The Decibel - How to stop Indigenous identity fraud

Episode Date: December 5, 2022

Joseph Boyden. Michelle Latimer. Carrie Bourassa. There has been a growing list of people who are accused of pretending to be Indigenous.Jean Teillet is a lawyer who was commissioned by the University of Saskatchewan to write a report about the issue of Indigenous identity fraud and to determine how postsecondary institutions can identify fraudulent applicants.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Hi, I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms, and you're listening to The Decibel. My name's Jean Taye. My grandmother was Sarah Riel, and my great-grandfather was Joseph Riel, who's Louis Riel's little brother. Jean Taye is also a lawyer, and she recently wrote a report on Indigenous identity fraud for the University of Saskatchewan. And my great-grandmother was Eleanor Poitras. She's the granddaughter of Cuthbert Grant. And I was born on the banks of the Red River, so I'm your classic Red River Métis. I'm also a member of the Manitoba Métis Federation. She looked into how institutions can identify people who are falsely claiming to be Indigenous.

When we're asking what your Indigenous identity is, or if you're Indigenous, or who are you, we say, who are your people? Who is your grandmother? Where are you from? Some of these people, these fraudsters, are claiming Indigenous identity by claiming no connection to a living community and no connection to living people. In recent years, there have been a number of exposés alleging that some prominent artists, academics, and public officials were not actually Indigenous, even though they claim to be. You can't just claim you're part of us if we don't agree. If we say, no, we don't know you, we've never heard of you, we don't know your family, we've never known your family, then your claim is not legitimate.

Today, we're talking with Jean about these false identity claims. About the harms they cause and what institutions, like universities, need to do to root out the fraudsters. This is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Jean, thank you so much for speaking with me today. Very welcome. It's a pleasure to meet you. And I'm pleased to be here to talk about this. It's a pleasure to meet you, too. I just want to, I guess, start from the basics here. So over the last few years, we've seen a lot of cases where someone is assumed an Indigenous identity and that later comes into dispute. I'm thinking about author

Joseph Boyden, director Michelle Latimer, and more recently, lawyer and professor Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond. How do you feel when you read about these cases? It compromises all the rest of us. It makes you feel embarrassed, and it makes you feel like you've been conned. It breaks our trust in everybody around you because you question them. Some of them more than others hit me because I'm more connected with some of them. I've sat down to dinner with Joseph Boyden. So you feel like you know them and then you find out that they've been lying to you all this time. And it's hard to trust a liar. It's really hard to trust somebody who you find out has been lying and lying repeatedly for decades. Yeah. And so what is your understanding as to why people do this? In some ways, I think you need a psychiatrist to look at this, like for some of these people.

For some of them, it's very clear. It's they want something and they think they can get it by claiming to be Indigenous. So in the hunting and fishing realm, they want to be able to fish or or some of them it's more sinister. They're claiming an Indigenous identity in order to stop a First Nation from getting a land claim through. So that's kind of the hunting and fishing realm. In academia, it's all about jobs and opportunity. There's no question about it. They want the grants. They want the opportunities to get support for their education. That's exactly what's going on. They want

something and they're willing to lie in order to get it. So essentially, they're taking these opportunities away from actual Indigenous people who could otherwise be in those roles. Yeah, they're usurping positions, and that's removing a real Indigenous person from that opportunity. But there's a lot more harm. When you find out later that they're a fake, that this is all a fraud, it calls into question all of that academic research. If you were the person that they were supervising as a PhD student, and you had a dream of being an academic yourself, and you were, say, a young woman in a university on the prairies, and you wanted to be a professor, and you thought you were working with this amazing indigenous woman, and her name's all over your resume. You published papers with her and then her world is exposed as a fraud. What does that do to you as a student?

So we also have a trust deficit with Indigenous people in education. So most people in Canada are aware, at least now, of residential schools. And we hear a lot about how they took the kids away and the kids lost their culture and they were physically and sexually abused. We hear all that. But there's another underlying thing that's going on here. That is what Indigenous peoples think about education now, right? So why would you want to go to school when that's what school meant, right?

