Canada’s Altruistic Apartheid
Sanctioned racial essentialism for Aboriginals, mandatory multiculturalism for everyone else.
There’s a charming Norman Rockwell illustration from 1959, Family Tree, of an imagined descent that includes a pirate and a señorita, a prim Puritan couple, a cowboy and a saloon dancer, and a prospector and his Indian bride; the modern inheritor of this ancestry is depicted as an all-American redheaded little boy.
Whatever its artistic merit, the painting reflects the common conceit of distant Native roots held by millions of ostensibly non-Native people. Many North Americans have cited such extraction as a conversation piece, an exotic mark of character, or just an intriguing bit of genealogy: among them are singers Cher and Beyoncé, actor Johnny Depp, rockers Jimi Hendrix and Robbie Robertson, baseball great Johnny Bench, and numerous others.
That such backgrounds are both perfectly plausible and difficult to verify tells us something about the history of the human species since 1492. Consensual or coerced relations between Europeans, Africans, and Indigenous people throughout the Americas—even when socially deplored or officially prohibited—must have happened countless times to generate the populace we are today. Most of us, by some measure, are mini-melting pots. And consider, too, today’s routine unions of partners whose great-grandparents might have been horrified at the prospect of “marrying out”: Protestants with Catholics, Jews with Gentiles, Asians with Anglos, and a rainbow of other combinations. Indeed, to oppose such relationships, and the products thereof, is now usually seen as a small-minded prejudice of the ignorant and intolerant.
Unless the opponent happens to be a Native person. In Canada, over the last few years, a rash of scandals have erupted over prominent figures whose claims of Aboriginal heritage have been heatedly disproved, like novelist Joseph Boyden, actress and filmmaker Michelle Latimer, academic Carrie Bourassa, and former judge Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond. The uproar around “Pretendians” has raised uncomfortable questions around race and politics that the angriest Aboriginals may not have intended in their denunciations. Métis lawyer Jean Teillet has called the phenomenon “the ultimate step in colonialism,” while on The Indigenous Foundation website, Neegahnii Madeline Chakasim has asserted, “To claim Indigenous ancestry and/or claim to be a member of a Nation without any evidence, or claiming Indigeneity for the fun of it, is a complete slap to the face of any existing Indigenous person.” And Ojibwe writer Drew Hayden Taylor explained the message of his 2022 documentary, The Pretendians, by remarking, “In past centuries, the dominant culture has tried to take so many things from us, leaving behind the one thing most important to us: who we are.”
Yet just who are “we”? As with so much else in conventional Canadian wisdom around Native issues, the jealous guarding of authentic Native identity has its logical terminus in a separate-but-equal regime that contradicts the universal impartiality promised to all citizens: sanctioned racial essentialism for Aboriginals, mandatory multiculturalism for everyone else. Never discriminate against, but always discriminate in favor. In principle, all people are to be treated interchangeably, but in practice, one subset of people must be impermeably sealed off from others. At its creepiest, the Pretendian problem has echoes of the one-drop standards that obtained in Nazi Germany and the Jim Crow American South, insofar as sorting the real Natives from the fake ones is determined in part by a biological purity that few other cultures attempt to preserve, much less openly endorse.
It’s also ironic that in many episodes of exposed Pretendians, the purported disadvantage of a Native background—statistically, Canadian Natives are poorer than non-Natives, suffer higher rates of addiction and suicide, and have long been overrepresented in prisons and as victims of crime—is used as a bonus credential in academia or the arts. Schools and other institutions eager to boast of their ameliorative “Indigenization” programs have hired, commissioned works by, or otherwise granted special recognition to applicants based on unchecked claims of Aboriginal ancestry.
Eventually—and inevitably—some of those claims turn out to be flimsy: a vague personal biography here, a tenuous adoption record there, suspicious gaps in government documentation (Canadian Natives are entitled to hold a “Status Indian” card issued by federal or provincial agencies) somewhere else. This has happened across Canada, from Vancouver’s Emily Carr University of Art and Design, where faculty member Gina Adams’s Native lineage was called into question in 2021, to Kingston Ontario’s Queen’s University, where no less than six instructors and staff had their Native self-identification doubted in an anonymous report that came out the same year.
