Tribes Blast ‘Wannabe’ Native American Professor

“I have always been, and will always be Cherokee.”

This is University of California, Riverside professor Andrea Smith’s official response to recent allegations that she is not Cherokee, an identity that she has claimed throughout her decades-long career as a prominent figure in Native American scholarship and activism.

In a blog post on Thursday night, Smith maintained that she is Cherokee, that she has “consistently identified [herself] based on what [she] knew to be true,” and that “[t]here have been innumerable false statements made about [her] in the media.”

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Knowledge of Smith’s fraud appears to have been widespread in academic circles but discussed more or less in private until now. As Kim TallBear, an associate professor of Anthropology and Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, noted in a radio interview, “Within the field, we’ve known about it for years, many of us, and we’ve anguished over this because many of us know Andrea and her work has been valuable.”

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