Why would you want to get an education if education meant all that horror and that abuse and that loss? So then we're only just in a very fragile way rebuilding the fact that education is important and that you should get educated. And the minute you have a fake who comes in and purports to work with those communities and with their kids and their students and do research on them and about them and then is exposed as a fake, what does that do to that fragile trust? Also then, it means that the rest of the university calls into question Indigenous academic research entirely because they sit there and they go, well, if she's a fake, then everybody else must be too. So it spreads a poison of suspicion on all Indigenous people. And so these harms that we're talking about then, Jean,

this is why it meets the bar to be considered fraud then? I call it fraud because the definition of fraud is intentional deception to get a material benefit. They're lying about their backgrounds, they're lying about their lived experiences. They're lying about almost everything in order to get what they think is somehow some kind of indigenous gravy train, which doesn't really exist. Whether it's criminal fraud or meets the standard, that's a whole other thing. But it is fraud. So just to be clear, like doing a DNA test or, you know, going on to ancestry.com and finding out you have a long lost indigenous relative, this that doesn't fit into this concept of indigenous identity. Yeah, okay. I was gonna say don't get me started on DNA, but you did.

So what you're getting when they come back, and they say you've got 5% Native American ancestry. That's what they say. What is that? That's like you're saying you're African. It doesn't say you're from Nigeria or South Africa or you're Zulu or you're from Morocco. Like you could be from anywhere with Native American ancestry. So it doesn't really tell you anything. So first of all, it's giving you like the thinnest of needles

in your ancestral haystack, to paraphrase from Kim TallBear. And also doesn't give you any indication of where your people are from, right? What is it Robert Yago says, you know, you're not going to find indigenous identity in spit in a test tube. Like it's not like that doesn't give you anything at all. And it's a marketing thing. They're marketing identity here. So unless you want to count 400 years ago as some kind of legitimate claim, which I do not. So some people will pull out a status card. Some people will say, you know, you're a member of this community and your family has been connected with this community. That's what we're talking about is a living, breathing community that knows who you are.

Yeah. So the idea of status cards, like this is something from the Indian Act. This really is not kind of a way to determine identity in itself. Then it sounds like it's much more complex than this. Status card is nothing more than saying that you're on a registry in Ottawa. This is actually government interference in Indigenous identity. I'm talking about Indigenous peoples, about communities, about relationships. And also, I'm on about the fact that Indigenous people are nations. So we're not a race. What the Indian Act does is tried, and it has always tried, to undermine the whole idea of nations and create Indigenous people as a racial identity. So they racialize them, and then it becomes all about

biology. It becomes all about your genealogy and who you can track back to. So you could lose your Indian Act status and your registration by joining the army, going to get an education, marrying a person who wasn't First Nations, deciding you wanted to be a minister or a priest, anything like that. So you can see there's a lot of nasty stuff underlying the purposes of the Indian Act, which are still determining who is an Indian. We'll be right back. Let's talk about the ways in which some people have done this kind of identity theft. So in your report, you actually highlight specific kind of common threads that people who've committed these frauds use time and time again. And one of the red flags is relying on adoption as part of their family story. Can you explain to me how this idea is used?

Yeah, I call it the adoption passport fantasy. Really, the fraudsters or the impersonators, they come in and they think that adoption is an on-ramp into indigenous identity. So what happens with these impersonators is they form some kind of relationship with an, either an individual who is, um, a member of a Métis community or a Cree community or Mi'kmaq community, an indigenous community. And they basically groom that person and they then get adopted into that family or by that person. So sometimes it's done by way of ceremony and sometimes it's less formal than that. But that's not the way it works. All that means is that you're a member of that family. But that's not bringing you into the nation. And it's not, as Norm Fleury would say, you're not taking a pill one day and waking up make you necessarily Indigenous. Adoption also comes

