![]() Some may insist their respective work with Indigenous peoples has been positive.Īudra Simpson (Kahnawà:ke Mohawk) is a political anthropologist at Columbia University focusing on Indigenous politics in the United States of America and Canada.I have sympathy for Jason Bateman's Sandy Bigelow-Patterson for reasons other than he was victim to identity fraud. Like the appropriation of land, resources, lives, and careers, it is deployed to explain their own White histories and their right to speak over - and for - Native people. The cases of Turpel-Lafond and Hoover remind us the embrace that should have been extended to people affected by those forces is offered now, a century and a half later, to those who appropriate those effects as their own. Indian women, newly defined only in relation to whom they married, bore and still bear the brunt of these exclusions. ![]() In Canada, the Indian Act of 1876 created the map of legal personhood that defined Indians as men of certain blood, the children of such and/or someone married to one, installing rules based on a father’s lineage on reserved lands. Indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada have experienced wrongdoing worthy of a presidential apology, a prime ministerial apology, a papal apology, and a truth and reconciliation commission. ![]() Supreme Court during arguments over the Indian Child Welfare Act, Nov. These new agonies would then become resources fresh for the culling.ĭemonstrators stand outside of the U.S. Overturning the law will break up more Indian families. Supreme Court as a “race-based” preference. This law is presently being challenged in the U.S. Meanwhile, in the United States, the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 sought to address these removals and mandated in custody hearings the placement of Indigenous children in Indian homes. There are now more Indigenous children lost to the foster care system in Canada than the notoriously cruel residential schools, established in the late 1800s and closed throughout the 20th century. These types of claims allow Whites to argue: “I must be you because there is abuse in my family and that is, in fact, you, so I am you.” Turpel-Lafond later added an adoption scenario to her story, a layer of believability because so many Indigenous families were fractured in the great march to civilization and the 19th century land grab. Neither woman is the first to veer from written facts to great personal benefit. It was suggested, without evidence, that this great grandmother was Mohawk. On her personal website under the tab labeled “Identity” is reference to her abusive great grandfather and a great grandmother who killed herself. This pain ticks a box that says “Native American.”Īnd what did Hoover get for this “pain”? She has held a McNair Fellowship and two Ford Foundation fellowships. At the heart of their “stories” was trauma, or an unciteable family pain that made them Indian. The list includes: Andrea Smith (2015), Michelle Latimer (2020), Cheyanne Turions (2021), Carrie Bourassa (2021), Gina Adams (2022), and now, Turpel-Lafond and Hoover, who, until her admission, identified as “a scholar of Mohawk/Mi’kmaq descent.”Īll of the claimants were White women, along with three men ( Joseph Boyden, Robert Lovelace, and Herschel Walker). How her own father’s 11 years in Norway House as the son of a White physician morphed into an identity of Cree by a descendant years later joins a succession of literary figures, filmmakers, scholars, and artists, all of whom amassed sizeable amounts of funding, space, and time before it was discovered they had fabricated their identities. was part of a family of elites who worked in Cree territory during a time of peak colonialism, after the Indians on the Prairies were starved into signing treaties, their land carved into reserves, and their children placed in residential schools. Keeper remembered him as “a little White boy,” according to a Canadian Broadcasting Company interview. Joe Keeper, an elder who was born and raised on the reserve, remembers that her father was the son of a medical doctor who served the community for 11 years. There were once Turpels at Norway House, two generations ago. Turpel-Lafond burst onto the scene from Niagara Falls, Ontario, near the U.S. A wunderkind by anyone’s standards but even more so because she hailed from a former Indigenous fur-trading community. Her meteoric rise took her from Norway House to Harvard University and a professorship at Dalhousie University in Canada by age 26. She reportedly skipped high school, and survived an alcoholic and abusive home. Turpel-Lafond has long described herself as a Treaty Indian and/or a Norway House Cree from a reserve community in Central Manitoba. Simon Fraser University and University of California Berkeley Professors Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond and Elizabeth Hoover.
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