Why do people fake Indigenous ancestry?

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Jordan Heath-Rawlings Most Canadians learned of the phenomenon thanks to a writer named Joseph Boyden, who wasn’t indigenous, but told an awful lot of indigenous stories while pretending to be. Since Boyden was called out for lying about his heritage in late 2016, he’s not been alone. Basically every couple of weeks he gets less alone. What we’ve found was that Dr. Kerry Bursa doesn’t have a drop of indigenous blood in her and that she has been faking her identity for at least 20. Just last month, a CBC News investigation into Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond and former judge who for decades had claimed to be Creed. The CBC News investigation found no evidence in support of that claim. An indigenous lawyer, academic, and author is calling for action in the wake of the president’s claims of indigenous heritage for years via Timmons Resume listed her as a member of an unrecognized mgma. Those examples are just a few of dozens of prominent researchers, writers, and others to claim indigenous heritage, at least until those claims were proven false. And a simple glance at the number of people who now self-identify as indigenous compared to even 20 years ago, as well as some basic math will tell you that it’s not only prominent writers and academics doing this. It’s a lot of people. So why, what changed to spark these increasing claims and the lengths that some people have gone to attempt to explain them? What do these stories do to people who are actually Indigenous. Why so many more now? And is there any way to identify them before they get the grants and titles and honours thereafter? I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Michelle Cyca is an editor for the Narwhal, focused on expanding coverage of Indigenous led conservation. She wrote this piece, however, in The Walrus. Hello, Michelle.

Michelle Cyca Hi.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Thanks for joining us today.

Michelle Cyca Yeah, thanks for having me.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings I want to go back to the start of, I guess it feels really weird and maybe slightly offensive to refer to this as a trend, but it is. A trend over the past few years. Tell me about Joseph Boyden, who was one of the first people to be exposed in this way. What happened to him? How did his heritage come to light?

Michelle Cyca Yeah. Joseph Boyden is kind of an inflection point here because while it’s not necessarily new that people are claiming indigenous ancestry, Joseph Boyden was kind of the first high profile case that got attention in 2016 after, uh, Jorge Perera published an investigation in APTN. So Joseph Boyden was probably one of the best known Indigenous authors in Canada. He wrote best like novels, like Three Day Road, and he’d always talked a lot about his own indigenous identity. But his claims really changed quite a bit over time in a way that’s interesting. Now to think about it. So he said he was Metis at times. He said he was Mi’kmaq. He said he was Ojibwe. He made frequent references to his uncle who was well known for being kind of an Indian cos player, he would dress up and call himself Engine Joe and sell like trinkets to tourists.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Hmm.

Michelle Cyca So he was, you know, public about his relationship to a man who was. Best known for pretending to be indigenous. And it’s surprising now in retrospect that it took so long for someone to start asking questions. But in 2016, A P T N published a very detailed investigation into his genealogy. He claimed to have found indigenous ancestors on his father’s side, and then later on, his father’s and his mother’s side, but none of his claims could be substantiated. They were all sort of family lore that didn’t seem to have any basis in reality. And what’s kind of interesting about it is just that, you know, he, his claims changed over time. He was never very specific. I feel like in 2023, people would probably have started asking questions sooner because we are living in this strange era. But at the time, he really built a career on this very vague, very shifty indigenous identity. So I called it a trend.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings You called it a strange era. And you said that Joseph Boyn was an inflection point, which I think is a good way to describe it because how often have these sorts of claims been exposed or admitted since, and is there, like a spectrum of this kind of thing. You write in your walrus piece that no two are exactly the same.

Michelle Cyca I would say there’s common themes, but each story is a little bit different. So I would say since maybe 2020, it seems like every few months there’s another really high profile story like this. So some that have made headlines. Gwen Benay, who is a governor, general winning poet, Michelle LaMer, the director, uh, Carrie Barasa, who is a health researcher and professor at the University of Saskatchewan. Those were all really big, splashy stories and I wrote about one of these claims at the university where I used to work, Emily Carr, which involved an artist named Gina Adam. You know, all of their stories and all of these stories tend to have a couple of common elements. So before I talk about what makes ’em different, maybe I’ll talk a little bit about what makes them the same. So often you see people claiming to have ancestry with a. Broad cultural group, you know, like Anishinabe or Metis, kind of a, a vague association, not a specific nation, but a group.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Mm-hmm.

