LIKE many, I was riveted by Sarah Viren’s article, “The Accusation,” published in the New York Times in March of 2020 in which she shares a personal story of the claims of sexual harassment leveled against her wife that nearly tore apart their home, family, and professional lives. Almost as suspenseful as a murder mystery, the story leaves you breathless as Viren moves closer and closer to the shocking truth of what happened.
But I find her recently published “The Native Scholar Who Wasn't” (also a Times Sunday read) a troubling piece of journalism. Here, Viren tackles the issue of a woman named Andrea Smith, a Native American scholar at UC Riverside who was exposed for faking her Cherokee ancestry a decade ago and never asked to account for herself.
I don’t dispute Viren’s finding that Smith deceived her friends and colleagues, and that doing so was wrong. The problem for me is that Viren’s work rests on unexamined presumptions about identity I find at least as damaging as anything this “fake” Native scholar is guilty of. These presumptions lead Viren to focus solely on the question of Smith’s ancestry, even when several of the sources she talked with for this article suggested a more nuanced perspective. The result is a missed opportunity to help readers think through complex questions of cultural belonging in a time when just such thinking is sorely needed.
BRIEFLY, Viren tells the story of J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Andrea Smith’s long-time colleague in Native American studies dating back to their time as graduate students in the Ph.D program at U.S. Santa Cruz. Over the years, Kauanui begins to suspect her friend and colleague is not who she says she is. When she finally asks Smith point blank about her Native ancestry, Smith admits that she is not enrolled (the term for being a member) in any Cherokee tribe and has no Cherokee relations to vouch for her. By this point, a book the two women have been working on together is nearly ready for publication. Kauanui takes what she believes is the ethical high road: she resigns from the project but doesn’t out Smith as a white woman. That, she believes, Smith should do on her own. Kauanui is still waiting.
The fallout from the failed book project is more complicated that Kauanui could have predicted. For one, many Native scholars stand up for Smith even after the revelation that she cannot prove she is Cherokee. What’s more, some of the junior scholars for whom inclusion in an edited collection by a prestigious scholar like Smith would have been crucial for their careers, blame Kauanui, not Smith, for the lost opportunity.
A DECADE passes. Andrea Smith shifts gears from doing specifically Native American scholarship to work in the field of ethnic studies. Meanwhile, Kauanui’s career falters. As Viren sees it, Kauanui paid a high professional cost for exposing Smith as a fraud. And she wants to know why to this day Smith remains a prominent, respected scholar in the eyes of many, when she has never had to account for herself.
In the simplest terms, for Viren, Smith is the perpetrator, Kauanui the victim. But when it comes down to it, Smith’s deception isn’t all that compelling. For one, it wasn’t intended as a personal betrayal of Kauanui, even if it felt that way. Nor is Smith responsible for how Kauanui chose to respond. We’re left with the fact that Kauanui is the most compelling victim Viren can produce. Yes, Kauanui felt hurt and puzzled. But hurt and puzzled does not a New York Times Sunday Read make.
We’re left with the fact that Kauanui is the most compelling victim Viren can produce. Yes, Kauanui felt hurt and puzzled. But hurt and puzzled does not a New York Times Sunday Read make.
On some level, Viren herself may sense this inadequacy because she wrests the focus from Kauanui, becoming preoccupied instead with Smith’s own insistence that she is and “always will be” Cherokee. With the this is so not okay energy of a woman determined to get to the bottom of things, Viren turns missionary. She reminds me of that girl we all knew in junior high school, the one who wouldn’t rest until she took down the classmate who proclaimed to her twelve-year-old frenemies that she had started her period (for realsies) even if she lacked the maxi-pad stash or soiled underwear to prove it. Part of you is mildly curious to find out the truth, but another part of you wonders: what is the point here, and where is the answer going to get us?
Many moons and (I’m guessing) a sizable Times expense account balance later, Viren has talked with enough of Smith’s family members and Native ancestry experts to find that, yep, Andrea Smith has at best an Elizabeth Warren-sized thimbleful of Native American ancestry—in any event, too little to be claimed by any Native tribe.