in another way. A lot of people make claims about being adopted themselves. So by way of casting doubt on official records, right? Oh, my father was adopted. When all the records don't say that, I'm continually surprised by how much adoption is a mechanism that is manipulated by white people who want to use it as a tool so that they can more successfully claim Indigenous identity. Another technique that some people have used is something called elder grooming. What do you mean by that? It's the same idea that I was talking about before. The white person will create a relationship with an elder, and then they'll start bringing that elder all over the place. So they'll travel with them, they'll bring them to conferences and things like that. And they're basically using the elder.

It's using that person to authenticate themselves. They think they look and sound more authentically Indigenous if they've got this elder with them. And so it's elder abuse. And there have been now fallout from some of these people who've been exposed where some of those elders are terribly hurt by what's been happening. Some of them are so relieved that these people have gone away out of their lives and they feel very, very much abused. And it's all in an attempt to look more authentic. So this is some of the ways that this happens. I'd like to talk about what can be done to prevent

people from doing this. Your report specifically looked at these issues at universities. So how can a university vet their claims? Well, one of the things that has been exposed is that the university was operating on an honor system. They just accepted that claim at face value. You got a search committee, say, who's looking for somebody or a hiring committee. It's made up of other professors in the faculty, none of whom probably are Indigenous, right? So they don't know if someone comes in and says, I'm Cree, or someone comes in and says, I'm Tlingit, or I'm Mi'kmaq. They have no way of knowing themselves, because they're not indigenous, and they're not from that group

of people. Now, the university has checks on all kinds of other things, right? They peer review articles that their academics write. That's a check on honesty that you didn't fake your lab results, right? And you're not plagiarizing and all that kind of stuff. Peer review is to keep things with a basic amount of integrity and honesty. Right. Okay. But what can a university hiring committee actually do then to verify these claims? Well, they need to, A, educate themselves about Indigenous people and how Indigenous people identify. And number two, they need to have relationships with Indigenous peoples. So, you know, if you've got somebody who's coming into, I'm just going to pick a university at random, but say the University of Manitoba, and they say they're Mi'kmaq, then someone on that hiring committee should put that to an indigenous advisory group, who would then look at it and say, hmm, well, we're a bunch of Sioux, Ojibwe, and Cree here,

we don't know anything about the Mi'kmaq, but they'll know somebody who's Mi'kmaq, right? So they'll phone somebody in or contact somebody who is Mi'kmaq and say, this person says this, can you put us in touch with someone from that community or somebody so that we can verify that they really are Mi'kmaq? So that's kind of what's going on across the country right now, is they're trying to set up these Indigenous advisory committees in order to do that kind of work. The point I want to make is you can verify this,

but the institution has to actually acknowledge that it's got a problem and it actually has to set up these advisory committees in order to deal with it. And that's the problem is that some of them are just not doing it. They're hoping it'll blow over and go away. Yeah. And when you're explaining it like that, you know, the verification, it does make sense. I guess I just wonder, though, about the unintended consequences that something like that might have. Like, you know, maybe fewer Indigenous people will apply because they find it disrespectful that they have to prove themselves in this way or they don't want to go through that process. What are your thoughts on that, Jean? It's the white people who are lying and impersonating.

And guess who has to bolster their defenses and their proof is the indigenous people, right? We have to clean up and get our identification systems better so that the frauds don't undermine us and attack us and steal any opportunities. We have so few opportunities anyway. This idea that people think there's some kind of big gravy train and millions of jobs. Indigenous academics, I think, are still less than 1% across the country. So it's not like this is opening jobs to, you know, every position in the university. We should, you know, make clear that these opportunities are very few and they will steal even those tiny little opportunities. So the universities can do it,

clearly, they can. Jean, thank you so much for taking the time to walk through all of this today. You're welcome. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Kasia Mihailovic is our senior producer, and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.