Thomas King’s revelation he is not Indigenous sends ripples through culture sector

TORONTO – Thomas King’s revelation that he has no Indigenous ancestry sent 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 his mother told him as a child. The same day, 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 directly respond to questions about whether those concerns were about King’s Indigenous identity.

“What we heard from community members related to the broader context: how the story was being received locally, how it intersected with current conversations in the community, and whether moving forward would align with our commitments to reconciliation and cultural respect,” Bojić wrote in an email.

She also said the opera house had not been in direct contact with King. 

In an op-ed published in the Globe and Mail, the California-born, Guelph, Ont.-based author 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 Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, technoscience and society before she moved back to the U.S., 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.

In his op-ed, King described his mother attributing his dark colouring to his father, who had left the family years earlier. King said his mother told him that his paternal grandfather “of record” was not his biological grandfather and that his biological grandfather, Elvin Hunt, was part Cherokee. 

King wrote that he met up with his father’s eldest sister when he was in his late 60s, and that she had the same story. 

He wrote that his mother had tried to obtain Cherokee citizenship for him and his brother, to no avail. Later in life, he said he picked up a volume of “Cherokee Roots” and searched for his family, finding some Kings and Hunts but not Elvin. 

He said he also tried to find his Cherokee relatives through a retired staffer from the Bureau of Indian Affairs in northeastern Oklahoma, but it didn’t yield any results.

Jean Teillet, a Métis author and retired lawyer who in 2022 was commissioned by the University of Saskatchewan to write a report on Indigenous identity fraud, said she takes King at face value that he truly believed himself to be part Cherokee.

“But the question for all of these people, especially in this day and age, is whether family lore or family stories is enough, and whether there’s some onus on them to actually provide some kind of verification of those family stories,” she said. “And I think there is an onus on people to check and to do the work.”

She said in most cases, it is possible to dig through genealogical records and find your origin, with the exception of people who were adopted during the ’60s Scoop whose adoption records were sealed. 

Teillet said there are many people falsely claiming Indigenous identity for the sake of getting something: sometimes hunting and fishing licences, sometimes scholarships and awards.

King benefited from his claims of Indigeneity, but Teillet said he doesn’t “appear to have concocted the house of cards stories” of some others, such as Buffy Sainte-Marie, who was accused in 2023 of lying about her Indigenous ancestry and fabricating a story about being adopted into an Italian American family in Massachusetts. 

Sainte-Marie has since been stripped of some honours, including the Order of Canada, the Polaris Music Prize and several Junos. However, those decision were made because Sainte-Marie is not Canadian, and therefore not eligible to receive them.

In an exclusive interview with the Globe and Mail, King said he didn’t plan to return any of his awards, other than the National Aboriginal Achievement Award for arts and culture, which he received in 2003, because the rest were based on his writing, not his ancestry.

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 syllabuses 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.” 

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.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 25, 2025.