So, now what?
Sometimes, it’s not our conclusions that need critique; it’s the questions that lead to them.
IN THE course of her research Viren discovered that, for a host of reasons, Native ancestry is difficult to verify. One of those reasons is because Native Americans themselves don’t agree. Sure, some of Smith’s Native colleagues are ready to throw “Pretendians” (pretend Indians) like her under the bus, but others try to tell Viren in various ways: not so fast. One Dine/Navajo scholar said she would stand by Smith because she had done the scholarly “footwork” to earn her place in the field. Another scholar, unnamed in the article, claims that Smith’s work is so foundational to the field that removing her would be like removing a body’s vital organ. And one Mohawk scholar continues to this day to work with Smith on Native scholarly projects. When interviewed for Viren’s piece, these colleagues stopped just short of fully taking Andrea Smith’s side.
But Smith did have sure-minded supporters. Last July, a group of six scholars signed a blog titled “Against the Politics of Disposability,” which contends that a focus on individuals and Native authenticity detracts from a focus on the institutions and practices that continue to marginalize indigenous people. This piece makes clear that the issue is not whether or not to support Andrea Smith’s claims to Cherokee ancestry. Rather, it points to a vital point of contention within the field of Native scholarship (and of ethnic scholarship in general): what counts as Native?
It points to a vital point of contention within the field of Native scholarship (and of ethnic scholarship in general): what counts as Native?
Rather than presume the default judgment that identity must rest on proven ancestry, Viren might have at least weighed the relative merit of the diverse positions she herself uncovered. Taking this complexity into account could advance our thinking about what constitutes cultural legitimacy and why there is so much deception around it, especially in the academy. Unfortunately, it is far easier and more expected of writers to take down people like Andrea Smith or Jessica Krug or Rachel Dolezal (the list is a long one, and growing). Even when the imposter in question has been named by her own colleagues as “one of the greatest Indigenous feminist intellectuals of our time,” gotcha is still easier than rolling up your sleeves and digging in.
THREE questions Viren might have raised based on her own research are the following.
First, why should DNA confer scholarly authority?
Smith’s contributions to her field either matter or they don’t. They might lose relevance as scholarship advances (that’s common) but they cannot lose value the moment the scholar in question fails to produce the ancestral credentials she lays claim to—and, yes, even if she’s been lying about it the whole time. That would mean we subscribe to essentialist ideas of race. As far as I’m concerned, the only people who have any business equating biology with destiny are white supremacists, and Viren is decidedly not one of them.
Some might argue that what matters is one’s lived experience as a member of the ethnicity in question. But by that logic, Kauanui (remember her?) wouldn’t get a pass here, either. According to Viren, Kauanui’s whole basis for entering the field of Native studies was because she had grown up in Southern California and felt unconnected to her ancestry. So, if it turns out that neither blood nor lived experience constitute scholarly authority (try talent and interest instead) why shouldn’t Smith be able to do her job even if she can’t prove she is Cherokee?
Second, who gets to decide what is Native enough?
Years ago, I attended a session on Asian American poetry at a conference where the moderator, a prominent Japanese American poet, started the Q & A by saying that he would take questions only from the people of color in the room because those voices had been traditionally marginalized. As a white-appearing but nevertheless mixed-race Asian, I felt I had the right to raise my hand. After all, I had experienced being either not Asian enough or not white enough much of my life, depending on the circumstances. Ironically, the question I raised my hand to ask (the poet-moderator looked right through me) was how we know when someone is Asian enough to get called on, and who is in charge of the answer. Look, if race matters that much to us, then races will continue to require gatekeepers—indeed, race has no meaning without the particular “gates” known as racial definitions and boundaries. And if the criteria for inclusion are, in the end, social constructions, then fine—social constructions matter. But someone has to articulate them and someone has to police them based on rules that, if you look to history, are always changing. It’s fair to ask what Native or Indian or indigenous mean. But it’s just as fair to ask how such meanings get made.