Michelle Cyca And often these claims will change over time the way Joseph Boydens did. So, Carrie Barasa also claimed to me Metis, but then later she claimed to be Clingett, which is a group of nations on the northwest coast of bc. Very different geographically and culturally. And often they have this story for why they’re disconnected or they’re not very embedded in their culture or community, which usually has to do with trauma or this legacy of shame, right? So often they say, you know, their indigenous identity was kept secret and they discovered it, or they’re reconnecting with it. Finally, I feel like a lot of the people who make headlines for this have kind of made being indigenous, like the focus of their careers. So Joseph Boyton wrote Indigenous Stories and Michelle Adam are directed indigenous stories and Carrie Brassel researched indigenous health. So it’s not a fact of their life. They’re not like a dentist who happens to be indigenous. It’s part of their identity. Yes, it’s in some ways the most significant thing about their identity, but the way they tell these stories differ. So some of them seem like they’re more like a family history that’s been exaggerated a little bit or distorted over time. You know, it’s quite common for Canadians to tell you or to think that they have an indigenous ancestor somewhere in their family tree. Um, that’s a really popular part of our national myth making. I didn’t know that if you’re indigenous, you will have this experience where every time you tell somebody, You know, I would say half the time they’ll come back and say, oh, I also have a little bit of indigenous ancestry. But other times you, you see what I think could only be called like a total fabrication of identity. So Gina Adams, the scholar I wrote about, claimed that her grandfather was born on the White Earth Nation in Minnesota. But all historical records suggest that he was born in Massachusetts. And when Carrie Brasa claimed to be Tlingit. She substantiates that at all. It was just a brand new claim that seemed to come out of nowhere. So sometimes these are sort of exaggerations of a really distant ancestor or maybe a purported ancestor. But other times they seem like, you know, I, I think we just shouldn’t mince words and say they just seem like straight up lies.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings So one of the most recent examples of, is Timmons, can you just maybe describe what happened to her because I think it’s a good way to make a distinction between the two kinds of stories we’re telling.

Michelle Cyca It definitely does, and I think it also shows how these stories have kind of evolved since Joseph Boyden or these kinds of cases. Right. So Diane Timmons was the president of Memorial University, Newfoundland, and she was the subject of an APTN investigation that was published I think on March 8th, but the day before that she came out with a statement of her own in the Memorial University student paper, the Gazette, where she wrote, you know, indigenous identity is complex. I’ve never claimed to be Mi’kmaq. I’ve never claimed to be indigenous, but I have said that I have Mima ancestry and heritage. And so she made this statement that when it was published, kind of seemed like it came out of nowhere. But the next day, the CBC investigation looked into her background in claims. She had said she had this great, great, great grandmother who is Mima who, who her father had discovered through his genealogy research. And through that connection for a time, she had been a member of a group called the Brak First Nation. You know, it wasn’t like she was hired into an indigenous specific position, but it was something that was cited in professional biographies about her. It was on her CV for a time. And the cbc investigation couldn’t substantiate that. The great, great-great grandmother that she’d said was Mi’kmaq in census records doesn’t appear to be, and while she might have an ancestor further back, I think cbc found someone 10 generations back. It really raised the question of what this identity claim was all about. And I think it’s, you know, it’s interesting compared to somebody like Joseph Boyden who made these, pretty bold claims that weren’t, you know, it doesn’t seem like he was very consistent about them or very right. He was just saying stuff. Whereas Timmons was quite deliberate. She said, you know, I’ve always said I have ancestry, that I’m not a M’kmaaq citizen. I, I have this great-great, great grandmother. Um, she was quite careful about her wording. She was, You know, deliberate about how she spoke about it. And I think that reflects that there is a lot more attention now on these kinds of claims.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings You know, people are getting savvier the ways that indigenous identity has been used for personal gain. But is there, I guess this is what really fascinates me a about it. What is the difference between indigenous citizenship and indigenous ancestry and like, I know there is obviously a, a pretty big difference, but where is the official line, if there even is one?

Michelle Cyca Well, there’s a pretty clear official line in, in some ways, you know, like I have a, I have Swedish ancestors, but I’m not a citizen of Sweden. I couldn’t vote in a Swedish election. Right. Can’t get any passport.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings So we are talking about an official definition then.

Michelle Cyca Yes. Yeah. So you know, first Nations are nations. They are distinct peoples, right? They have their own membership, they have their own laws and governance. And so there are definitely concrete differences, legal differences. But another way of looking at it is, is kind of how indigenous people, talk to each other or how they ask questions. So it’s really common for indigenous people to ask each other questions. Like, you know, who’s your family? Where are you from? Who’s your grandmother?

