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Twelve Native American women who are scholars of Native American studies have issued an open letter on Andrea Smith, a professor at the University of California at Riverside who is widely viewed as having falsely claimed for years to be Cherokee. (She is not current responding to questions about the matter). The letter, published in Indian Country Today, says that the discussions about Smith have caused a range of reactions, and that many worry about damage the field.
"Our concerns are about the profound need for transparency and responsibility in light of the traumatic histories of colonization, slavery and genocide that shape the present," says the letter. "Andrea Smith has a decades-long history of self-contradictory stories of identity and affiliation testified to by numerous scholars and activists, including her admission to four separate parties that she has no claim to Cherokee ancestry at all. She purportedly promised to no longer identify as Cherokee, and yet in her subsequent appearances and publications she continues to assert herself as a nonspecific 'Native woman' or a 'woman of color' scholar to antiracist activist communities in ways that we believe have destructive intellectual and political consequences. Presenting herself as generically indigenous, and allowing others to represent her as Cherokee, Andrea Smith allows herself to stand in as the representative of collectivities to which she has demonstrated no accountability, and undermines the integrity and vibrancy of Cherokee cultural and political survival."
