got a PhD in anthropology, where she studied Native American affairs, then got a professorship at Berkeley teaching about Native American culture. She married a Crow Indian and went on trips to various Indian reservations where she studied and wrote papers about the problems they faced, and she was informally adopted by one of the Native families she stayed with. . . .

At some point, maybe after going to the Mi'kmaq reservation during grad school to hunt down family members, Elizabeth must have noticed holes in her family legend; it seemed that her great-grandmother wasn’t really Native American, just some ordinary white woman who drowned for unclear reasons. Although nobody knows for sure, it seems like after realizing this, Elizabeth tried to hide it - maybe from herself, but at least to others. She kept claiming Native ancestry, and even writing about her (nonexistent) Native relatives.

After Elizabeth Warren and other high-profile cases brought the issue of fake Indians ("Pretendians") into the spotlight, some people from the Native community started going after Professor Hoover, challenging her to prove her Native descent. Over time the challenges got louder and louder, and eventually she had to admit she wasn’t Native after all. Some of her students wrote an open letter demanding that she resign, which said:

We find Hoover's repeated attempts to differentiate herself from settlers with similar stories and her claims of having lived experienced as an Indigenous person by dancing at powwows absolutely appalling. [She has] failed to acknowledge the harm she has caused and enabled.

At which point Hoover's life fell apart.

Siskind has a long history of siding with victims of the cancel mob, so he immediately identified with Hoover and felt that attacks on her were unfair. I had the same gut feeling; by the moral code of a gentle modern soul like Siskind or me, the attacks on Hoover are barbaric. But I know enough about traditional communities to understand what happened here.

First, after a short discourse on what race means in our world, Siskind notes that the key variable seems to be "lived experience":

Although race doesn't exist biologically, it exists as a series of formative experiences. Black children are raised by black mothers in black communities, think of themselves as black, identify with black role models, and face anti-black prejudice. By the time they're grown up, they've had different experiences which give them a different perspective from white people. Therefore, it’s reasonable to think of them as a specific group, “the black race”, and have institutions to accommodate them even if they’re biologically indistinguishable.

Siskind's main mistake is assuming that this post-modern sort of definition applies to a traditional community like an American Indian tribe. What defines membership in such a community is not "lived experience" in some generalized sense; it is personal, family ties to other members of the community.

This comes across very clearly in the New Yorker story. When Hoover tells Mi'kmaq Indians that she is Mi'kmaq, they don't ask how many pow-wows she has been to; anybody can to go a pow-wow. They ask, "Who are your kin? Where are they?" As Siskind suspects, this is where Hoover's story fell apart. Confronted with these questions, she looked, found that she had no such connections, and realized that by the Mi'kmaq definition she was not and could never be one of them. If Hoover's family legend had been true, she might have found some of her relatives, and if they had welcomed her (as they probably would have) she could have begun the process of becoming a member of the Mi'kmaq community.

There is a ton of anthropology about how this works, and I read a significant swath of it while writing my dissertation. Consider that in many languages, there is no common word for "friend." You call your best friends "brothers" or "sisters" and your secondary friends "cousins" and your more distant friends "kinsmen." That is the paradigm under which many Native American tribes have historically operated.

This does not necessarily have anything to do with blood; many Native tribes have strong traditions of adoption. But if you are adopted into a tribe, and really want to be thought of as a member, you have to work at it. First, you work on really joining the family that sponsored you, and then you work your way out into the broader community. If you don't build up those personal ties, your formal membership will not count for much. (Unless somebody in the tribe wants something from you.)

To most Indians, whether you wear Indian clothes and take an Indian name and dance at pow-wows is of no real importance; Indian wannabees have been doing that for a century. What counts is your personal, family ties to community members.

(For tribes with membership rolls, formal membership is also important, but in the first place those lists were really built up from family ties, and in the second your formal membership will not avail you much if you don't know anybody else in the tribe.)

The second point I would make concerns the viciousness of the attacks on Hoover:

Her graduate students stopped working with her and switched advisors. Her department tried to prevent her from attending meetings, and made her promise not to do work on any Indian reservations. The entire academic and Native American communities are giving her the cold shoulder. She wrote an apology letter saying that she had "put away my dance regalia, ribbons skirts, moccasins, and Native jewelery . . . I've begun to give away some of these things to people who will wear them better," but privately described her life as being in “ruins".

I could never participate in such a shunning. Which is another way of saying that I have no strong community allegiances at all.

Real world communities only endure if they viciously defend their boundaries. Think of the scorn that many groups have heaped on wannabees and poseurs, or, in reverse, they lengths to which people will go to fit in to their chosen group, changing their speech, clothing, etc. For our tribal species, community membership is of extreme importance.

One of the ugliest such fights going on in the world right now is between trans women and so called "TERFs", feminists who want to police the boundary of womanhood and keep out the poseurs and the wannabees. There is nothing mysterious about this; if you think membership in your group is important, you pretty much have to defend its boundaries, and TERFs are not at all unusual in their willingness to be cruel about it. 

Or consider how many Americans who think of "American" as an import category feel about people sneaking across the border.

Yes, race in America is really weird right now. I am dismayed by the whole apparatus of "Native" scholarship and the like, which I find bizarre. Universities are western institutions rooted entirely in western values, and their attempts to accommodate Native American or African "perspectives" are always going to be fraught. I find it offensive to say that no white person should teach Native culture or African history. I place much of the blame for stories like Elizabeth Hoover's on the academic valuation of ethnic belonging, which I don't think has any place in a university setting.

But as long as people value their ethnic groups, they are going to police the boundaries of those groups, and so far as I can tell Elizabeth Hoover really was on the other side of the line than she claimed to be.