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Mm-hmm.

Michelle Cyca And these are ways of establishing relationships and connections. So people will say the community they’re from and the nation they’re a member of, they might give some family names and the person they’re talking to, you know, as often as not, might know somebody from that community because Indigenous communities tend to be pretty small. So it’s about establishing those living connections, those, those present day connections to a nation, to a people, to a community, and to a family. And that’s quite different from, you know, looking back in your family tree two or 300 years and finding somebody who might have been indigenous where you don’t know what nation they were a part of. You’re not even necessarily sure you know, what group of nations they were from. You don’t know what nation you’re connected to now or if you have any indigenous family. And so it’s more of a historical detail, and when people take the approach of doing like a 23andme dna test, they’re really treating it as like a biological detail. And that’s not really how indigenous people understand it. That’s not how our communities are constituted legally or politically.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Mm-hmm.

Michelle Cyca They’re living entities. And so claiming that you have a long ago association, Is very different from claiming to be a part of a community that exists in the present day. That’s a sovereign nation where you have family, you have ties to it. And I think that’s, that’s the difference that we need to understand. You know, indigenous nations aren’t abstract entities. They’re real, they’re concrete. And so it is different to say, you know, 10 generations ago I had a great-great-great grandma who might have been mi’kmaq versus saying, I’m a citizen of a mi’kmaq nation.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings I wanna read something to you from your piece and ask you to explain what’s happening here to me, because first of all, I found this fact staggering, and second of all, I think it gets right at why so many people feel comfortable making this claim before they’re exposed today. So here, here’s the stat. In 1996, when Timmons was in her late thirties, only 860 people in Nova Scotia identified as Metis. By 2016, that number had grown to 23,315, an increase of over 2600%. That’s not all. New Metis children being born. How does that happen? It’s a pretty crazy phenomenon, that growth. And I just wanna say, Daryl LaRue is a scholar who has written and studied this phenomenon pretty intensively. So his work is a really, really good grounding in how this happens. But, In essence, there’s a couple things happening here. So, you know, the Metis nation has its roots in the Red River Valley in Manitoba, the descendants of Louis Ral, and that’s kind of the how the Metis nation has understood it was a distinct people. But over time, a lot of people have grown to understand Metis as just meaning, like mixed. So you know, if you have an indigenous ancestor somewhere, those people might start to call themselves Metis without having a relation to the Metis nation. This culturally distinct, politically distinct group of people. Right.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Without being a citizen.

Michelle Cyca Without being a citizen. Exactly. And. In the two thousands, a couple things started happening that I think made people wake up to the potential value or cache of an indigenous identity. So one was, you know this really interesting case in Newfoundland actually, where the federal government created a new federally recognized nation which was basically for people who, you know, thought they had some indigenous ancestry but weren’t federally recognized in that region, and the government kind of expected around 10,000 people to apply for a membership, but they got a hundred thousand applications.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Wow.

Michelle Cyca Because, all of these people who thought they might have a distant ancestor way back in their family tree, suddenly thought, oh, if I apply for this, I can get the status card, I can get benefits, I can get, you know, indigenous citizenship when maybe I’ll pay fewer taxes or get to go to school for free.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings They saw material benefits to it. Huh? That feels really cynical to me.

Michelle Cyca It is a little bit cynical. I mean, I don’t think everybody is explicitly looking for rights and benefits, but a hundred thousand people, a hundred thousand people is a lot of people and. You know, similarly, there was a, a landmark Supreme Court case in 2003, the Pali case, which was the first case that established that Metis people have rights under the Indian Act. So, or that they have aboriginal rights for hunting and fishing. And that was a case where, you know, two men shot a moose. They were Metis, they claimed they had a right to hunt the moose and the Supreme Court. Upheld that, right? And, and said, yes, Metis people have these inherent rights as well. So that was the first case that said there are distinct Metis rights. And that also was a foundation for people saying, oh, so being Metis comes with rights too. You know, I might have this ancestor. Maybe I’m Metis. And so it, it was really about a lot of people shifting how they identified and. That’s where you start to see a lot of these new sort of self-declared Metis groups appearing, especially in Eastern Canada, so Nova Scotia, Quebec, Ontario groups arising who call themselves nations. And basically invite membership for anyone who says they have a drop of indigenous blood somewhere in their family tree, inviting them to reclaim their Metis ancestry, to apply critically to pay a fee, often an annual membership fee, and get a card in exchange that says your Metis. So they get these benefits. Then well, they don’t necessarily get them. So they get a card and then they have to go and try to get them. You know, most of these groups are not federally recognized, so they are not entitled to benefits. They’re not recognized by the Metis Nation or the surrounding First Nations. So legally speaking, they’re not First Nations, but the perception is harder to, you know, it’s a little more fluid because if you have a card, this is your Metis and you’re calling yourself Metis, I don’t think your average Canadian is gonna know the difference between those two things.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings So I know we’ve talked about making this distinction within the communities and within the nations, but when we see claims like this from Boyden or Timmons or whomever, how are they typically parsed in terms of truth or not like who looks into this? Is it done ad hoc by, you know, whichever journalist gets wind of a falsehood and tries to do it? Do First Nations try to look into people claiming their citizenship as well? Like I guess, I’m trying to figure out what happens next when someone starts making these claims.

