Spanish
The discovery that the renowned Canadian writer Thomas King is not of Indigenous origin is shaking the country's cultural world, which for years has periodically faced revelations about similar falsifications.
King, who has based much of his work on the North American indigenous world, acknowledged in an interview with The Globe and Mail newspaper that an organization dedicated to revealing cases of false indigeneity recently informed him that he did not have an Aboriginal origin.
King, 82 years old and born in California, although he has resided in Canada since 1980 where he has taught classes on indigenous studies at universities in the country, had assured in the past that he was of Cherokee origin.
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In 2020, King, author of works such as 'Indians on Vacation' or 'The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America', received the Order of Canada, the country's highest honor, for "exposing the harsh reality of injustices against indigenous peoples in North America". In an essay published in the Canadian newspaper, King acknowledged that for years he ignored "the rumors" that denied his indigeneity until this year, he decided to "seek his origin". The writer explained that he contacted Tribal Alliance Against Frauds, the American organization dedicated to revealing the false origin of supposed Cherokee natives and that was responsible for disseminating "the rumors". The organization presented him with genealogical evidence denying his Cherokee origin, information that King said was "devastating" as he was unaware of it. "At 82, I feel as if I've been split in two, a man with one leg inside a story of two. Not the Indian I had in mind. Not even an Indian," he stated. King is the last of the prominent figures in the Canadian cultural world who have to retract their supposed Indigenous origin. The falsification is so widespread in the country that a term has even been coined to define the fraud: 'pretendians', those who pretend to be Indigenous. The most well-known initial case was that of Grey Owl, a popular writer born in 1888 and who died in 1938, who for a large part of his life pretended to be an indigenous person but who was actually British and whose name was Archibald Belany. More recently, other figures from the Canadian cultural world have been denounced as 'pretendians': singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie, who is actually of Italian origin; writer Joseph Boyden; film director Michelle Latimer; the prestigious judge Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond; and politician Kevin Kline.
