Can You Be Sued for Saying Someone Isn’t Indigenous?

In June 2021, an Atikamekw artist named Catherine Boivin posted a video on TikTok. It begins with a clip of a woman who goes by Isabelle Kun-Nipiu Falardeau describing “une femme Métis de l’Est,” or an Eastern Metis woman. In French, Falardeau explains that such women are “wild . . . you let them loose in a forest and they won’t have a problem,” that they have “hunter husbands” and don’t wear makeup. Falardeau was speaking generally, but she also calls herself la Métisse des Bois—the Metis woman of the woods. The video then cuts to Boivin, a mascara wand hovering near her eyelashes. “Do we tell her or not?” she says to the viewer in French. Boivin’s question captures the growing frustration among many Indigenous people who have seen their identities not only co-opted for profit but reduced to cheesy stereotypes. Expert estimations place the number of people who have fabricated Indigenous identities at tens of thousands to possibly over a hundred thousand. Some of these so-called pretendians have made the headlines—singer Buffy Sainte-Marie, author Joseph Boyden, filmmaker Michelle Latimer—but the vast majority are not notable enough to warrant a media exposé detailing their deceptions. On social media, Indigenous people and allies, as well as a number of anonymous accounts with handles like @pretendianhunter, have taken to calling out suspected frauds themselves, just as Boivin did in her TikTok. But Boivin is facing an exceptional situation, one that could shape the future of Canadian discourse on Indigenous identity. In early May, Boivin found herself in a Quebec courtroom with Falardeau, who is suing her for defamation over a number of social media posts—what Falardeau has called a “smear campaign”—that, in turn, allegedly spurred an onslaught of cyberbullying. (Falardeau responded to fact-checking questions but declined to provide evidence or details regarding her ancestry.) The court battle is representative of a growing divide in Canada when it comes to Indigenous identity. On a fundraiser for Boivin’s legal costs—which has raised more than $28,000 since it was launched on May 9—her partner wrote in French that the lawsuit is “a fight to protect our knowledge, our identity, and to defend who we are as a people.” On her own fundraiser, Falardeau claims she is fighting for the right to self-identify as Metis: “I will defend the right to my identity,” she wrote in French. “I will defend my work, my books. I will defend my right to respect, security, freedom, and peace.” In Canada, debates over who can claim Indigenous identity are playing out everywhere, from museums and universities to the House of Commons and the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. Institutions, many of which were recently eager to champion Indigenous people after decades of systematically excluding them, have fumbled the basic task of determining how to distinguish real from fake. The result has been a surge of self-identified Indigenous figures with vague, often dubious origin stories. Falardeau, who claims her nickname was given to her during an Indigenous ceremony, has published a number of books on Indigenous plant medicine. These are for sale on her website, which also details her supposed Metis identity. Although Falardeau noted in a statement to The Walrus that she had not heard of the Eastern Metis movement prior to Boivin’s commentary on her identity, her claims are strikingly similar: these individuals and groups differentiate themselves from the federally recognized Metis Nation of the plains, claiming to be the unacknowledged descendants of Indigenous people and French settlers. The movement has seen its numbers explode in recent decades, with dozens of organizations springing up across the eastern provinces, representing thousands of members. Some organizations have even produced membership cards mimicking Indian status cards. The Eastern Metis movement is widely decried by the Metis Nation and First Nations. Many people who self-identify as Eastern Metis have nothing more than a family rumour about distant Indigenous ancestry. On her website, Falardeau has a 100-question survey to encourage others to connect with their own Metis identities—which includes prompts like “Have you ever had a pet with an Indigenous name?” and “Do you have a Native drum?” She has claimed that Boivin’s social media posts led others to harass her online, and she filed her application for a lawsuit two months after Boivin’s TikTok video, according to Radio-Canada. “For the past five years, the anti-Metis movement has been scaring people who want to work with me,” she wrote in French on her website.

