At McGill, we’ve launched one of the first university policies in Canada to verify Indigenous citizenship. Reconciliation demands no less.
A few years ago, at an airport in Texas, a boisterous man working at a sunglasses kiosk struck up a conversation with me. At one point he laughed and said, “I don’t know what you are, but I know you’re not white.” I often find myself thinking back to that exchange—in many ways, it encapsulated my existence. Throughout my life I’ve been mistaken for Iranian, Algerian, Spanish and other nationalities. I am none of these; rather, I’m an Ojibwe Anishinaabekwe, and a member citizen of Nezaadiikaang (Lac des Mille Lacs First Nation) in Treaty 3 territory, near Thunder Bay in northwestern Ontario. My Ojibwe nationhood comes from my mother. My father isn’t Indigenous; his family was part of the large wave of immigrants that came to northwestern Ontario in the 1950s. Experiences like the one in that airport have shown me that identity isn’t always straightforward—we are not always who we might appear to be.
Today I’m an anthropology professor at McGill University and the university’s first Associate Provost of Indigenous Initiatives. In my research, I’ve seen how this same complexity, and ethnic ambiguity, play out in how easily people can slip into false Indigenous identities. In the past few years, case after case of fraud has surfaced in Canadian academia, exposing people who’ve claimed Indigenous identity to advance their careers, accessing...
The Hindu reported on Saturday that the Tribal Council in Nicobar islands has written a fresh letter to the Tribal Affairs Minister Jual Oram about the island administration’s claims of settling t...