Musician Buffy Sainte-Marie, pictured here in 1970, has long said she didn’t know who her birth parents were but that she was Indigenous. Last week, a CBC investigation revealed both her parents were white.
CMA-Creative Management Associates, Los Angeles
Lori Campbell, a ‘60s Scoop survivor, challenges the CBC’s motives in their exposé on the questionable Indigenous roots of legendary singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie.
Many people were excluded from Indian status.
(Indigenous Services Canada)
Challenging Indigenous identity fraud in academia must name and focus explicitly on structures of whiteness, white entitlement and settler colonialism so we don’t recreate the harms of past policies.
Johnny Depp played Tonto in The Lone Ranger (2013). Depp has claimed some Native American heritage in the past.
(Disney)
Indigenous Nations have always maintained their citizenship orders. They have always retained the right to determine who does and does not belong. We know who we are.
Grey Owl was an original ‘pretendian,’ portraying himself as the the son of a Scottish man and Apache woman after moving to Canada in the early 1900s.
(Canadian National Railways/Library and Archives Canada, e010861684)
Those quick to call-out are often not clamouring for Indigenous nations’ jurisdiction over citizenship, nor are they demanding “pretendians” be held accountable to Indigenous nations.