Yesterday I read this fascinating article by Jay Caspian Kang about Elizabeth Hoover (above), a tenured professor of environmental studies at Berkeley who has long identified as Mohawk and M’ikmaq. When her claims to an Indian identity were challenged and she was unable to provide evidence of Indigenous ancestry, the life she had carefully built around a culture that she either believed was hers, or for which she had a special affinity, went up in smoke.
Kang mentions a number of “Pretendians” in academia — i.e. Indigenous-identifying individuals who are not in fact Indigenous — including poet Qwo-Li Driskill, whose work “engages themes of inheritance and healing, and is rooted in personal (unenrolled) Cherokee Two-Spirit, queer, and mixed-race experience.” Driskill has also been the subject of anti-Pretendian scrutiny (in spite of his apparent admission of non-Cherokee-ness with the term “unenrolled”); a petition calling for his dismissal from Oregon State University was started by his graduate students, and has garnered almost 3,000 signatures in the past month. As the watchdog group Tribal Alliance Against Fraud explains:
Only . . . federally recognized tribal nations can say who is one of them and who is not. Period. That is what self-determination and sovereignty mean. Literally. And it means we are not just talking about “race”. We are talking about a unique historical, legal, political status for American Indian people in this country, based on hundreds of years of federal treaty law founded on thousands of years of tribal civilization before the United States ever existed.
This is why “self-identification” as an American Indian person is both impossible and highly problematic when people presume to do it anyway. Being an American Indian person is not about who you claim to be, it is about who claims you. It is about an ancestral blood kinship, tribal belonging, tribal identity, cultural connection, and the centuries of intergenerational grief, trauma and oppression that our families have inherited and resiliently endured that settler families have not.
Anger at non-Indian academics who self-identify as tribal is well justified, since support for scholarly research is so limited. Academia is a brutal world no matter how you identify, assiduously gate-kept and seething with dark egotism, and few scholars ever make it to tenure in an environment where 75% of faculty are now contingent. So if Hoover, Driskill, and others have positioned themselves as Indian to take advantage of funding and hiring opportunities for Indigenous scholars, their claims of tribal belonging are cynical in the extreme.
On the other hand, Kang’s article left me feeling somewhat sympathetic to Hoover (though not so much to Driskill; it’s hard to to take seriously someone whose public identity is “two-spirit, queer (non-citizen) Cherokee; as well as a trans scholar, teacher, and activist also of African, Irish, Lenape, Lumbee, and Osage ascent [sic], who also identifies as ‘Crip and Mad’”). After all, Hoover’s belief in an Indian identity was inculcated in her by her mother, who told stories of her Native ancestry and took her to Pow-wows (I would have liked it if Kang had interviewed Hoover’s mother or sisters). One of Hoover’s former graduate students even mentions seeing Hoover, after her public disgrace, at a Native gathering: “She was at the campfires, laughing really loud, like how Native women usually laugh . . . It’s weird she laughs like that.”
It’s weird she laughs like that. That line stayed with me.
I confess to not knowing how Native women usually laugh, but the idea of a recognizable, culturally-prescribed form of female laughter among American Indian women intrigued me. The cadences and volume of our speech, our tone of voice, the way we dress and wear our hair, even the way we walk, are outward cultural signifiers that tell us and those around us who we are. Can these formal identifiers — whether of origin or affinity — be studied and put on? Or do they come from a deeper place?
Eric Owens in Porgy and Bess, Metropolitan Opera, 2020.
In February 2020 I saw the live broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera’s then-new production of Porgy and Bess in a local theater. The Met was taking its first tentative steps into the realm of equity, and, in those early days, management apparently decided that commissioning a new production of Porgy, which they hadn’t staged in 30 years, was the way to signal that commitment. The opera, a masterwork by any estimation, has nevertheless been controversial since its premiere in 1935; critic Scott Brown has mentioned:
Porgy’s still-clicking-hot racial radioactivity. It’s a story of “black life” penned by a white Southerner, scored by a New York Jewish composer, written in dialect (cartoonish, by today’s standards) and containing strong whiffs of well-intentioned paternalism, tourism, and exoticism.
Regardless of its radioactivity, Porgy has been a launching pad for the careers of many great Black singers, and the 2020 production team approached the work with sincerity and good faith. The show’s choreographer, Camille A. Brown, when interviewed backstage at the Live in HD performance, even spoke of drawing on “blood memory” to inform her own work on the show.
