On March 7, Memorial University of Newfoundland president Vianne Timmons published a statement about her ancestry. In it, she wrote, “I am not Mi’kmaq. I am not Indigenous. I did not grow up in an Indigenous community.” But this wasn’t a confession or an apology. Though Timmons had said for years that she had Mi’kmaw ancestry, and though she had previously identified as a member of the Bras d’Or Mi’kmaq First Nation in Nova Scotia, she wrote that she had never made a false claim to Indigenous identity.
The motivation behind her statement became clear the next day, when the CBC published a detailed investigation of her ancestry. Timmons is not the first public figure whose claim to Indigenous ancestry has lately come under scrutiny. Since Giller Prize–winning author Joseph Boyden made headlines for his shifting identity claims in 2016, similar stories have emerged with disturbing regularity, though no two are exactly the same. Timmons’s story represents an increasingly popular North American pastime: grasping at the furthest branches of a family tree in search of an Indigenous ancestor. And in the ambiguous zone between Indigenous citizenship and Indigenous ancestry, from where Timmons drew her personal and professional identity, a crisis of disinformation is taking root.