Complicating these situations, however, is that few of these cases seem to have been deliberate frauds. Even the famous imposter Archie Belaney (1888–1938), an Englishman whose Scottish-Apache persona of “Grey Owl” was wholly invented, parlayed his imaginary Native status into genuinely progressive campaigns for wilderness conservation in the early 20th century. Michelle Latimer and Joseph Boyden both denied that they were merely cashing in on a pedigree they knew to be fictitious. “A small part of me is Indigenous, but it’s a big part of who I am,” Boyden hedged, while Latimer wrote, “I am verifiably connected to the complicated historical and cultural reality of the ‘Algonquin halfbreed’ or Métis population of the Gatineau Valley [around the city of Ottawa]. This complexity has been painted as though I was attempting to fabricate or appropriate a false identity for personal gain. This is simply not true.” In response to questions of her background that had begun circulating on social media, Emily Carr’s Gina Adams offered her own statement of genealogy: “When I was a young girl, my grandfather told me that he was of Chippewa: Ojibwe-Lakota descent and that he was born and raised as a young boy on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota.”
However they stand up to the hard data of census records or other research, such avowals of good faith don’t win sympathy from the custodians of Indigeneity. Of his documentary The Pretendians, Drew Hayden Taylor noted, “[O]ne of the weirdest things we’ve discovered is that, you know, two-thirds of them, or two-thirds of the people we’ve discovered, are opportunists.” What’s weird about that? There will always be people who try to get a benefit—like a tax break or a parking spot—if they convince themselves that they genuinely deserve it and that no one will vet their request too closely. Likewise, if tenure or public funding are handed out to anybody who ticks the appropriate racial box, little wonder that some candidates will conveniently recall a long-lost relative or a one-time rural residence that boosts their eligibility. These are not Catch Me If You Can-type circumstances where someone who can’t fly a plane is caught wearing a pilot’s uniform, or someone who’s never set foot in medical school is caught performing surgery. They might be shady, they might be selfish, but it’s hard to see them as out-and-out swindles.
The broader consequence here is that policing who exactly can call themselves Indigenous can shut out some who honestly believe they have some natural connection to Aboriginal customs or Aboriginal causes. People’s sense of their own ethnicity, after all, can derive from influences as subjective as the stories passed down from a grandparent, a picture in a photo album, or a memory of a childhood family reunion. Someone named McDonald might still follow his Italian aunt’s old minestrone recipe, while someone named Beaulieu might teach her kids about the lunar new year out of respect for her Chinese in-laws. But if your appreciation of Cree folklore or Haida art is nullified by your lack of Cree or Haida DNA, then why bother appreciating at all?
That’s the question arising from charges of “cultural appropriation,” when authors, painters, or even chefs commit the unpardonable crime of drawing inspiration from the styles of groups to which they don’t personally belong. Now apply the same accusations not to novels or recipes but to living people, and see what good comes of it. If what you thought were deep-seated ties to an Indigenous past aren’t recognized by Indigenous referees in the present, isn’t that one less person defining Indigeneity? If you can only look, think, and be reared within certain very narrow parameters in order to qualify as a real Native person, then why should the much larger non-Native society see you as anything but a prisoner of an isolated, archaic community, like the Hasidic Jews or the Amish, with no contributions to offer the outside world? As it is, many Canadians know Aboriginals only as the country’s underclass, a perennially dysfunctional minority subsisting in remote towns plagued by endless crises of poverty and abuse, or struggling to survive on the mean streets of big cities. Denying the Aboriginal standing of writers and professors, or of any professional not employed as a full-time Aboriginal advocate, reinforces those stereotypes.