Michelle Cyca I think that really depends, and it’s also a pretty tricky topic because it is sensitive to look into somebody’s claims, and I think it depends on what nation they’re claiming and in what context. So, In the United States, for instance, it’s very common for people to claim to be Cherokee specifically. That’s kind of the big nation, that something like a quarter of Americans believe that they have Cherokee ancestry or something like that. And the Cherokee Nation is pretty proactive about calling people out who say that they’re Cherokee, but don’t have a connection to the nation. But most, most nations are like that. They don’t have the resources and they also don’t have the capacity to track these kinds of claims. So in that case, it often falls on. Indigenous people who, you know, start to get a sense that something isn’t quite right with somebody’s claims. And I think that’s why so many of the stories that are breaking are people who are in these quite high profile positions where, you know, they’ve made such a professional reputation on their claim to addition any, that at a certain point, you know, there’s a a huge volume of people who have been asking questions and there’s more scrutiny on their claim because they’re in the public eye.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Mm-hmm.

Michelle Cyca I think the point at which a journalist is doing an investigation usually comes after many, many years of indigenous people having their own suspicions or asking questions, and I don’t think that there is a really formal way to investigate it, but you know, there should be mechanisms to check. The people’s claims are truthful. One of the big problems here is that institutions have just relied on self declaration. You know, someone’s saying, Yes, I’m indigenous and checking a box when they apply for a job, right? So there’s been no verification process, which makes it tricky cuz then later, you know, it’s only when the claims don’t start to add up that people begin asking questions. And as for who should ask those questions, it’s, it’s also tricky, I think the nations themselves who are being claimed should have a voice in leading these investigations or, or at least speaking to them. I also think there’s a big institutional responsibility. You know, if you’ve hired someone into a role or given them a large grant or a job on the basis of their indigenous identity claim, then there should be a responsibility on that institution to do the work of checking that they’re. Allocating those resources appropriately, but because that hasn’t happened, what we see now is that this often falls on journalists who have the opportunity and the resources and the investigative skills to look into these claims.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings I just have a couple more questions, and this one is an obvious one, but I will ask it because it needs to be asked and said, why are these sorts of claims so offensive to indigenous people?

Michelle Cyca There’s a few reasons, but one of them is really evident in the stories that have gotten headlines in recent years. You know? Carrie Barasa claimed to have this dysfunctional family defined by alcoholism and abuse, and she used that story of trauma a lot when she talked about her indigenous identity.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Mm-hmm.

Michelle Cyca Gina Adams, the artist that I investigated from Ala Magazine, she claimed her grandfather went to residential school and that that trauma really defined his life. So when people use those elements in their stories, they’re, they’re taking some of the most tragic and painful parts of indigenous history and they’re using them for personal gain. Yeah, those are real histories. They’re real traumas. It’s really degrading to see them used like that. It’s, it’s painful. You know, a lot of indigenous people today are survivors of residential school. They’re intergenerational survivors of residential school. And to see someone use that trauma, To get a job or to establish their provincial credentials is horrifying.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Mm-hmm.