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Boivin is not the only one facing legal consequences for calling out suspected Indigenous identity fraud. Darryl Leroux, an associate professor at the University of Ottawa who studies the phenomenon of French Canadians claiming Indigenous identities, is also the subject of a defamation lawsuit. In 2022, he was sued by Michelle Coupal, an associate professor at the University of Regina and the Canada research chair in truth, reconciliation, and Indigenous literatures. For years, Coupal identified as Algonquin, but an investigation revealed her purported Indigenous ancestors, Thomas Lagarde dit St. Jean and Sophie Carriere, were actually a nineteenth-century French couple. Numerous historians told the CBC that a letter characterizing them as Algonquin was almost certainly forged. The likely fake letter, on which her claim was based, was the subject of a 2021 CBC exposé by Geoff Leo that mentioned an anonymous Twitter account had claimed “more than 30 high-profile academics, artists and political figures are ‘pretend Indians,’ including a Saskatchewan university professor who traces her roots to Lagarde.” The day the exposé was published, Leroux made a number of social media posts about this “professor” and later criticized her by name in a public talk for having “built a career” around “false claims.” Coupal’s suit alleges that these statements are defamatory. (Though Leo’s CBC investigation certainly had a greater reach than a handful of public statements by Leroux, no action has been launched against the CBC by Coupal.) Even before the CBC exposé, Leroux knew about Coupal’s history. While working on his 2019 book Distorted Descent, Leroux compiled a database of organizations with lax membership policies that facilitated fraudulent claims; among them was Bonnechere Algonquin First Nation, to which Coupal belonged. (Despite its name, BAFN is not federally recognized as a First Nation, and its members are not eligible for Indian status, though it is still listed as part of a land claims process with the Ontario and federal governments.) When Coupal learned about the database, she tried to get an advance copy of Leroux’s manuscript and arrange a conversation with him. In a private message exchange with Niigaan Sinclair, an Anishinaabe writer and son of the late Murray Sinclair, Leroux writes that during Coupal’s attempts to intervene in his publishing process, she revealed who her supposed Algonquin ancestors were. Leroux had already identified the couple in his research as not Indigenous but French Canadian. Her efforts, he surmised, were an attempt to “hide her own fraud.” In July 2023, Lagarde and Carriere, the nineteenth-century French couple, were struck from the list of root ancestors recognized by the Algonquins of Ontario, and Coupal—along with over 1,900 other descendants—was removed from the membership list. During pre-trial oral questioning in November 2022, however, Coupal said that even if her links to an Algonquin community were disproven, she would continue to identify as Indigenous. “I am Indigenous and French,” she insisted during questioning, later insisting, “I’m not going to stop honouring the Indigenous heritage I know I have.” (The Walrus contacted Coupal through her lawyer, who declined to participate in fact checking or to provide comment.) In her affidavit, Coupal said that Leroux’s statements had humiliated her and made her a pariah in her field and among her peers. What’s more, Coupal said, Leroux is alleging she had leveraged her identity claim to advance her career and attain her position at the University of Regina as the Canada research chair in 2018—a claim she denies. But an Indigenous member of the university’s hiring committee testified that Coupal was considered for the position because of her Algonquin identity, a connection that elevated her above other “incredibly qualified” non-Indigenous candidates. That hiring committee member also testified that there were two other candidates who identified as Indigenous but were less qualified or had ancestry claims that seemed more tenuous to the committee than Coupal, who clearly stated her connection to BAFN and emphasized her Indigenous perspective in her application materials. “Had Dr. Coupal not self-identified as an Indigenous person, she would not have been hired as Canada research chair for truth and reconciliation education,” the hiring committee member testified. Legal threats are nothing new when it comes to the issue of pretendians. While reporting on several cases, I’ve lost count of how many people have declined to speak on the subject after being threatened with a lawsuit, or they are are simply terrified by the prospect of one. Crystal Semaganis, whose organization, Ghost Warrior Society, investigates suspected cases of Indigenous identity fraud, told me that, after publishing her findings, she’s received a number of demand letters from law firms instructing her to retract the statements or face a lawsuit. But so far, she said by email, none have followed through. After Michelle Latimer was the subject of a 2020 CBC investigation, she filed a defamation lawsuit against the CBC and four journalists involved in the story but later dropped it. The outcomes of these two new lawsuits could embolden even more Indigenous identity fraudsters to use legal threats as a cudgel. Hand wringing over pretendian exposés often focuses on the risk of making a mistake and naming a real Indigenous person as a fraud. But neither Falardeau nor Coupal have seemingly offered any evidence that their Indigenous identity claims are legitimate. It appears that both defendants are trying to set the identity claim itself aside, even as their defamation suits rest on the legitimacy of that claim being denied. They seem to argue, instead, that they should not be criticized or questioned over those claims at all. There are few formal channels to address Indigenous identity fraud. One is the media, and in the past decade, a number of high-profile scholars, performers, and even politicians have been the subject of investigations into their Indigenous identity claims and how those claims were leveraged for personal gain. But these investigations usually follow protracted efforts to see suspicious identity claims investigated by the institutions that have bestowed positions and awards—along with credibility and authority—on the suspected pretendians. The CBC’s investigation into Carrie Bourassa, the University of Saskatchewan scholar who falsely claimed to be Tlingit, Anishinaabe, and Metis, came years after four frustrated Metis scholars discovered Bourassa’s fabrications and filed a complaint with the university and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Their