On his first day of class, Yola Gomez, a first-year Ph.D. student at Oregon State University, was inundated with claims about mistreatment towards minority students by a professor in OSU’s Women Gender and Sexuality Studies program. 

The alleged mistreatment was by Associate Professor Qwo-Li Driskill, who recently made headlines of false claims of Indigenous identity. 

“(On) my first day grad students let me know of the ongoings within the department,” Gomez said. “Driskill’s aberrant behavior is abusive primarily toward people of color students.”

This account aligns with other graduate students, such as Ariana Berenice and Shaina Khan, who reported similar mistreatment in Driskill’s class.

In an open letter posted over the summer, graduate students of the OSU Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies program, wrote about their experiences with Driskill to bring attention to the issue.

Berenice, a second-year Ph.D. student also in the WGSS program, spoke about needing Zoom accommodation that had previously been made for others. Berenice said that Driskill would often deny these requests without giving reasons as to why.

Perplexed by this behavior, Berenice started speaking with others in her cohort about Driskill’s alleged mistreatment while trying to remain vague about who was being described. 

However, most students would often guess–unprompted–that Berenice was inquiring about Driskill.

The more Berenice spoke about the issue of disregard for support for students in Driskill’s classes, the more concern started to surface. 

Some students who came forward chose to remain anonymous due to fear of retaliation.

Part of the grievance letter states, “Rumors have been spread that accuse us of transmisogyny and prejudice based on race and ethnicity. It seems that the louder we get, the louder these accusations get. As a consequence, many among the graduate student body are reluctant to speak.”

However, other students voiced how these issues with Driskill were “open secrets” spanning years. 

“I started asking people to talk about these things because it was not fair. We all needed to be treated equally. The more I looked into it, I found that the white (students) were given the best treatment in the program,” Berenice said.

Some students noted the coursework for Driskills’ classes was a “dictatorship” and was overly time-consuming, similar to “working a full-time job.”

“After several months of demands that changes be made, little has changed, and most alarmingly, Driskill is still teaching in our program, despite our extensive grievances concerning their classroom practices and their treatment of graduate students,” they wrote. 

Driskill could not be reached for comment, and the faculty in OSU’s WGSS program declined to comment on the matter.

As reports of mistreatment multiplied, students like Khan, a graduate student assistant for the WGSS department began urging a thorough investigation and accountability from OSU.

Khan said Driskill doesn’t take any feedback from students, regardless of whether it’s positive or negative, which leaves no room for improvement of open communication for the graduate students with their professors. 

As the mistreatment continued, Gomez called Cherokee Nation to see if there was any kind of familial connection, which, regardless of enrollment status, can define whether or not an individual is of Indigenous descent.

This sparked an investigation by the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds, a watchdog organization that dedicates itself to exposing individuals who monetize identities that they have no claim to.

“We expose ethnic frauds pretending to be American Indian people or ‘tribes’ when they are not. We are researchers. We gather facts. We are the whistle-blowers,” their website states.  

Driskill has claimed to have Cherokee, Lenape (Delaware) and Osage ancestry. They have also said they are not federally enrolled in any of those tribes. 

Driskill identifies as queer and Two-Spirit, a blanket term used in various Indigenous languages, which describes the various nature of gender identification and their role in their community.

This identity involves having both a masculine and a feminine spirit to describe their diverse sexualities, gender identities, roles and how one may come to express them. However, it is not recognized as a blanket term in all Indigenous tribes. 

Driskill earned their Ph.D. in rhetoric and writing, with a concentration in cultural rhetorics from Michigan State University. They have gone on to publish books “Walking with Ghosts,” which was nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and “Asegi Stories: Cherokee Queer and Two-Spirit Memory,” a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in 2017.

In a press release addressed to OSU from October 2023, TAAF accused Driskill of falsifying their Indigenous identity. They claimed to have “hundreds of unimpeachable genealogical documents” to prove that Driskill was falsifying their identity.

The TAAF also called for OSU to “fire Qwo-Li Driskill for academic dishonesty and ethnic fraud, unless Driskill makes a public statement admitting that they are not American Indian at all and gives a public apology.” 

Oregon State University doesn’t have any policies set in place to vet potential staff or faculty when applying for positions that teach specific subjects dealing with identity like Two-Spirit queer studies.

“OSU does not consider race or ethnicity in admissions or faculty recruitment or promotion,” stated the Vice President for University Relations and Marketing Rob Odom in an email.

“This goes back years and it will continue to reverberate. OSU has to be held accountable. The allegations of (Driskill’s) fraudulent identity go back to 2009. OSU had been notified of their false Indigenous identity,” Gomez said. “They have harmed so many students with zero repercussions.”

Speaking out also comes with the risk of vulnerability. Gomez, Berenice and Khan all expressed various instances of suspected retaliation on Driskill’s behalf. 

They felt Driskill was using their identity as a trans nonbinary queer and weaponizing it in a way of accusing the grad students of intolerance and discrimination.

These tactics, however, will not keep the students silent. The student activists are made up of various intersecting identities such as queer, trans, Indigenous, Black and brown among others, and they say they know what it’s like to have to fight to be seen and heard. 

The graduate students suspect that Driskill spread inflammatory rumors around the WGSS department about the student activists who reported Driskill as having bigoted views of trans, queer and Indigenous identities once Driskill realized their own behavior was no longer being tolerated.

Student activists are taking online action in the form of petitions like the one on Change.org, calling for the removal of Qwo-Li Driskill from OSU faculty.

These students who came forward said they are dedicated now more than ever to see that justice is seen through, the grad students explained.

At the moment, Driskill is still a professor at the university for winter term.