“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.
One of my goals here at DWR is to provide a resource that can help when the arguments start flying and you need a little argumentative boost to counter the tomfoolery going on with the other side. Dr. Jane Clare Jones intellectual rigor and acumen will almost never steer you wrong.
On International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women I think its important to affirm that:- Women are oppressed as a sex class.
The oppression of women as a sex class exists in order to enable male access to women’s bodies as a reproductive and sexual resource,and the appropriation of women’s domestic, reproductive and emotional labour. This appropriation is facilitated by a system of socialisation which inculcates entitlement in males, and teaches women to prioritise the needs of others above their own
Once upon a time, we called this system ‘gender.’ Male violence against women and girls is not a series of ‘isolated incidents.’ It is a structural feature of the system of women’s oppression. It arises from male entitlement, and aggrieved entitlement when women do not comply with what men want or expect Male violence functions as a mechanism to enforce women’s compliance with male entitlement
Women have a right to politically organise as a sex class in order to raise consciousness about, and resist, MVAWG Women have a right to single-sex spaces in order to discuss their experiences of, and heal, from their experiences of male violence. Women have a right to determine who they stand in solidarity with in the fight against MVAWG, and to determine with whom they share political interests.
Solidarity to all the women in the women’s movement who have dedicated their lives to raising awareness about the epidemic of MVAWG in this society and to providing services to our sisters when they most need them.xx You can follow @janeclarejones. (Source: https://threader.app/thread/1463789703669465091)
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