Native Canadian filmmaker and lecturer Drew Hayden Taylor, who is a self-proclaimed 'white passing' Anishinaabe man, has spent a lot of his recent years investigating those who lie about their indigenous heritage.
Native Canadian filmmaker and lecturer Drew Hayden Taylor, who is a self-proclaimed 'white passing' Anishinaabe man, has spent a lot of his recent years investigating those who lie about their indigenous heritage.
Compared to earlier generations, there has been a noticeable uptake of people in recent years identifying as indigenous, both here in Aotearoa New Zealand and in other countries around the world.
While this has been something to celebrate, in some indigenous communities, it’s been cause for concern.
According to Anishinaabeman Drew Hayden Taylor, an award-winning playwright, author, columnist, filmmaker and lecturer, the past 10 years in Canada have seen a flood of white people being outed as ‘pretendians’ (pretend Indians) after claiming to be native when they’re not.
In this episode of the NZ Herald podcast The Māori in Me, host Myjanne Jensen explores this issue and talks to Hayden Taylor about his award-winning documentary The Pretendians, which looks at the phenomenon in more depth.
Hayden Taylor says the issue of pretendians has led to a larger, more complicated conversation among native Canadians about how to authenticate someone as indigenous moving forward.
“It’s been an ongoing issue in Canada for 100 years or longer, with the most famous case going back to the 1920s with a British man named Archie Belaney who was known as ‘Grey Owl’,” Hayden-Taylor said.
“He grew up in England wanting to be native, and as soon as he was old enough, he took a boat over and learned how to speak Anishinaabe, learned how to hunt and trap and after a few years looked very native.
“In the last 10 years, it was Joseph Boyden who really kicked this off, who was a very popular author who kept claiming to come from several different nations.
“Eventually people began to become suspicious… and that’s when they found he had no indigenous heritage, and that ended his career.”
Since then, Hayden-Taylor says there’s been a flood of people from within the arts, including filmmaker Michelle Latimer, academia and educational institutions, as well as the legal fraternity, of white people seeking “the prestige, and perceived financial and spiritual benefits, of being indigenous”.
That shocking rise is what has contributed to his focus in this area. “It just kept happening. Literally every two, three months, someone would be outed.”
Back in Aotearoa, figures released by Stats NZ in September last year showed one in three children in Aotearoa were likely to identify as tamariki Māori by the early 2040s, as the country’s population became increasingly ethnically diverse.
For the Māori and broad Pacific ethnic groups, population growth among the youngest age group (0 - 14 years) was expected to be higher than in the total population, with the share of children identifying as Māori projected to increase from 27 per cent in 2018 to 33 per cent (about one in three children) in 2043.
In comparison, the total Māori population was projected to grow from 17 per cent of New Zealand’s population to 21 per cent over the same period.
University of Auckland Professor of Māori Studies Margaret Mutu has dealt with a 'pretendian' here in Aotearoa.
Speaking on the podcast, Professor Margaret Mutu said she believed while the issue of pretendians was unlikely to have the same impact here in Aotearoa, she had seen the odd person attempt to claim to be Māori to benefit financially.
“In this country it was shameful to be Māori, so why would anyone want to be Māori when they were not?” Mutu said.
“It was only when they started to impose the Treaty land claims some years ago that I thought the issue of pretendians could become a problem here too.
“I haven’t seen a large number of people, but I have seen a few examples, and it was deliberately out of the Treaty claim settlement process where these people thought they were going to get something out of it.”
She shared one anecdote of a former student of her Māori studies classes who “really hated the fact she was Pākehā”, but then turned up at other courses and other areas claiming to be Māori, which she heard second-hand from other people.
“[Someone] came to me and asked me whether I knew of her, and he told me that her mother and father were both English immigrants. So they dealt with it as part of their Treaty claim settlement process.
“Eventually, because she had been outed here in this country, she went to Canada and portrayed herself as indigenous up there, as Māori, and ended up using that to get herself promoted through the university process to a very high level until others here in New Zealand saw what she was doing, let the First Nations people in Canada know, and they got rid of her.”
Listen to the full episode above to hear more about pretendians and their impact on indigenous communities.
The Māori in Me is an NZ Herald podcast, hosted and produced by Myjanne Jensen.
