“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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Reblogged this on aunt polly's rants and commented:
My Great-grandfather & my grandfather were both adopted by the Serrano tribe in San Bernadino, CA. in the early 1900s. I have beaded belts that are over 100 years old that my grandfather gave to me when I was 10 because I always had a natural interest in Native Americans. I have never claimed to have “Native” ethnicity but I have always “felt” like one … my friends who are POC tell me that I’m not “really” white.
“Feeling” like you’re this or that doesn’t actually make you into what you’re feeling. It’s JUST a feeling. & ya know … how a man can “feeling” like a woman & then claiming to be an “actual” woman (“transwomen are women” mantra) is any different than any other person “feeling” to be a POC or a Native is beyond me.
YOU ARE WHAT YOU ARE & THAT’S THAT. ANYTHING ELSE IS A FUCKING LIE.
The ideological incoherence and acceptance of blatant discrimination by its believers is truly breathtaking… so it’s cognitive dissonance is simply ignored by its adherents in exactly the same way incoherent and discriminatory religious ideology is waved aside by its. Jessica Krugg’s and Rachel Dolezal’s cases (‘identifying’ and working as a black person when white-but-Jewish and then being fired) is the very point raised by Rebecca Tuvel in her Hypatia article In Defense of Transracialism that ended up getting her fired for daring to argue cogently that there is no qualitative or quantitative difference in the reasoning between allowing and celebrating transgenderism (Jenner’s physical alteration was all the rage at the time of publication) and transracialism. Heads, I win, tails, you lose. Nice ideology if you can fool enough people to go along with the idiocy.
Oh the hypocrisy! Does the new (progressive) left have any insight into themselves at all? Self identification for some but not for all. Censorship for others but free speech for them. Today I experienced a small but fleeting bit of satisfaction when I read that twitter’s new privacy policy is targeting left leaning activists, locking them out of their accounts. Ah,so now you care about censorship eh? I shall stop referring to them as Left from now on. They’re just “Progressives” An aberration of what the Left once was. I digress
3 comments
December 3, 2021 at 5:14 am
silverapplequeen
Reblogged this on aunt polly's rants and commented:
My Great-grandfather & my grandfather were both adopted by the Serrano tribe in San Bernadino, CA. in the early 1900s. I have beaded belts that are over 100 years old that my grandfather gave to me when I was 10 because I always had a natural interest in Native Americans. I have never claimed to have “Native” ethnicity but I have always “felt” like one … my friends who are POC tell me that I’m not “really” white.
“Feeling” like you’re this or that doesn’t actually make you into what you’re feeling. It’s JUST a feeling. & ya know … how a man can “feeling” like a woman & then claiming to be an “actual” woman (“transwomen are women” mantra) is any different than any other person “feeling” to be a POC or a Native is beyond me.
YOU ARE WHAT YOU ARE & THAT’S THAT. ANYTHING ELSE IS A FUCKING LIE.
LikeLiked by 1 person
December 3, 2021 at 7:06 am
tildeb
The ideological incoherence and acceptance of blatant discrimination by its believers is truly breathtaking… so it’s cognitive dissonance is simply ignored by its adherents in exactly the same way incoherent and discriminatory religious ideology is waved aside by its. Jessica Krugg’s and Rachel Dolezal’s cases (‘identifying’ and working as a black person when white-but-Jewish and then being fired) is the very point raised by Rebecca Tuvel in her Hypatia article In Defense of Transracialism that ended up getting her fired for daring to argue cogently that there is no qualitative or quantitative difference in the reasoning between allowing and celebrating transgenderism (Jenner’s physical alteration was all the rage at the time of publication) and transracialism. Heads, I win, tails, you lose. Nice ideology if you can fool enough people to go along with the idiocy.
LikeLiked by 2 people
December 3, 2021 at 9:44 pm
hbyd
Oh the hypocrisy! Does the new (progressive) left have any insight into themselves at all? Self identification for some but not for all. Censorship for others but free speech for them. Today I experienced a small but fleeting bit of satisfaction when I read that twitter’s new privacy policy is targeting left leaning activists, locking them out of their accounts. Ah,so now you care about censorship eh? I shall stop referring to them as Left from now on. They’re just “Progressives” An aberration of what the Left once was. I digress
LikeLiked by 2 people