As Brown explained in a TED talk:
Movement has always been a part of the African tradition. So, when you look at the Middle Passage and how the culture of the African people, they attempted to strip them of their culture, but somehow it was still living in their body and we call that a blood memory. That idea of movement being a way of expressing ourselves is something that is traditional and it’s a heritage that continues to be passed down. It’s just something that is innate, in Black people specifically. So, you’re tapping into something when you’re moving your body that I believe is very spiritual.
When Brown suggests that certain ways of moving are innate, she is proposing that these cultural signifiers are genetically and even spiritually coded — rising from the body, soul, and unconscious mind. This proposition is complicated, to put it mildly. For how do we draw the line between cultural expressions like dance movements as a product of “blood memory,” and less-admired cultural traits as not so? Is it logical, for instance, to assert that Black dance forms are genetically coded, but that the achievement gap that has long dogged Black students is not? Is it consistent to say that the beautiful parts of a culture come from an essential and immutable inheritance, whereas the non-beautiful parts are imposed from somewhere else? When you start talking about “blood memory,” you’re starting down a slippery slope, one whose outcome is inevitably very bad indeed.
In fact, the notion of “blood memory” draws on tropes of nineteenth-century European Blut und Boden nationalism, which held that the soul of the German people was ineradicably rooted in the soil from which it sprang. Interestingly, this conflation of land and peoples has echoes in Native American identity: as participants chanted at the 2016 Standing Rock protests, “We are the land and the land is us.” And the recent embrace of this essentialist land-people continuum by some of the most strident voices on the Left today is both troubling and unintentionally ironic. We’re seeing it play out in real time in ostensibly pro-Palestinian protests that target Jews based on what we can reasonably call “blood memory.” But if legitimate claim to a land is based on what the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds calls “ancestral blood kinship, tribal belonging, tribal identity, cultural connection, and . . . centuries of intergenerational grief, trauma and oppression,” then the claim of Jews to the land of Israel cannot be disputed.
What’s more, if, as the Tribal Alliance also asserts, “being an American Indian person is not about who you claim to be, it is about who claims you,” then we must assume that identity is proved or disproved by an entity outside oneself — much as a Roman paterfamilias, by either picking up or walking away from his newborn infant placed on the ground by the midwife, determined whether that child was a person or not and would live or die. If we insist that identity is based on the approbation of the group to which one is applying, then, for just one example, countless natal men who wish to be thought of as women will have their chosen identities snatched away.
Elizabeth Hoover apparently believed herself to be an Indian to her core, and based her life and work on this self-perception of Indianness. One’s Native identity, however, is based neither on family lore nor on personal affinity. Its basis in genetics is also tenuous at best; since Native tribes are sovereign nations within US territory, tribal affiliation is a nationality, rather than a race or ethnicity, and, after centuries of intermarriage, tribal citizens often fail to present a stereotypical “Native American” phenotype.
A chart from the 1984 Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) Enrollment Manual.
I’m left wondering who Elizabeth Hoover really is, whether her self-identification as an Indian was opportunistic or born of desire, and if her sundering from this identity inculcated in her from childhood feels as lonely as it sounds.
Though some wish to tear down national borders, sovereign tribal nations apparently wish to maintain theirs. Because of the appalling mistreatment of Native citizens by the US government over many years, it makes abundant sense that:
tribal enrollment criteria are set forth in tribal constitutions, articles of incorporation or ordinances. . . common requirements for membership are lineal decendency [sic]from someone named on the tribe's base roll or relationship to a tribal member who descended from someone named on the base roll.
Constitutions, ordinances, and charters are important tools of governance. Should they be used to chart the inner person, to classify the soul? Should all identity groups be as restrictive as tribal nations, basing one’s allegiance to them strictly on adherence to the charter or approval by the group? To identify as Indigenous is based neither on blood nor on feelings, but on history. Why, then, do we resort to these arbitrary and ineffable tools when it comes to some chosen identities and not others?
"Is it consistent to say that the beautiful parts of a culture come from an essential and immutable inheritance, whereas the non-beautiful parts are imposed from somewhere else?"
It is one of my favorite features of your thinking and writing, Julia, that you can see through inconsistencies such as this. I've noticed many such examples since beginning to read you, and am thankful for each one!