Honourable senators, I’m honoured to rise today as a resident of Treaty 6 territory to speak on the traditional, unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg people, and to address Motion 96 moved by our colleague, Senator Mary Jane McCallum.

Motion 96 seeks authorization for the Standing Senate Committee on Indigenous Peoples to examine and report on the misrepresentation of Indigenous ancestry and inadequate self‑identification standards, and the profound effects that such identity fraud has on the further marginalizing of Indigenous people, in particular, Indigenous women. I want to thank Senator McCallum for bringing the attention of the Senate to this concerning and complicated problem.

Every afternoon, as we enter the chamber, we pass a statue of Senator James Basil Gladstone, the first status Indian to sit in the Senate of Canada where he represented my own province of Alberta.

Senator Gladstone was appointed by Prime Minister Diefenbaker in 1958 at a time when status Indians did not yet have the right to vote in federal elections, which meant he was able to vote on legislation in this chamber, but not able to vote for his own member of Parliament.

If you Google James Gladstone, you will quickly find articles that tell you that his father was Cree and that his mother was a member of the Kainai Nation, a part of the Blackfoot Confederacy. But that is not true.

According to public genealogical records, James Gladstone was officially the son of Harriet Gladstone and her then partner, James Bowes. James Bowes wasn’t Cree. He wasn’t Indigenous. He was identified in public records as White and came from Lanark County in Ontario.

Harriet’s family tree is a little bit more complicated. Her father William James Shanks Gladstone was born in Montreal to Scottish parents.

Her mother, whose name was Harriette, was the daughter of Louis Leblanc who, according to government records, was French Canadian and of Angelique Vallee who was Métis with French, Sioux and Saulteaux roots.

As best I can deduce, James Gladstone’s biological claims to Indigenous identity flowed through his Métis great-grandmother. To judge by the public genealogical records I’ve found, he was neither Cree nor Blackfoot.

Was our first First Nations senator a “pretendian”? Well, it’s not quite that simple.

Because of family circumstances, young James Gladstone ended up being sent to the St. Paul’s Anglican residential school near Cardston, Alberta, at the age of 7. At 16, he was enrolled in another residential school, St. Dustan’s Industrial School, near Calgary, where he trained to be a printer.

When he was 24, he married Janie Healy, known as Pok-otun or Little Daughter. She was a member of a prominent Blackfoot family and the daughter of Joe Healy, known as Flying Chief.

Together, they raised their family on or near the Blood Reserve, what we now call the Kainai First Nation. He fought for a decade to be adopted as a member of that First Nation and to be granted Indian status, which he finally won in 1920.

Gladstone became a successful farmer and rancher, and became deeply involved in First Nations politics and the fight for voting rights. In 1949, he was elected president of the Indian Association of Alberta. When he gave his maiden speech in our Senate in August of 1958, he began his remarks by speaking in Blackfoot. The translation of his speech reads:

The Indians of Canada are very happy to know they have someone in Ottawa to represent them in the Government of Canada. I pray that I will be able to speak the right words for them.

Two years later, the Diefenbaker government passed the Canadian Bill of Rights and the legislation granting all registered Indians in Canada the right to vote. Gladstone played a key role in making that happen. How exactly are we to understand his life now?

I wanted to share his story to illustrate some of the difficult complexities of the pretendian issue. It’s easy enough to condemn people who appropriate Indigenous identity in a calculated and cold-blooded way as a fraud, a trick, a way to cheat their way into a scholarship, to market a book or get a promotion in academia.

Pretending to be First Nations, Inuit or Métis as a way to further your career or just make yourself seem more interesting is clearly dishonest and immoral. Such fakery is an audacious insult, a slap in the face to any authentic Indigenous person who has spent a lifetime coping with racism, economic injustice and social inequity. It’s a sort of stolen valour — exploiting not just the suffering and trauma but also the resilience and courage of a marginalized minority group to give yourself economic or social advantage.

It’s harder, though, to know exactly what to do with people who have fallen in love with the idea, the romance, of Indigenous identity. Personally, I blame Jean-Jacques Rousseau, my least favourite philosopher, who celebrated the romantic ideal of the “noble savage” in the 1750s. Some 270 years later, it seems all too many people are still entranced with the idea of appropriating some such Rousseauesque heritage.

It began in Canada with Grey Owl, also known as Archie Belaney, the British adventurer, conman and world-renowned animal conservationist, who claimed to be of Apache descent. His lifelong fraud was only revealed after his death in 1938. He was English through and through, but he posed and postured as exactly the kind of “noble Indian” that Americans and Europeans wanted to believe in. He was a grifter, but he knew his audience well and leveraged his fake feathers into a global success as a bestselling author.

Today, it sometimes seems that we are in the midst of a flock of grey owls — authors, filmmakers, artists, academics and politicians, people who have built identities and careers out of very dubious, sometimes willfully deluded claims to Indigenous identity. In some cases, these bogus claims seem to be based on a naïve misunderstanding of family stories — people who honestly believed that they had a secret or lost Indigenous grandparent or great-grandparent, perhaps because of misheard or misremembered family lore. It might explain the largely debunked claims by Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and American Senator Elizabeth Warren to have Cherokee roots — a wistful, wishful exaggeration of a murky family tradition.

