The issue of identity – specifically, the identity of scholars claiming to be Indigenous – is one of increasing importance in Canadian universities.  The recent resignations of Mary-Ellen Turpel-Lafond and Carrie Bourassa from UBC and the University of Saskatchewan, respectively, have had an enormous impact on those campuses.  Every campus needs to pay very careful attention to what as gone on at these institutions and adjust their policies accordingly.

With respect to the case of Mary-Ellen Turpel-Lafond, a legal scholar who first rose to prominence over 30 years ago through her work with the Assembly of First Nations during the Meech Lake and Charlottetown rounds of constitutional bargaining, and who held the position of the University of British Columbia’s Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre from 2018 onwards, UBC frankly blew it.  When the CBC produced an incredibly detailed account of Turpel-Lafond’s background which shed enormous doubt on the idea that she has any Indigenous ancestry at all, UBC’s initial response – under former President Santa Ono – was pretty weak, in effect saying “well, her hiring had nothing to do with her Indigenous identity, so nothing to see here”.   Fortunately, last week Interim President Deborah Buszard released a much more thoughtful letter to the community, one which accepts UBC’s responsibility and which not only makes an atonement for past actions but which lays out the steps for developing a more meaningful accountability to Indigenous peoples.

In response to the Bourassa case, the University of Saskatchewan released a report on Indigenous identification authored by Jean Teillet, a leading Canadian expert on Indigenous rights, Métis identity, and history.  It is excellent and I urge everyone to read if they have not already.  The points have to do with how institutions need to discard the idea of self-identification as the sole method of determining Indigenous identity and bring verification of ancestral connection and community acceptance into the process.

This is all to the good, but I think there were two areas where Taillet could have provided a little more guidance, because they are areas of serious concern to universities.  The first one is how institutions are meant to identify “authentic” Indigenous communities.  The report recommends gathering information community connections, but what if the community itself is not authentic?  This was certainly an issue with respect to Carrie Bourassa.  Before she claimed identity as Anishnaabe and Tlingit (which was her downfall, since these claims were easily shown to be false), her principal claim to indigeneity while she was at First Nations University was as a member of the Riel Métis Council of Regina, which is not recognized by the Métis Nation of Canada.   

There was something similar at work in the anonymous report on “pretendians” teaching at Queen’s University, which surfaced in 2021 and which provoked a significant policy discussion at that university (I would link to it, but it appears to have disappeared from the internet).  Several the targets of that report were people who claimed membership in something called the “Ardoch Algonquin First Nation” in Eastern Ontario.  The nation is not identified as a First Nation by the Government of Canada and, more importantly, the Algonquin Anishinabeg Nation Tribal Council does not consider it part of the Algonquin Nation.  There are also instances at Carleton University, among other institutions, with respect to scholars claiming to be part of an “Eastern Métis” community, whose claims to indigeneity are – to put it mildly – viewed skeptically by most other Indigenous peoples, let alone the Métis Nation of Canada.   Basically, it’s not enough to ask for community acceptance: you must be sure that the community itself has been vetted for indigeneity as well.

(And that’s not even dealing with the issue of ascertaining Indigenous identity of any scholars coming up from the United States, where the rules and customs are different again.  This issue seems especially difficult to deal with).

So, that’s one big issue.  The second one, I think, has to do with academic traditions and the relationship institutions with Indigenous peoples: specifically, with respect to the taboo against institutions hiring their own graduate students as faculty.  If you read the way most institutions talk about their obligations to First Nations, it is usually with respect to those with whom there are local treaty obligations: so, the University of Saskatchewan talks about Treaty 6 and the Homeland of the Métis, University of British Columbia (Vancouver) talks about the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam) at the Point Grey Campus, and adds other Coast Salish people – the Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil- Waututh) Nations – at its downtown campus, etc.  But if you hold to the theory that it’s a form of academic incest to hire from inside your own graduate programs, that means it’s difficult to hire from amongst citizens of local bands, and indeed, that Indigenous scholars from outside the region have an edge in hiring, which might not demonstrate efforts to foster reconciliation to local Indigenous communities.  Indeed, I think it makes it harder to bring local communities into partnership with institution and might have particularnegative effects on an institution’s ability to identify “pretendians”, if it chooses to avoid hiring precisely those whose identity is most easily checked by a partner nation (one of the ways Turpel-Lafond got away with claims of Cree identity for so long was because her claimed community was Norway House, which is so far from any law school that it might as well be on the moon, and so no administrator checked). 

Institutions should think specifically about how they could work with local First Nations to produce a certain number of local PhDs – in a sense, set up a “domestic/local pipeline” of Indigenous scholars who would be resource both to the institution and the communities from whence they came.  To some extent, I expect there are informal arrangements to this effect, and that the taboo about hiring from within is already relaxed to some extent at many universities, but it would be worth being explicit on this point and having these discussions with local First Nations, Inuit, and Métis communities.

In any event: I look forward to the Taillet report recommendations becoming the standard at Canadian universities, and for institutions to take a good hard look at how they identify truly Indigenous communities and how their hiring practices support local Indigenous communities.