King revelation sends ripples through culture sector

TORONTO — Thomas King’s revelation that he has no Indigenous identity is sending ripples through Canada’s cultural sector, while raising questions about what responsibility a person has when they claim a heritage they say they cannot prove.

The 82-year-old author of “The Inconvenient Indian” revealed on Monday that he is not part Cherokee on his father’s side, as he said he believed from childhood based on information from his mother.

Also Monday, the Edmonton Opera announced it would no longer stage an adaptation of his 2020 novel “Indians on Vacation,” following conversations with Indigenous community members from Treaty 6 territory.

Communications director Jelena Bojić said those conversations were not in response to any single article or revelation, but began several weeks ago when community members raised concerns about the production.

She didn’t immediately respond to an email asking whether those concerns were about King’s Indigenous identity, but noted they had not been in direct contact with the author.

In an op-ed published in The Globe and Mail, the California-born, Guelph, Ont.-based King said he had heard rumours for several years that he wasn’t Indigenous but discounted them until recently.

He says he got in touch with the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds, who shared their genealogical research with him showing no Indigenous ancestry.

But Kim TallBear, a professor at the University of Minnesota who was until recently the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience and Society, said if someone builds their career around their Indigenous identity, it’s their duty to verify it.

“There is no excuse for not knowing, especially when you’re an intellectual. There’s just no excuse,” she said.

“This research is increasingly easy to do. And when you hit a wall in the documentary record because you’re not a certified genealogist, then you go to a certified genealogist. But there’s a lot that a member of the public can do on an Ancestry.com account, or even without the account.”

She said it’s unethical to claim and benefit from a history that isn’t your own.

“We need people from our own communities to speak for us,” she said. “We don’t need people who are pretending to be us.”

King did not respond to requests for comment sent through his publisher, nor did the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds.

Jordan Abel, an award-winning Nisga’a author and associate professor of English at the University of Alberta, said he started replacing King’s work on his syllabi a few years ago when he heard rumblings questioning the author’s ancestry.

“One of the things I always think about is, whose work am I teaching? Whose work am I holding up?”

King’s 1993 “Green Grass, Running Water” was one of the first books he read by someone who identified as Indigenous, which Abel noted in his memoir “Nishga.”

» The Canadian Press

There are many Indigenous authors whose work Canadians can read instead of King’s, Abel added.

But he said there’s a middle-ground when it comes to accepting people’s claims of Indigenous identity, even if they don’t have the documentation to back it up.

“I’m somebody who really values urban Indigenous peoples and people who are disconnected from their communities,” he said. “And of course, these are the legacies of residential schools and colonialism that Indigenous folks are in these positions.”

Abel said that in an ideal world, everybody would be connected to their community and have evidence of their origins. But that is not our world, and he believes there should be space in Indigenous communities for people who don’t have documentation or “proof” of their identity, even if it means there could be some cases like King’s.

“I’m happy to deal with this risk if it means that we’re being radically inclusive and inviting people into the fold that have complicated relationships with documentation,” he said.

“We want the people who are in those situations to be the most transparent and honest they can be about their relationships to community and Indigeneity,” he added.

» The Canadian Press