In a recent essay in the online magazine Hyperallergic, the Canadian art critic Amy Fung questioned the high costs of ethnic fraud. Specifically, she considered a string of so‑called pretendians: individuals who self-identify as Indigenous even though that’s not their ancestry. She opened with cheyanne turions, the SFU Galleries curator who was called out on Twitter earlier this year for a questionable family tree. That case followed in the wake of other dubious claims made by the novelist Joseph Boyden, the poet Gwen Benaway, the director Michelle Latimer, and others.
“In all of the aforementioned examples,” Fung wrote, “the issue that gets lost behind questionable genealogy and family lore, is how ethnic fraud requires the full participation of the predominantly White cultural and academic institutions who hire them, protect them, and in many instances, prefer them.”
Questionable genealogy is not a new phenomenon, of course. Consider the life of...
Shazia Hafiz Ramji is the author of the poetry collection Port of Being. She divides her time between Toronto and London, where she’s writing a novel.
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