Article part three (end):
Kauanui might have expected a real reckoning this time around, but not everyone did. That June, the Lenape scholar Joanne Barker, who also signed the open letter, predicted on her blog that Native academics and activists would disagree about what to do about 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 second blog called “Against a Politics of Disposability” was created in July to defend Smith, and six scholars and students who identify as Native American argued there that the scrutiny of Smith was either premature, too late or inappropriate. “In the end it is up 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 not on individuals but rather on institutions and structural practices that continue to marginalize Native peoples.”
The University of California, Riverside, also issued a statement praising Smith as a “teacher and researcher of high merit,” noting that it 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’s only response was a brief post to her personal blog in July, which was later taken down. “I have always been, and will always be Cherokee,” she wrote. “There have been innumerable false statements made about me in the media. But ultimately what is most concerning is that these social media attacks send 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 day be attacked.”
By that point, Kauanui said it felt like 2008 all over again, 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 role the United States played in deciding which tribes receive federal status — but those had no direct connection to concerns about Smith’s deception. “We were called ableist, anti-Black, jealous, Cointelpro, you name it,” she said. “I was an exposed nerve.”
When I began researching this article, I wanted to understand why stories like these seem to dominate one industry — my industry. As a white academic, I watched, aghast, as other white academics were outed for pretending to be scholars of color, both in real life and online. It seemed absurd 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 Ruby Zelzer posted on Twitter in September, “Academia, do we have a problem?”
It started last April, when the writer H.G. Carrillo, a former and much beloved assistant professor at George Washington University, died of complications from Covid-19. The Washington Post ran an obituary that recounted the story he always told others in his adult life: that at 7, he fled Cuba with his family and landed in Michigan. But after the obituary ran, Carrillo’s sister contacted the paper. 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 assistant professor of neurology at Vanderbilt University, apologized for pretending under the Twitter handle @Sciencing_Bi to be a bisexual, Native American scholar at Arizona State University, where I now work. @Sciencing_Bi had often Tweeted in support of McLaughlin’s 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 only in July when McLaughlin announced that @Sciencing_Bi had died of complications from Covid-19 and others on Twitter started looking for a public notice of her death.
‘These people kind of hide out in academia where the system is not dealing with them and the only way to deal with them is to shame them, to let them know that you know they are a fraud.’
Then in September, Krug posted her confession, which received by far the most attention, including write-ups in The New Yorker, The New York Times and eventually Vanity Fair, and was followed a few days later 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 month, Craig Chapman, a white assistant professor of chemistry at the University of New Hampshire, was outed for, like McLaughlin, creating a Twitter account purporting to be a woman of color that he used to criticize minority groups and social-justice arguments. Then, a few weeks after that, Kelly Kean Sharp, an assistant professor of African-American history at Furman University who had identified as Chicana, resigned after she was accused of having no Mexican ancestry at all.
All of this was a little bewildering to watch from the sidelines. Academia is an industry, like journalism, that defines itself in large part by its ethical standards; we’re supposed to educate people and produce knowledge. So what does it mean that we’re also a haven for fakes? Even more disturbing for me, as I began to learn about Smith’s story, was hearing similar stories that had gone untold — or, perhaps more accurately, unheard. Talking with Cornsilk, and with some of the Native scholars who signed the open letter, I learned about other academics falsely claiming to be Native American who came before or after Smith. It was the accumulation of such stories, not just Smith’s alone, 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 just felt like we needed to recognize the pervasiveness of the problem.”
It’s a problem that has been known at least since 1992, when, in an early use of the term “ethnic fraud” in a newspaper, The Detroit News published an investigation into what were then known as box-checkers: students who identify as Native American on their college applications. “Thousands of students misrepresent themselves to gain entrance and scholarships to U.S. universities, costing real American Indians access to higher education,” the article reported. It was accompanied by a shorter piece about similar lies by Native-identified faculty. Of the 1,500 university educators listed as Native American at the time, said Bill 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 by both Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania Law School when she was on the faculty at those institutions and has since apologized for claiming that identity.