In other cases, people seem to have gone far deeper into their romantic delusions, constructing whole professional and social lives around their fantasies of being Indigenous to the point where I suspect they themselves have come to ardently believe their own personal mythologies. Maybe they’re just besotted with that noble savage illusion, with the idea that somehow claiming Indigenous heritage will make their lives more interesting, more intense or more “authentic.”

Perhaps they are so horrified by the violence and injustice of colonization, that they’d rather identify with the colonized than the colonizers. Pretending to yourself that you are Indigenous and, hence, innocent may be easier than facing up to your own culpability in the ongoing project of settler colonialism. For people who have lost touch with their own roots, who don’t know anything about their own ancestry or identity, adopting someone else’s story might make them feel more rooted and centred, more part of a community and less alienated in our deracinated modern culture.

For some, this cosplay may be a relatively benign act of imagination — they dress up in ribbon skirts, buy dream catchers and attend sweats. Their actions may cause some eye-rolling, but they aren’t doing anyone any direct harm.

In other cases, though, this putting on of a fake identity is far more corrosive. Every time a non-Indigenous author, journalist, artist or filmmaker wins professional success and attention by playacting Indigenous identity, it means their voice drowns out the authentic voices of those with lived experience of being First Nations, Inuit or Métis. Every time a self-deluded narcissistic pretendian wins an award, gets university tenure or is given a seat at a boardroom table, it means someone real has been pushed out or denied access. It is all too evident that many such pretendians delight in perpetuating clichés, stereotypes and tropes about Indigenous people, making it even harder for authentic contemporary voices to be heard.

Yet moral judgments aren’t always so easy to make, especially given so many pretendians see themselves as champions of Indigenous causes, and especially given that a few of them have actually done legitimately good work in advancing social justice for Aboriginal Canadians, often leaving heartbroken and betrayed colleagues in their wake when their fraud is revealed.

Then there is the flip side of the issue. For decades, for generations, many Indigenous people, particularly Métis and non-status Indians, were encouraged or even forced to deny and hide their cultural identity. Others lost their status when their mothers married out and were cut off from their culture and their treaty rights. In other cases, Indigenous children lost their identities because they were adopted by White families or raised in White foster homes.

In an effort to weed out the pretendians, we don’t want to overcorrect and deny people who are just discovering their Indigenous roots the chance to explore and reclaim their cultural identity. After 300 years or so of intermarriage, there are dangers in getting fixated on blood quantum as a proof of Indigeneity. It reduces Indigenous identity to a question of genetics and percentages, and history teaches us, many times over, that such calculations are disturbingly reductive.

I started this speech by noting that James Gladstone had a Métis great-grandmother, yet he grew up amongst Indigenous children and lived his adult life as an Indigenous man, was adopted and claimed by the Blackfoot Confederacy and dedicated his life to fighting for Indigenous rights, including during his time as an Independent Conservative senator. As a non‑Indigenous person, what right do I have to critique or police his identity post-mortem?

These questions of identity are so political and so personal. What do we claim? What are we allowed to claim?

My own father of blessed memory was Jewish. I was raised with a strong sense of my Jewish cultural roots, but I’m not Jewish, and I know it offends and angers many in the Jewish community if and when they perceive that I’m trying to pass myself off as Jewish or to claim a right to Jewish identity or voice.

My late mother was born on a Mennonite colony in Ukraine. Her father was Mennonite, but she wasn’t raised as a Mennonite. I have next to no lived experience of Mennonite culture, yet my Mennonite roots are real and authentic. Am I allowed to claim any part of that heritage? Or does that just make me a pretender of a different sort? Have I ever, subtly and not so subtly, ever so slightly misrepresented my cultural heritage in a bid to seem more interesting or to advance my professional and political interests? Well, yes. Over the years, I have probably done just that.

Still, there is something sadly racist and reductive in assuming that our identity is all in our DNA and our bloodlines. In this multicultural country, where we’re sometimes a little too keen to sort and label people by racial or ethnic identity, perhaps we’ve made it too tempting for people to pretend to be something they’re not just so they can pin a convenient label to their metaphorical lapels.

It’s hard to know precisely what the Senate or the federal government could do about this problem of misrepresentation of Indigenous identity. We surely don’t want the state to interfere with the autonomy of universities to hire academic staff, nor with the rights of publishers to offer contracts to the writers they choose to publish. And for the Crown to define who is and isn’t Indigenous is a story we’ve seen before, and it doesn’t end happily.

And yet, it is exasperating, frustrating and infuriating to see so many people leveraging mythical or tenuous claims to be Indigenous to advance their careers or take up space in the public discourse. Sometimes they seem to be the loudest voices, flexing their privilege to aggrandize themselves and shut out others. So I hope the Indigenous Peoples Committee will, at some point, explore the complexities of this sensitive issue. I know the committee will do so with care and nuance.

I thank Senator McCallum for giving us all this inspiration and for being, always, an inspiration to us all. Thank you and hiy hiy.