I have been hesitant to share this publicly, but in light of Elizabeth Hoover's most recent statement, I felt like it was time to share the letter I sent her in June 2022 with the research into her family and exposing her lies. nativeappropriations.com/2023/05/a-lett…
I have been devastated, enraged, and exhausted over this for the past year. I have spent countless hours supporting her current and former students, trying to process my own emotions, and having to continue on at an institution that gave her a PhD, her first job, and tenure.
I have so much more to say, and I will. The waves of harm extending from this are immense and difficult to even capture. So many actual Native people have been caught in the web. And there are so many more like her.
I am extremely grateful to the friends and colleagues who have held me up through this and supported me as everything fell apart over and over again.
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ᏏᏲ @CantorArts, @Stanford alum/ former Cantor intern (2006?) here. I helped redo your Native gallery. I think my name is on the wall still. Anyway. This is a bad tweet and here’s why.
(There are lots of Native folks in your mentions saying this too but just my two cents)
Curtis has a complicated and painful legacy in Native communities. He set out to capture what he termed “the vanishing race,” believing that Native folks were going extinct and needed to be documented before their disappearance.
But he also had very strong beliefs about what constituted a “real” Native person, and would choose costumes, poses, and locations to capture his stereotype-laden aesthetic. He would mix regalia from tribes and physically manipulated negatives to erase signs of “modernity.”