Third, why does ethnic imposture make people so mad?
The indignation and righteousness that accompanies Viren’s story is de rigueur. It communicates: stay in your (racial) lane. To be clear, I’m not defending deception of any kind, especially in a scholarly setting. But when identity categories are heavily policed for ideological reasons, there will always be those who transgress those boundaries, some more safely than others, to be sure. But we never think to call that exploration. We never call it curiosity or experimentation or transcendence. We just call it wrong. But who exactly does it harm to live outside your racial category? And I ask this question as someone who, no matter how I appear to you, never had one to call her own. But that’s okay. Humans are not categories. Most of us are living or have lived a social lie in one way or another. Like Ru Paul says, “I’ll stop being in drag when you stop being in drag.”
Most of us are living or have lived a social lie in one way or another. Like Ru Paul says, “I’ll stop being in drag when you stop being in drag.”
The main argument for harm is that ethnic frauds take opportunities for scholarships and jobs away from “real” members of that group. That’s a fair concern with potentially lasting consequences, but it does still raise the question of what counts as enough. Some scholars may ground their identity claim in but a fraction of ancestry or lived experience. All other criteria being equal, if one scholar is 1/16 Native and another is 1/8 Native, is “merit” based on one’s DNA?
Viren quotes Cherokee scholar Steve Russell’s article “When Does Ethnic Fraud Matter?” in which he wrote, “The test of being Indian is not who you claim, but who claims you.” But Viren overlooks what Russell goes on to say1:
“Inconvenient truths from Indian history are true without regard to the identity of the person who documents them. This is important work that deserves more respect than it gets. The work, by its nature, has no ethnicity, any more than, say, Jewish studies requires Jewish scholars. Anybody can learn Hebrew. Offensive as Indians may find ethnic fraud, combating it vigorously is at war with the idea of Indian studies as a legitimate academic discipline.”
In other words, if the most important question is always proof of legitimacy, it won’t solve ethnic fraud, but it won’t advance Native studies, either.
As I see it, if there really is a compelling reason why Native legitimacy must remain grounded in ancestry, then fair-minded people should be able to have that conversation—and to argue against it—with impunity. (Tip: you don’t have to agree with them).
I AM so old, that when I started graduate school, the notion that “race is a social construct” and that “identity is a performance” were heady and unsettling concepts introduced by scholars like Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Judith Butler. Nowadays, they have become almost impotent truisms. People say them, especially the one about race being a social construct, but it doesn’t seem to prevent re-essentialized thinking. In light of #Black Lives Matter and Proud Boys, voting rights restrictions, and widening equity gaps in every measure that matters, perhaps essentialist thinking is strategic, an urgent matter of survival. But people deserve to know that deeply informed and well-meaning scholars disagree on these matters, and that we all stand to learn from having those disagreements.
ALTHOUGH she describes herself as an academic, Viren has an MFA in non-fiction; she is not a trained historian or ethnic studies scholar. In this piece, Viren is attempting the role that worked so well in her first piece, that of investigative journalist. Such reporting interprets issues in specialized fields like medicine or technology that affect our own lives in ways we might not otherwise understand. But just as we have a right to expect that Andrea Smith is who she says she is, readers also have a right to expect due diligence from Sarah Viren. As regards this article—not a personal story like her first piece was—I think that means being willing to explore questions around ethnic legitimacy and boundary violation that have a rich history of inquiry, questions that this article either skirts or ignores.
Viren earned for herself the platform from which she now speaks because her first article for the Times Sunday Read was such a stunner. When it comes to issues of Native identity and deception, however, it is an irresponsible use of that platform to suggest that the most interesting or important question we can ask of Andrea Smith is whether or not she is Cherokee. Doing so obscures the far more vital question of why we think the answer matters in the first place.
My simple mind doesn't think this is an issue of identity. Isn't this simply that she lied on her "Résumé"? And if it's that simple, what does any Academic suffer when that is discovered? But what do I know? :)