The latest example of this denial has a strange twist. In March 2023, Vianne Timmons, president of Newfoundland’s Memorial University, voluntarily withdrew from the position after critical news coverage about her past declarations of Mi’kmaq background. “While I have shared that I am not Mi’kmaq and I do not claim an Indigenous identity, questions about my intentions in identifying my Indigenous ancestry and whether I have benefited from sharing my understanding of my family’s history have sparked important conversations on and beyond our campus,” ran the familiar mix of confession and denial in her written statement. Yet in one news account, she added that she had previously worked with Native elders at the University of Regina, who “encouraged her to acknowledge her Mi’kmaq ancestry at every opportunity.” So being able to cite some Native heritage is a definite asset, apparently, right up until it’s a liability. What might be a role model for some to admire can also be a tall poppy for others to cut down.
Of course, the continued focus on Indigenous identity comes from good intentions. Canada’s Natives were devastated by the settlement of the land mass by Europeans and others over 500 years, through disease, disenfranchisement, violent displacement, and forced assimilation; however it happened, it was an irreversible process of superior numbers and superior power. To address this history, a sprawling complex of bureaucracy, social work, and legalism has grown around Aboriginal concerns in the last few decades, in the form of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (2016–19); the Truth and Reconciliation Commission over the discredited Native residential school system (concluded in 2015); the Prime Minister’s Statement of Apology for the same system (2008); the Federal Government Statement of Reconciliation (1998); the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1991–1996); the Official Apology by the Anglican Church of Canada for its part in operating residential schools (1993); the Special Parliamentary Committee on Indian Self-Government (1983); and the Indian Claims Commission (1969–77), as well as a long roster of other government initiatives and court cases. Together the inquiries, commissions, and apologies amount to a virtual industry or, some might say, a racket.
Besides these, many bodies have formally or informally set aside space for Aboriginal accommodation, like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s News site, which has one of eight subsections dedicated to Indigenous coverage, and some lawyers have called for a minimum of one obligatory Native seat on Canada’s nine-member Supreme Court (such quotas, incidentally, are disproportionate to Aboriginals’ fraction of the Canadian population, which is about five percent). Today, all Canadians are regularly reminded of Natives’ unique place in their society through renamed streets and buildings, ritualized land acknowledgements, and the new federal Truth and Reconciliation holiday of September 30th.
But at the same time, the reality that Natives and non-Natives have been “reconciling” on individual levels for many generations undermines that uniqueness. Not all the displacement was violent, and not all the assimilation was forced. Indeed, in another few lifetimes there may be many more individuals who might make a legitimate assertion of Aboriginal roots somewhere among their forebears. As with anti-discrimination or anti-racism undertakings in many countries, Canadian policies that serve to integrate Native and non-Native citizens become redundant when they succeed, such that some administrators of those policies may assume a vested interest in seeing that they fail. The indignant responses to alleged Pretendians, even when the pretending is sincere, reveals a certain defensiveness on the responders’ part, as if their social currency has been devalued or their special bloodline diluted. An Indigeneity that includes those to whom an Aboriginal heritage isn’t their most important attribute threatens the sensibilities—and maybe the careers—of those to whom it is.
Rather than weaving Indigenous people into the overall fabric of Canadian society, through shared education, shared neighborhoods, shared opportunities, and not least of all shared genes, the current orthodoxy around Native affairs plays out as an altruistic apartheid—a race-based system of exclusivity and separation meant to be benevolent but which is actually reinforcing the very divisions in health, prosperity, and achievement that already distinguish Canada’s Aboriginal population from every other. It is a project unworthy of a pluralistic democracy.
As universities, libraries, businesses, broadcasters, and other organizations scramble to add a discrete “Indigenous” or “First Peoples” category to whatever they do (some Starbucks outlets feature a land acknowledgement of the local Native band on their menu boards), the ongoing marginalization of actual Canadian Natives becomes more and more entrenched. As paternalistic governments strain to validate pre-Columbian Native traditions and Native spirituality in a post-industrial age, the persistent segregation of Native life becomes more and more conspicuous. And as the politics of grievance and entitlement still compel us to contest each other’s heredity, the recurring comparison runs not to vibrant cosmopolitan nations in the 21st century, but more and more back to the Alabama or South Africa of a darker, more demarcated time.
