The Pretendian Dilemma

"Well-known Aboriginal families in the Sharbot Lake area such as the Badour, Cota, and Hollywood families are no longer included in the Algonquin Land Claim."

"A pretendian's paradise" By John Tenasco, 2023. Pencil crayon

"Why are there so many pretendians?"

Red River Metis attorney Jean Teillet, suggests that as many as 25% of academics who claim  to be Indigenous are guilty of "identity fraud"; and there are as many as a quarter of a million throughout Canada.  Some of the guilty people are now famous icons. The University of Saskatchewan commissioned Teillet to research the topic: click here

Betty Nippi-Albright explains, identity frauds are employed in universities and with the various governments of Canada. She continues they are causing great harm to Indigenous people when they take up spaces intended for them. Further, pretendian frauds should be criminally charged, after all, "fraud is fraud".

The Algonquins of Ontario, the structure through which Canada's ongoing Algonquin genocide continues, has a huge pretendian infestation; some people have said as many as 4,000.  In 2013, 700 people from the Sharbot Lake / Ardoch area were removed.   In 2019 it was said that as many as 2,500 pretendian Algonquin have been removed from enrollment.  A 2022 award winning CBC documentary aptly called, The Pretendians, outed the so-called Ardoch First Nation and Allies for harbouring pretendians within a fictitious Cybernet community.  It is hoped that the 2023 Algonquin tribunal hearing process removes as many as 2,000 additional pretendians. 

A lot of people ask me, "why are there so many pretendians?" My usual response is, "I don't know, ask White women as they are the most guilty."  Regardless, there is a lot of discussion about the phenomena and below are some of the reasons I have heard . . .

1  The are psychologically ill
2  To gain access to hunting and fishing rights
3  To gain access to scholarships, jobs, and research funding
4  To gain access to programs and services
5  To leverage race in patriarchal society
6  To gain access to ceremonial spaces
7  To infiltrate Indigenous movements and surveille Indigenous resistance
8  To raise their profile in the arts such as theater, music, and as a writer
9  They suffer from the White Saviourism complex
10  To protect their fee simple land from prospecting, drilling, and mining
11  To sabotage Indigenous people and their rights out of jealousy, resent, and hatred
12  To gain access the political spaces of chiefs and councilors
13  Their parents lied and now they believe they are Indigenous
14  They have conflated respect and allyship with theft and cultural appropriation
15  Nation statehood has erased who they are and they lack a meaningful culture/identity
16 They have Indigenous family members and do not understand the difference between lateral and direct relations
17 Universities need accommodating, obliging, needful administrative staff and professors and pretendians serve well as they have no basis of who they claim they are
18  In the Algonquin land claims process membership has become partisan where enrollment was manipulated to entrench particular Algonquin Negotiation Representatives at the Algonquins of Ontario negotiation table

It is about time that White women hold White women accountable for what they are doing to Indigenous people. 

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​Lynn is an author, advocate, artist, and public speaker. Her work encompasses both anti-colonial work and the celebration of Indigenous knowledge. She challenges Canada’s practices, policies, and laws of colonial genocide such as the land claims and self-government process, sex-discrimination in the Indian Act, the continued destruction of Akikpautik / Chaudière Falls–an Anishinaabeg sacred place, and Canada’s lack of policy addressing Indigenous women and girls with disabilities who are bigger targets of sexual violence. 

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