“A Canadian medical researcher who rose to become the nation’s top voice on indigenous health has been ousted from her government job and her university professorship — after suspicious colleagues investigated her increasingly fanciful claims of Native American heritage and learned she was a fraud.”
“Far from being a member of the Métis nation, as she had long claimed, a laborious trace of Bourassa’s family tree revealed that her supposedly indigenous ancestors were in fact immigrant farmers who hailed from Russia, Poland, and Czechoslovakia.
Wheeler, a documented member of Manitoba’s Fisher River Cree Nation, started digging into Bourassa’s genealogical records — and took her findings to the media.
But when pressed to provide evidence of Native American heritage, Bourassa suddenly changed her story — saying that she had been adopted into the Métis community by an unnamed Métis friend of her deceased grandfather, Clifford Laroque.
“Even though Clifford passed, those bonds are even deeper than death because the family has taken me as if I was their blood family,” she insisted in a statement. “In turn, I serve the Métis community to the best of my ability.”
“Wheeler said the fact that the letter advocates sidelining genealogical proof is alarming at a time when Indigenous people are fighting for their rights and their land.
“That’s opening the doors to every Tom, Dick and Harry to claim Indigeneity,” she said. “Then suddenly out of the woodwork, everybody’s Indigenous because they feel like it.”
University of Saskatchewan associate professor of Indigenous studies Winona Wheeler says Bourassa’s story is built on a fundamental falsehood. (Chanss Lagaden/CBC)
According to an email from the University of Saskatchewan, if Indigenous identity or experience is required for a role, the university “accepts self-declaration in matters of employment.”
Wheeler said that’s not enough.
“When I apply for an academic job, I have to give them a copy of my certificate for my PhD,” she said. “But if I’m applying for a position that’s targeted only for Indigenous people, I’m not required to provide anything except self-identification. Now that’s lowering standards.”
Smylie said she decided to speak up, despite the risks to her career, because the consequences of continued silence are grave.
“If I was to stay quiet and let somebody who’s an impostor regularly inform the nation and lead the nation like in Indigenous health, then I guess then I wouldn’t [have] earned the right to call myself Métis anymore,” she said. “And that will be the end of our people.”
The discrimination and hatred that transracial individuals receive in Canada is real, and their very existence is being questioned. When will this rampant transracialphobia and marginalization stop?
Is there a better example of how utterly inconsistent and deranged transgender ideology is? Why in the case as ‘someone who identifies as Indigenous’ is lambasted in the press and yet, somehow a man can identify as a woman and all is well in the world (it really isn’t).
Like, come on CBC, either self identification all the time or none of the time – it can’t just be for men who think they are women. You should be championing Bourassa’s case not denigrating her and questioning her ‘validity’. So what if the established facts of the matter point to the exact opposite of her identity claims? How can we not endorse Bourassa while tirelessly advocating for men to freely claim womanhood because they self-identify as such?
What is the metric you are using to promote one aspect of self-id, but not the other?
Asking for the female population of Canada that is being erased in Canadian society through the wildly inappropriate application of gender identity laws.
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