Michelle Cyca And when you see people in these public roles, you know, where they’re making art about being indigenous, where they’re producing scholarship about being indigenous. If they’re not indigenous, what they’re producing is not legitimate. It’s a fabrication of indigenous identity. They’re shaping the public understanding of what it means to be indigenous based on a fantasy. They’re also working with students. They’re working with other indigenous people. They’re impacting other people’s careers and education and livelihoods. I think there’s real harms that are being done to the people who surround them as well as anyone who is learning from them. Yeah. Thinking that they’re getting a real understanding of indigenous history or indigenous identity from someone who is essentially making it all. But the other harm, and the other reason I think it’s really offensive is, you know, every time there’s one of these stories, a lot of people look at it and say, well, it sure looks like being indigenous is an asset. You know, you say you’re indigenous, you get a great job. You can just become president of university if you’re associated with being indigenous. And it really erases a lot of the inequities faced by indigenous people today, you know, so the last residential school only closed. 27 years ago, indigenous women were being sterilized without consent in hospitals. As recently as 2018, there are more than 50% of all the children in foster care are indigenous children. Indigenous people are overrepresented in prisons or underrepresented in educational institutions like there are real serious inequities. And if a white person can call themselves indigenous and get a job or a sense of personal fulfillment out of it, it doesn’t help address those inequities. It doesn’t help those people. And it, you know, it skews the conversation. Uh, it skews the national understanding of the injustices. Indigenous people face the real harms of racism and discrimination, especially against people who are visibly indigenous. It just, it really divorces that lived experience of being indigenous from this fantasy. This idea that being indigenous makes you a little bit more interesting. Yeah. Or maybe a little bit more qualified for a job. And that’s, that’s painful. It is, I guess in general. A positive thing that it’s, it’s no longer so stigmatizing to, to call yourself an indigenous person, but is there a way that we can keep the loss of that stigma and lose the fake status claims? Like, will we see it if we call it out enough, go away? I honestly don’t know.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Fair enough.

Michelle Cyca I, I wish I was more optimistic about this. I mean, You know, the stigma being indigenous, like I said, I don’t think that if you’re white presenting and educated and affluent and you can, you’re qualified to get a job as a university professor, you’re, you’re probably not facing a lot of stigma in your day-to-day life. Yeah. Certainly not the stigma that, uh, an indigenous person who’s visibly racialized and lives on reserve is facing. So I don’t know that it’s combating stigma in that way, but I also don’t know. You know, the high profile cases themselves are even scratching at the tip of this phenomenon. Of the thousands of people who are claiming ancestry, most of whom are not in high profile jobs, they’re not in public facing positions.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings They’re just getting those fake cards and getting away with it.

Michelle Cyca They’re just getting those fake cards. Yeah. And you know, Darrell la Ru’s research has found more than 90 of these. Sort of self-proclaimed nations or groups mostly in Eastern Canada who are continuing to try and get federal recognition, get legitimacy as. First Nations or indigenous groups and have access to those rights, and I don’t think that we’re gonna see those efforts stop. I also think that there are a lot more of these people than we can reasonably expect to see covered in the media there. There’s honestly just too many of them. You know, there can’t be a media investigation for every university professor who’s claimed to be indigenous, but isn’t really because I, I think there’s far more. That we haven’t heard about than the ones we have heard about. You know, in some ways I think people are, are maybe just playing the odds. They’re more likely than ever to be exposed, but there’s still no real mechanisms for what to do here. There’s no process at universities, for instance, for how to review people’s claims. We haven’t seen anybody fired for this. They tend to resign, right? Or take a leave of absence or step back on their own terms. So, while there’s certainly public embarrassment, I don’t think that we’re seeing real repercussions. Nobody’s been charged with fraud. Nobody’s been forced to repay grants that they got that they shouldn’t have received. So I’m not sure that there are enough measures in place to really limit this phenomenon. And I don’t think indigenous people can do it by themselves. They can’t. They can’t lead the charge on this all the time. I think we need non-indigenous people, you know, who see a family member start claiming to be Metis. To ask some of those questions themselves.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings That’s a really good point. I tried to end this on a positive note, but I really thank you for bringing it back to earth and thank you so much for sharing this with us and, uh, walking us through it. I really appreciate it.

Michelle Cyca Yeah, thanks very much. I know it’s a complicated topic, but I am glad to see that people are starting to think about it and pay more attention, so hopefully that’s a good first step.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Michelle Cyca writing in The Walrus. That was The Big Story. For more from us, you can head to the big story podcast.ca. If you’re interested in more of Michelle’s work, you can find it at the narwhal, at the walrus, as I mentioned. And also a deep dive into one of these stories in McClains. You can find us on Twitter at the big story fpn, and as always, you can email us hello at the big story podcast.ca. I’m gonna keep dropping this phone number here until at least a few of you guys call me and say something, pass along a story idea or what. It is 4 1 6 9 3 5 5 9 3 5. The big story is available wherever you get podcasts, anywhere and everywhere, and on smart speakers by asking them to play the Big Story podcast. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.