Distorted Descent

White Claims to Indigenous Identity

Darryl Leroux

• Publisher: University of Manitoba Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780887555947
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Distorted Descent examines a social phenomenon that has taken off in the twenty-first century: otherwise white, French descendant settlers in Canada shifting into a self-defined "Indigenous" identity. This study is not about individuals who have been dispossessed by colonial policies, or the multi-generational efforts to reconnect that occur in response. Rather, it is about white, French-descendant people discovering an Indigenous ancestor born 300 to 375 years ago through genealogy and using that ancestor as the sole basis for an eventual shift into an "Indigenous" identity today.

After setting out the most common genealogical practices that facilitate race shifting, Leroux examines two of the most prominent self-identified "Indigenous" organizations currently operating in Quebec. Both organizations have their origins in committed opposition to Indigenous land and territorial negotiations, and both encourage the use of suspect genealogical practices. Distorted Descent brings to light to how these claims to an "Indigenous" identity are then used politically to oppose actual, living Indigenous peoples, exposing along the way the shifting politics of whiteness, white settler colonialism, and white supremacy.

Part One:

THE MECHANICS OF DESCENT

Chapter One

Lineal Descent and the Political Use of Indigenous Women Ancestors

Genealogy forums offer anyone with a computer and an internet connection an accessible way to piece together their family history. They also provide the type of social environment that leads individuals who may be aware of some distant Indigenous ancestry to move toward a claim of Indigenous identity. In my reading of these online discussions, I have striven to be respectful of individual “race-shifter” stories as they manifested themselves in the forums. More to the point, I have sought to express sensitivity about individual claims, given how white settler colonialism has led to the disenfranchisement and alienation of countless Indigenous people. Whether in the case of policies such as those that led to Indian residential schools and the Sixties Scoop, or those contained in the Indian Act, the Canadian government and its white citizenry have aimed to disconnect Indigenous peoples from kinship-based relationships for centuries. For many Indigenous people, then, sorting through an identity that was stolen from self and family is a messy business. With this in mind, the interpretation herein is not meant to foreclose the possibility of reconnection with Indigenous kin for those who have been dispossessed in such a manner.

Instead, I read the stories that I outline below as components of a much broader social phenomenon that deserves dedicated scholarly attention at this particular juncture—one in which white settler consciousness has embraced the language of reconciliation in a manner that anticipates no possibility for restitution or reparations.1 In this context, settler self-indigenization makes sense, in that it provides white North American peoples with another avenue through which to avoid accountability in the ongoing violence of a system that we continue to benefit from almost exclusively. As we will see, most of these newfound claims to an Indigenous identity take the form of a mixed-race, “métis” identity, though in this chapter, parallel identity claims are explored as well. As Adam Gaudry has succinctly explained, “These [new] ‘Métis’ identities are described as a personal journey, rather than a connection to a historically continuous and still-living Métis community, making them relatively difficult to critique in settler societies that privilege self-identification in identity construction.”2 In order to explain the types of claims made on the genealogy forums, I have turned to broad concerns—expressed primarily by Indigenous scholars—related to governance and kinship. In particular is the concern that the continued racialization of Indigenous peoples’ identities overrides the political basis for Indigenous peoples’ relationships with the United States or Canada. Seen in this light, the wide variety of individual claims on the online genealogy forums are situated as part of a renewed strategy of white settler control—based in the mechanics of descent outlined herein—over the lands and lives of Indigenous peoples.

My use of the concepts of race shifting and race shifters has been inspired by Circe Sturm’s extensive research on the phenomenon of white Americans becoming “Cherokee” in the United States. One of the key similarities between Sturm’s findings and my own is that, in mine, only a small minority of those who are aware of their Indigenous ancestry actually go on to claim an Indigenous identity. As such, understanding what has pushed an increasing number of French descendants to claim an “Indigenous” identity in the past decade and a half is a priority in this book. Sturm explains that the social process through which an individual becomes aware of their ancestry determines whether or not they will eventually identify as Indigenous. In particular, she posits that the shift from gaining knowledge of one’s Indigenous ancestry to claiming an Indigenous identity usually occurs after one is involved in “extended social contact with other race shifters.”3 In this sense, I read online genealogy forums as providing the type of social contact that is required to propel French descendants—whether they speak primarily French or English and live in Quebec, Ontario, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Maine, Vermont, or New Hampshire—to claim an “Indigenous” identity.

To be sure, while there are many apparent synergies between becoming Cherokee in the United States and becoming “Eastern métis” in Canada, there are also many clear differences. The most striking difference that I have found among French descendants is the interchangeability of Indigenous women ancestors. This study’s analysis of genealogy forums uncovered a remarkable fact: some of the same seventeenth-century Indigenous women are now being reclaimed by French-descendant people as the sole basis for several different Indigenous identities. The interchangeability of Indigenous women ancestors and identities is in stark contrast to Sturm’s work that focused specifically on the use of Cherokee identity, which tends to act as a container for race-shifter claims to indigeneity in the United States due to the tribe’s history of exogamy (out-marriage) and cultural adaptation.4 The claims below certainly call into question the legitimacy of self-indigenization and/or race shifting, especially in its disregard for, even opposition to, both past and existing forms of Indigenous identity based in kinship and citizenship.

Much of the upcoming analytical work is empirically based and, as such, focuses on the detailed mechanics of race shifting: not only do I focus on the broad arguments mobilized to claim an Indigenous identity, but I also identify the specific (Indigenous women) ancestors who are at the basis of these newfound claims.

In this moment, when individual self-fashioning is given primacy over social and political analysis, it has become common to accept self-identification as the main determinant of one’s social identity. The next three chapters push back against self-identification as a primary mode of self-making, by casting a gaze on the social organization of self-identification on online genealogy forums. As Kramer has argued, reading genealogy as a “technology of belonging” allows us to be attentive to the labour that goes into making relations through the practice of genealogy.5

SETTING THE STAGE: FIVE KEY GENEALOGY FORUMS

Going forward, I examine several of the highest-profile and most-used online genealogy forums aimed at French descendants, as well as a couple of additional forums that emerged in preliminary research. Without a doubt, the Généalogie du Québec et d’Amérique française (GQAF) website is the most far-reaching of these sites. By mid-2017, the GQAF forum included well over 500 pages of material, representing more than 5,500 individual threads going back to 2007, each started by a site member with a single post. As with all forums that I encountered, one can become a contributing member of the GQAF forum by signing up for a free account, though one can read the publicly archived threads without being a member. In the period from July 2015 to July 2017, each thread included on average four replies, though a significant minority of posts (between 5 and 10 percent) received no replies, while others (again, 5 to 10 percent) received a dozen or more replies. All threads garnered at least a few readers, though the average number of views per thread numbers in the range of 300 to 400. Threads devoted to Indigenous identity and ancestry or indigeneity more broadly make up a small minority (1 to 2 percent) of the threads in the forum, but they attract significantly more replies and views than is the norm on the site. It is not uncommon for a year-old thread on indigeneity or Indigenous identity/ancestry to attract upwards of 1,000 views. Along with its forum, the GQAF website hosts one of the most in-depth and easily accessible French-descendant genealogy databases on the Web, which no doubt drives much of the traffic to the forum. The database contains hundreds of thousands of entries based primarily on information from marriage, birth, and death registries. It covers a period stretching from the first French colonist born in Quebec City in 1620—Hélène Desportes, who is my direct ancestor ...