Indianz.Com > News > ‘The Pretendians’ documentary from Canada tackles hot topic
‘The Pretendians’ documentary from Canada tackles hot topic
Friday, September 30, 2022
Indianz.Com
A new documentary tackles a topic that continues to generate controversy across Turtle Island. Just why are so many people claiming to be Indian?
Created by executive producer Drew Hayden Taylor, “The Pretendians” premieres on CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, on Friday evening. Though the documentary is presently only available in Canada, it focuses on an issue that has attracted attention in the United States as well.
“A lot of the Pretendian issue also makes mainstream news,” Taylor, a citizen and resident of the Curve Lake Nation, an Ojibwe community in Ontario, said in an interview on Thursday ahead of the premiere.
Taylor, an award-winning playwright, author and journalist, pointed to a slew of recent Pretendian news coverage, including the case of Gina Adams, an American artist who is the subject of a major story in Maclean’s Magazine. She recently left her position at a prominent educational institution in Canada after questions were raised about her claimed tribal affiliation.
“That’s actually one of the weirdest things we’ve discovered is that, you know, two thirds of them, or two thirds of the people we’ve discovered are opportunists,”
Taylor said of people like Adams, who turn their Pretendian claims into profitable careers.
Taylor believes Pretendianism appears to have gained a hold at educational institutions because of their efforts to hire people who come from Native communities, whether tribal nations in the United States or First Nations in Canada. Emily Carr University had touted Adams as part of a “cluster hiring initiative” of “Indigenous faculty members” at the institution in British Columbia. “They go out of their way to encourage hiring Indigenous people in academia, you know,” Taylor said of such efforts. “It’s a positive thing. It’s a wonderful thing.” Problems can arise, however, due to a reliance on self-identification, rather than recognizing the sovereignty of Native nations. In the case of Adams, Emily Carr University described her as being “Ojibwa Anishinabe and Lakota descent of Waabonaquot of White Earth Reservation in Minnesota” despite the former employee not having any connection to any tribe in the U.S. “As a result, a lot of these institutions hire people that claim to be Indigenous and aren’t,” Taylor said. “These universities are caught in the middle of, ‘What do we do?'” Academia isn’t the only place where false claims are an issue. “The Pretendians” includes a segment on the illegitimate “Native” art market in British Columbia, where investigative journalist Francesca Fionda discovered that fraudulent products represent 75 percent of what’s being sold in Vancouver, a popular tourist destination.Gina Adams joined Emily Carr University in 2019 as an Indigenous hire, claiming her grandfather was Ojibwe. She was a celebrated artist whose career was tied to her Indigenous identity, writes @michellecyca.
— Maclean’s Magazine (@macleans) September 14, 2022
Then people started questioning her ancestry. https://t.co/wFIur2N10N
“The Pretendians” airs on CBC at 9pm Eastern on Friday as part of the The Passionate Eye television series. The documentary can also be streamed on CBC Gem. The CBC services are available for viewers and internet users in Canada, so for now people based in the U.S. won’t be able to watch “The Pretendians” easily. Taylor hopes the situation changes in the future. “Hopefully, somebody in the States will find it, like it, wanna buy it and broadcast it, and hopefully everybody will be able to see it,” he said.As he investigates the growing phenomenon, Drew Hayden Taylor asks: “Is it all about money and jobs, or is there something deeper going on? https://t.co/SnfhDyRQWP
— indianz.com (@indianz) September 29, 2022
Also from Drew Hayden Taylor
Identity wars: What makes an Indigenous person Indigenous, and how do ‘pretendians’ complicate things? (CBC September 29, 2022)
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