Late last week, Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador  removed its President, Vianne Timmons, on a without cause basis, on account of her contested claims to Indigeneity.  This is a big deal, (read the original CBC story about Dr. Timmons here, and the very long interview with her on the subject of her Indigenous heritage here.)

Formally, there are three things of which Dr. Timmons stands accused.

First, that she claimed membership in the “Bras D’Or Mi’kmaq First Nation”, a band which is recognized neither by the Government of Canada nor by surrounding Mi’kmaq communities (I have discussed the issue of the importance of recognition in a PSE context back here).  This is not in dispute: Vianne Timmons says she joined this group for a couple of years based on her brothers’ recommendation “around 2009”; the band in question says she had “membership” (i.e. paid dues) from 2011 to 2013.

Second, that she claimed Indigenous heritage in such a way that left the impression that she might claim Indigenous identity.  Timmons says she has never directly claimed Indigenous identity and as far as I can tell no one has come up with evidence to the contrary.  On the other hand, if one talks about Mi’kmaw heritage without specifying that it was many, many generations back AND leave a reference on your CV for the better part of a decade to your membership in a band which most non-Indigenous folks would not know was unrecognized, then a whole lotta white folks are probably going to think you’re Indigenous. For instance, when Timmons was named President of MUN, it was quite clear that the Student Union President – and presumably many others – was under the impression that she was Indigenous.  And that’s kind of on her.

Third, that since she was seen by some to be Indigenous, she received two “benefits” that are targeted towards Indigenous people.  First, reception of an Aboriginal Achievement Award from Indspire, a national indigenous education charity in 2019.  The second was that her appointment by the federal government to the Independent Advisory Board for Senate Appointments, a non-partisan body that provides the prime minister with recommendations on nominations to the Senate.

My opinion is that she is clearly culpable on counts one and two.  But on count three, it’s not clear at all whether there is a case to answer.  We simply don’t know whether the line on her CV factored in her federal appointment.  Timmons claims that the bit about her membership in an unrecognized Nation was off her CV by 2018 when this happened, and no one has been able to find definitive proof to the contrary (though the fact that the MUN Student Union President in 2020 believed at the time that she was Indigenous suggests that something was on her CV when she applied for the MUN job in 2019), but even if that were the case, it’s hard to determine one way on another what was in the feds’ minds at the time.

And as for the Indspire award: check out the organization’s webpage.  As of 2022, the organizations was still saying the award was for people of Indigenous heritage.  Timmons might well say: if this definition was good enough for Indspire, why is it not good enough for me?  (And notably, no journalist appears to have ever gone to Indspire for a quote).  If people have a problem with awards being given to people of Indigenous heritage rather than Indigenous identity, I would argue that their real quarrel is more with Indspire than with Dr. Timmons. 

But that still leaves the first two charges, which are basically that she implicitly was claiming membership in a fake FN Band for close to a decade in a way that would have led many to assume she was claiming Indigenous identity.  But is this – or should it be – a disqualifying offense?

Dr. Timmons was certainly an ally to Indigenous peoples, both at Memorial and at the University of Regina but as such she almost certainly should have done more to clarify her identity.  This blurring of the line between ancestry and identity – not just “I am with you” but “I am one of you” is deeply problematic.  That said, the way in which I understand how First Nations create these boundaries has changed quite a lot over the past decade.  For instance, when she was at the University of Regina, with which First Nations University is affiliated, I am fairly sure that her claim to membership status in a non-recognized FN band was out in the open: certainly, it would have been at the time of the Indspire award in 2019.  Yet no one felt at the time that it was appropriate to challenge her (similarly. Dr Carrie Bourassa, another controversial academic affiliated to the University of Regina at roughly the same time, made claims to indigeneity that may have provoked skepticism, but did not result in public reckoning until many years later).   I am sure it was surprising to Dr. Timmons that what passed without comment four years ago in another job was suddenly seen as retroactively so problematic.

So until very recently, it was not disqualifying.  But times and standards change, and this seems to me to be one of those cases (and not before time).  I would flag two things, however:

First, to some extent, this act was Memorial’s Board covering its own tracks.  Literally all of the things for which was knowable and should have been known at the time Timmons was hired in 2019.  If she’s guilty and it’s such a serious matter, doesn’t everyone on the Board owe the community a mea culpa?

Second, we should question whether this was in fact a disqualifying offense in and of itself.  I think that a lot of the venom in the recent strike was very personally directed at Dr. Timmons for what was seen as her high-handed management style (though in typically Canadian fashion, everyone pretended this wasn’t the case and talked abstractly about “collegiality” instead).  Whether this was right or wrong I can’t say from a couple of thousand klicks away, but I do get the impression that Dr. Timmons never really “took” at Memorial, and there was a reasonable chance that her term would not have been renewed when it came up for review in late 2023/early ‘24.  Letting her go now without cause (and not hiring a replacement for two years), means in effect the institution just got to pull the trigger on this decision a few months early. 

But would if have been disqualifying for a more widely-liked President?  It’s an interesting but ultimately unknowable question.