For years, all she would tell Kauanui was that she was from Long Beach, Calif. Over time, the two became good friends just as Kauanui had hoped, though she quickly realized that Smith didn’t want to talk about her family or her Native roots. The thought of having not just another Native student at Santa Cruz but a student who understood how complex and complicated Native identities can be was thrilling to Kauanui, and she pushed for Smith’s acceptance and reached out to her as soon as she got in. Part of her eventual dissertation, in fact, would look at that question of identity within the context of Hawaii, specifically the state’s comparably strict rules regarding who counts as Native and who doesn’t. But she grew up in Southern California, and she knew what it felt like to belong ancestrally to one place but be raised somewhere else. Kauanui is Kanaka Maoli, or Native Hawaiian. “She had something in the application that talked about what it meant for urban Native Americans away from homeland.”

“She positioned herself as Cherokee,” she told me. Kauanui served on the department’s admissions committee that year, and she still vividly remembers Smith’s application: how passionately she wrote about gender politics but also how clearly she defined her ethnic identity. She and Kauanui met almost 25 years earlier, when Kauanui was a 28-year-old graduate student in the history of consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Smith was a young divinity student who planned to go there for her Ph.D. If only Andy would do this.”Īndy is Andrea Smith. “When I read it, the very first thing that came to my mind was: Oh, my God.

“It was a fantasy piece,” she told me the first time we talked, last November.

But Kauanui wasn’t thinking about Krug she was thinking about Andy. It was that kind of story, the kind that spreads so fast and so far it soon seems that everyone has read it, and everyone has had a reaction: shock, disgust, anger, amusement.

The confession was posted only minutes earlier, but already six friends had forwarded her the link. “I have thought about ending these lies many times over many years,” she continued, “but my cowardice was always more powerful than my ethics.” “To an escalating degree over my adult life, I have eschewed my lived experience as a white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City,” wrote Krug, a history professor who had for years identified - and published - as a Black and Latina scholar. She was reading a story on her phone in bed, a confession written by a woman named Jessica Krug, when, quite suddenly, it yanked her into the past. It was a Thursday morning last September, and J. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

Pieces of Lies by Angela Richardson