Many academic administrators feel there’s little they can do to fix things without, as Daniel Schwartz, the history department chair at George Washington University and at one point Krug’s supervisor, put it, launching into a “new McCarthyism” of interrogating people’s race. Universities are also hesitant to start vetting identity claims, in part because of the fear of lawsuits but also, according to a number of scholars I talked to, because doing so 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 also doesn’t make it easy for people with concerns to speak out, in large part because academia is a hierarchical industry, one in which a small minority of those with secure jobs or tenure have huge sway over decisions about job security for the remaining majority. And a vast majority of those making those decisions are white. According to a 2020 report by the American Association of University Professors, Black, Hispanic and Indigenous scholars are all grossly underrepresented in academia, especially the further up you go in the hierarchy. Black 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 — one in which those doing the labor of researching someone’s background are often also those most harmed by the trespass in the first place, and their only real power to effect change is by means of what others then dismiss as cancel culture. Those who do 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 not dealing with them and the only way to deal with them is to shame them, to let them know that you know they are a fraud,” said Jacki Thompson Rand, a Choctaw professor at the University of Iowa. “That is the additional 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 easy, 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 anything about their parents in the acknowledgment section of their dissertations, and then there was the issue of their maddeningly common last name: Smith. But eventually, I was able to figure out their mother’s maiden name — Wilkinson — and using census records, birth and death certificates and obituaries, I began to piece together the story Smith had for so long refused to tell.
Smith’s mother, Helen Jean Wilkinson, was born in a small town in Indiana to what appear to be middle-class parents: Her father was an engineer according to a death certificate, and her mother was at one point a trustee for Luce Township, a farming town of a little more than 2,000 on the Ohio River near Evansville. Their ancestors appear to have been mostly farmers and laborers in Kentucky and Indiana going back generations. Some of Helen’s Kentucky ancestors fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War, and a couple owned slaves. A great-grandfather on her mother’s side, Lyman V. Pierce, was one of the first police chiefs of Owensboro, Ky., a man whose story of killing a romantic rival was narrated recently in that city’s “Voices of Elmwood” tour. But neither Helen, nor her parents, nor her grandparents, nor her great-grandparents, nor her great-great-grandparents are listed in census records I found as anything other than white.
Helen went to Indiana University, where she worked on the yearbook staff and majored in business education. At some point after 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 still alive. But finding him was even harder.
Then one day, Kauanui mentioned that someone once told her that Smith used to spend summers with her father in Virginia. I searched for people with his birth year who had ever lived in Virginia, and eventually 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. After I explained what I was looking into, the woman on the other end of the line exhaled. “Yeah, we heard about 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 man from Chicago who, like his daughters, is very smart. He was a nuclear physicist with the Pentagon before he retired, the relative told me. He has a degree from M.I.T. His family are mostly of British ancestry, and no, he didn’t want to talk to me, but his relative wanted me to know that I was doing a good thing writing this article. “Honestly, integrity is everything in academics,” she said. “So let 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 just as 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, but 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’s on her father’s side, a woman named Margaret Jane Wilkinson. She told me that Helen had never identified as Native American. But, she said, the family always claimed her grandfather on her mother’s side — the son of the police chief who shot a man in Owensboro — was American Indian.
Hearing that, I wondered if this was perhaps the proof of Native ancestry that Smith had never produced. But I also knew by then how common 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 little obsessed, but 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’s 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 ago.
“We’re mostly Scandinavian,” she said.
When we hung up, I felt for a moment that I’d tracked down 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 not reducible to genetics. That’s a fallacy that tribal nations spend a lot of time trying to dispel. What it is about depends on whom you talk to, but it tends to boil down to this: Are you claimed by the community that you claim? If anyone needs proof that Smith wasn’t Cherokee, it has been there since 2008.
In Native Studies there’s a concept called “settler colonialism” that Smith has written about. It includes the conviction felt by non-Natives that the land, but also the knowledge, cultural heritage and identities of American Indians belong to the rest of us. 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 Party. “Playing Indian is a persistent tradition in American culture,” he writes, “stretching from the very instant of the national big bang into an ever-expanding present and future.”
In other words, this might feel like a new story, but it’s actually quite old. For Kauanui, that long history is part of what’s so dangerous about Smith and others like her. By refusing to acknowledge their identity theft, these people make invisible those they are stealing from. And by refusing to apologize, they imply that their trespass is not that big of a deal.
John Stevenson, a professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, told me that when his former colleague, the activist and academic Ward Churchill, was accused of ethnic fraud, the university couldn’t do anything because of a policy it had preventing it from considering ethnicity or race in hiring or firing decisions. This was true even after The Rocky Mountain News ran an article in 2005 reporting that Churchill’s family had no identifiable Cherokee connections. (Churchill still claims he is Native American and has criticized the newspaper’s genealogical research.) “If Ward proved anything,” Stevenson said, “he proved that if you wanted to say you were XYZ, the way you do it is keep saying that and don’t apologize.”
What eventually led to Ward’s firing, in fact, was not the small outrage about 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 as “little Eichmanns” because, he argued, they “formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of American’s global financial empire.”
“I’m thinking about what galvanizes the nation, but that happened here,” Stevenson told me before we got off the phone, and I said I’d been thinking about that recently, too: what outrages people, but also what galvanizes them to make change. And, by contrast, what we choose to ignore.