complaint was dismissed; according to Caroline Tait, then a faculty member at the University of Saskatchewan, it fell outside the university’s research misconduct policy because there was no process to deal with such concerns. Tait and the other scholars then contacted media outlets. After the CBC’s reporting was published, Bourassa was put on leave by the university, and she then resigned. But not all media investigations lead to consequences, even in cases where fraud is all but undeniable. Elizabeth Hoover, a scholar who claimed for many years to be Mohawk, has had her claims thoroughly and publicly debunked; she was even the subject of a feature by The New Yorker. Still, she remains on faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, and continues to teach classes related to Indigenous studies and culture. Last year, University of Winnipeg professor and artist Julie Nagam was investigated by the Winnipeg Free Press over her unsubstantiated claims of Metis identity. Neither Nagam nor the university has responded to the investigation, and she remains on the faculty. Her tier-two Canada research chair—a five-year federal research grant that comes with $100,000 in funding each year—was renewed last year, though the title of her chair was changed to remove the word “Indigenous.” (Coupal’s research chair was also renewed in 2023.) To date, very few Canadian universities have implemented policies to verify Indigenous identity or to investigate suspected fraud. The majority have not addressed the matter and don’t appear to be trying—even those that have weathered pretendian scandals within their own faculty. (The University of Regina informed The Walrus by email that it is in the process of setting up a verification policy.) In Canada, only one person has faced criminal charges for Indigenous identity fraud: Karima Manji, who enrolled her twin daughters as Inuit beneficiaries by falsely claiming she had adopted them from an Inuk woman named Kitty Noah, was sentenced in June 2024 to three years in jail. But Manji, who already had a criminal conviction for fraud, is the exception, in part because Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. (NTI), the Inuit agency responsible for enrolling beneficiaries, investigated the fraud itself. When non-Indigenous organizations are ensnared in fraud, their actions suggest that they would prefer to ignore it. Faced with indifference, it’s understandable when people take to social media to air their suspicions and research. For one thing, it gets attention, which seems to be the only thing that institutions respond to. After Semaganis posted on Facebook about Bradie Granger, a self-identified Indigenous professor at Cambrian College in Sudbury, Ontario, in May, her findings were picked up by the media a few days later; the college swiftly issued a statement saying they “take these concerns seriously.” Granger is now on leave from the college, according to the Sudbury Star. “The burden of proof is seriously misplaced in this country,” Semaganis told the federal Indigenous and Northern Affairs Committee in December. Her mother, a residential school survivor, had to testify about her experiences in order to participate in the Indian Residential Schools Survivor Agreement process. Semaganis told the committee that her mother died just three days after testifying, saying, “I believe it was from having to relive that kind of trauma.” Why, she asks, did her mother have to testify to something that was already a matter of government record? And in comparison, why are so many settlers able to take money and opportunities meant for Indigenous people—many created as a form of reparations for residential schools—simply by checking a box? Indigenous identity fraud is hard to prevent or address, in part due to the lack of agreement on what Indigenous identity is and who gets to decide. Efforts to verify or validate Indigenous identity are tricky: Does one rely on federal identification, testimony from community members, genealogical data, family lore, personal conviction? Western courts are just as mired in confusion, says retired Metis lawyer Jean Teillet—which means they’re ill-equipped to make determinations. (Teillet is a member of The Walrus’s board.) Even if Coupal and Falardeau win, Teillet says, they might end up spending more on legal fees than they would receive in a settlement. (On her website, Falardeau says she spent $60,000 on lawyers before deciding to represent herself in court.) What’s more, Teillet points out, “Reputations are not restorable.” No matter the outcome, a lawsuit is unlikely to change anyone’s mind regarding the legitimacy of Coupal’s or Falardeau’s claims. But these cases, as the first of their kind, are precedent setting, and any of the possible outcomes could raise the stakes for this already contentious issue. Risks of calling out Indigenous identity fraud have always been high, and yet people continue because there seems to be no other way to achieve any measure of justice. “Without Geoff Leo’s reporting, Carrie Bourassa would still be employed at the University of Saskatchewan and CIHR,” Caroline Tait said in an interview with scholar Robert Henry, published in the journal Aboriginal Policy Studies. “Our complaint had zero impact at both institutions.” Unlike journalists, most raise these concerns without the protection of a media outlet, shouldering the consequences alone. Journalists like me and Leo have won or been nominated for awards and advanced our careers by covering pretendians, but many Indigenous people I’ve spoken to have been threatened, bullied, or ostracized for speaking out. Tait has said she was marginalized at the University of Saskatchewan after filing the complaint about Bourassa and eventually left the university due to the lack of support. “I was very naive in believing the truth was the most important issue,” she said in her interview with Henry. For generations, Indigenous people have seen everything taken—our nations, our languages, our children. Now that our identities are valuable, those are being taken too, in what scholar Kim TallBear has called “a final act of theft.” Every case of Indigenous identity fraud that reaches the headlines underscores that there are no processes, no strategies, and no willpower to address this theft. No judgment has been reached in either Falardeau’s or Coupal’s case, but whatever their outcomes, these cases represent an escalation in the risks of claiming to be Indigenous without proof, as well as the risks of calling it out. Neither case will settle the question of Indigenous identity fraud, but they could make naming that problem even more dangerous. The post Can You Be Sued for Saying Someone Isn’t Indigenous? first appeared on The Walrus.