In researching Smith’s past, I talked at one point to a former high school classmate of hers, who told me she didn’t remember Smith’s ever identifying as Native American in high school, but added that “we wouldn’t have talked about that back then.”
The woman was white, and we had a brief conversation 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 being in a club with Smith in high school, she didn’t think she knew her that well; she also questioned, it seemed to me, the premise of the story itself. “As important as this issue 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 still 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 as a culture about Native Americans, they argued, so the theft of Native identities means less, too. Others said we romanticize American Indians and that so many people have stories of a long-lost “Indian” ancestor (again, 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 matter of pragmatics. To prove that a person isn’t Black, you usually only have to talk to their parents. To prove that a person isn’t Native American, you sometimes have to go back generations. That makes telling a story like this one more complicated, especially in a world where every narrative is supposed to fit in a sound bite and every audience expects to have an instant reaction, sometimes one that’s formed before they have even finished reading.
At some point after I contacted Smith, her original blog post went back up: “I have been and always will be Cherokee.” I take that to mean that she still identifies as Cherokee, but because she hasn’t responded to my requests for comment, I can’t say for sure. I know that as recently as 2018, she identified in an online essay as a person of color. Her sister, Justine, who now has two Native American children and is a pastor at a Methodist Church in Norman, Okla., was identified in an interview last 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 adjacent fields, like ethnic studies, and has slowly built back a reputation. This past spring, she came out with a new coedited collection from Duke University Press, the same press that published and later condemned Krug.
“Thank you for your ethical stance 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 about your author Andrea Smith’s fraudulent claims and your responsibilities about them?”
‘Academia, do we have a problem?’
Smith’s book, edited with Tiffany Lethabo King and Jenell Navarro, is an anthology called “Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness” that is meant to examine ways that Native Studies and Black Studies might find common ground and by extension how Black and Native activists can collaborate rather than compete. But it lies on shaky ground by including Smith as an editor, said Joseph Pierce, a Cherokee academic at Stony Brook University, who also tweeted about the apparent double standard. “That Duke, which has 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 reject Andrea Smith, was so messed up to me,” he told me.
Neither King nor Navarro responded to my requests for comment on their collaboration with Smith, but as her name 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 but she has it 100 percent nonetheless.”
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 because they don’t want it to be true. “Non-Natives didn’t want their Indian being taken away from them,” she told me.
Or as Annita Lucchesi wrote, in her Tumblr post outing Smith in 2015: “Most Native scholars that are connected to their cultures/communities have questioned her for a very long time. But non-Natives get so comfortable using their one token go-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 have realized that the intersections for those identities in academia, while it should be large, is not,” he said.
In other words, these hoaxes, though they reveal a lot about the people who carry them out, also say something about those who fall for them in the first place.
One of the last 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’s obsessed with Smith in this article, and she fears that what happened in 2008 and again in 2015 will be repeated here. I wrote back to say that I don’t think of her as obsessive. “You’ve made decisions that weren’t necessarily advantageous to your career,” I said, “but you did so because you ethically felt like you had to.”
What I didn’t say was that, when it comes to her second concern, I share her fear. Not about what will happen to Smith specifically, but more broadly what will happen with stories like hers. I heard recently from a Native scholar who had a good friend, a colleague, who had always identified as 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 about the discovery, but the Native scholar I know is encouraging her friend to go public as well. She said that kind of transparency — the transparency that Kauanui and others were pushing for in 2015 — could really change the way we talk about identity and power in academia, but also elsewhere. The last I heard, that person, whom I asked to interview for this article, still hadn’t decided what to do. It seems as if, in many ways, academia hasn’t either.
Hannah Arendt said that anytime we 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 give up 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 about their decision to publish Smith’s recent book. Gisela Fosado, the editorial director, sent me a long statement that included the following:
“For months now, we at Duke University Press have engaged in difficult conversations about 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 always include serious engagement with questions of ethics outside of those raised in the peer review process. That has changed. Our publication of Smith’s most recent work did harm by undermining the brave calls by 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.”
Smith never responded to Kauanui’s email, and she most likely never will. But maybe it’s not her apology that matters.
Sarah Viren is a contributing writer for the magazine and an assistant professor at Arizona State University. Her last article for the magazine was a personal story of an accusation she knew to be false.
Correction: May 26, 2021
An earlier version of this article omitted the location of the University of Wisconsin campus from which Justine Smith received an undergraduate degree. It is the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.
A version of this article appears in print on May 30, 2021, Page 26 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: The Genealogy of a Lie. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper |
