04/22/2026
Canadian Journal of Political Science (2023), 1–6
doi:10.1017/S0008423923000239
The Pretendian Problem
Jessica Kolopenuk
Department of Family Medicine, Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, and Faculty of Native Studies,
University of Alberta, 1-36 Pembina Hall, Edmonton, AB T6G 2H8, Canada
Email: [email protected]
Abstract
Pretendianism is a problem in academia (and of whiteness). Its long-standing existence is
well researched and analyzed in the academic record, and it has been brought to wider
audiences through news and social media. In response, task forces, committees and advi-
sory councils are being created in universities to determine stronger identity validation
policies, with emphasis on engaging relationships with local Indigenous nations, commu-
nities, elders, and knowledge holders. Policy making, including processes and procedures
of identity validation, will be a powerful apparatus going forward to administer indigene-
ity in universities. This approach will also lead to the intensification of Indigenous
definition and regulation by predominantly non-Indigenous institutions. This article pro-
poses a set of complementary extrapolicy practices addressing pretendianism worth
exploring and that emerge from the everyday embodied vantage points of Indigenous
academics. We must (continue to) name whiteness, model Indigenous relationality and
learn from Indigenous women’s leadership.
Résumé
Le prétendianisme est un problème dans le monde universitaire (et de la blanchité). Son exis-
tence de longue date a fait l’objet de recherches et d’analyses approfondies dans les
antécédents universitaires et a été portée à la connaissance d’un public plus large par le
biais de l’actualité et des médias sociaux. Pour y répondre, des groupes de travail, des
comités et des conseils consultatifs sont créés dans les universités afin de définir des politi-
ques de validation de l’identité plus solides, en mettant l’accent sur l’établissement de rela-
tions avec les nations, les communautés, les anciens et les détenteurs de savoirs.
L’élaboration de politiques, y compris les processus et les procédures de validation de
l’identité, sera un outil puissant pour administrer l’indigénéité dans les universités. Cette
approche conduira également à l’intensification de la définition et de la réglementation de
l’indigénat par des institutions majoritairement non autochtones. Cet article propose un
ensemble de pratiques extra-politiques complémentaires pour lutter contre le
prétendianisme, qui méritent d’être explorées et qui émergent des points de vue quotidiens
et incarnés des universitaires indigènes. Nous devons (continuer à) nommer la blanchité,
modéliser la relationnalité autochtone et apprendre du leadership des femmes autochtones.
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Canadian Political Science Association
(l’Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique. This is an Open Access article,
distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/),
which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423923000239 Published online by Cambridge University Press
2 Jessica Kolopenuk
Keywords: Indigenous peoples; pretendians; academia; university policy; whiteness
Mots-clés : peuples autochtones ; prétendus Indiens ; monde universitaire ; politique universitaire ; blanchité
Pretendianism is a problem in academia (and of whiteness). The long-standing
existence of playing Indian, race-shifting, self-indigenizing, and fraudulent identity-
claiming is well researched in the academic record (Andersen, 2014; Deloria, 1995;
Gaudry and Andersen, 2016; Leroux, 2019; Moreton-Robinson, 2021; Pewewardy,
2004; Sturm, 2011; TallBear, 2022). It has also been brought to the attention of
wider audiences through news outlets and by having incidents shared on social
media. Some of the harms of pretendianism include the misappropriation of
resources earmarked for Indigenous students and researchers and the promotion
of harmful stereotypes and other misrepresentations about indigeneity by those
without lived experience. Indigenous women, including the Indigenous Women’
s
Collective (IWC) and the Indigenous Women Scholars (IWS) group, have been
leaders in addressing pretendianism. For example, in 2015, the IWS published an
article in Indian Country Today identifying Andrea Smith as a pretendian and
how she was invited to address her false identity claim. The disavowal of preten-
dians like Smith did not get taken up broadly in 2015 but gained more attention
when the New York Times published a 2021 feature exposé on the issue.
Universities are responding to the pretendian problem by forming institutional
bodies and developing identity validation policies that emphasize documentation.
As well as assessing this policy-oriented response, I want to foreground three com-
plementary practices available for Indigenous academics to also address the preten-
dian problem: naming whiteness, modelling Indigenous relationality and learning
from Indigenous women’s leadership. To explore these practices, I draw on an
auto-ethnographic case study in which, in a recent experience, it was suggested
that I am not from the First Nation I claim and how I (and my relatives) addressed
the situation.
In 2022, the National Indigenous Identity Forum (NIIF) produced Indigenous
Voices on Indigenous Identity. The report has become an orienting document for
institutions grappling with the pretendian problem. It defines a pretendian as
“[a] person who falsely claims to have Indigenous ancestry, who fakes an
Indigenous identity, or who digs up an old ancestor from hundreds of years ago
to proclaim themselves as Indigenous” (NIIF, 2022: 4). Pretendians, in this defini-
tion, include flat-out fakes and those with distant ancestry claims. It follows that the
pretendian problem is not about establishing degrees of Indigenous authenticity but
about whether one’s Indigenous relationality (continues to) exist(s). The need to
address the problem is, therefore, linked to the collective concerns of Indigenous
peoples around caretaking our relatives, governing Indigenous relationality and
struggling against colonialism.
Yet the pretendian problem has become framed as a policy issue among
Canadian universities. Indigenous expert committees are being established, identity
validation guidelines are being constructed, collective agreement policies are being
reconsidered, and reprimands for fraudulent identity claims are being discussed
(NIIF, 2022: 6). Task forces, committees and advisory councils are being created
in universities to determine stronger identity validation policies, with emphasis
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423923000239 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Canadian Journal of Political Science 3
on engaging relationships with local Indigenous nations, communities, elders, and
knowledge holders. Organizational statements denouncing pretendianism, such as
the one made in 2015 by the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association
(NAISA, 2015), are no longer (if they ever were) considered adequate in addressing
the problem. Going forward, policy making will be a powerful apparatus to admin-
ister indigeneity in universities. This approach, even as it is Indigenous-led, will also
lead to the intensification of Indigenous regulation by predominantly
non-Indigenous institutions.
Not lost on many Indigenous scholars is that the policy-based approach in
Canada, in some measure, echoes the biopolitical logic of colonial governance
established through the Indian Act, which administered the historic“Indian prob-
lem.” The growing hyperawareness of indigeneity in universities makes sense, given
that as biotechnologies shift to bring smaller, farther and unseen realities into sci-
entific view, technologies and techniques of governance also become refined to see
bodies and populations on intensified scales. Indigenous scholars and students have
been left wondering if our now Indigenous-led biopolitics (if it can be called that)
will be an effective approach to quell the menacing force of pretendianism in aca-
demia. We hope that it is.
Drawing on a personal case study, I explore a set of extrapolicy practices to address
pretendianism. In 2021, the university that employs me made a Facebook post includ-
ing a link to a story regarding an award I had won. Among the positive comments
made to the post from colleagues and family members was one made by someone
who is presumably from the First Nation I claim. It reads:
She’s not from here and we’ve never heard of her.
A university staff member made me aware of the comment and offered to delete
it, but I urged them not to. I responded (I’ve replaced names with—— to respect
anonymity):
Hi——. Thanks for your comment. With the presence of so many pretendians
in academia, it’s important for Indigenous scholars to be transparent about
who they are and what families they come from especially when questions
and concerns like yours are raised. I’m a status Indian registered with
Peguis, but more importantly, I’m a McCorrister and Spence. My late grand-
mother is—— McCorrister. I am bear clan and received my names, colours,
and clan in ceremony with—— ——. I did not grow up on reserve, but I can
assure you that while you and others may not know me, my family surely does.
It looks like you are even FB friends with two of my relatives—— and——
Some (not all) of my other relatives who are on FB include——
,——
,——
,
——
,——
,——
,——
,——
,——
,——
,——, and——. Thanks again for your
comment and all the best.
In addition to my legal recognition, the post emphasizes my kinship relational-
ity, including my clan and relatives. My cousins and aunties, tagged in the post,
joined the thread in claiming their connection to and support of me. The individual
who made the initial accusation privately messaged to apologize for their comment
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423923000239 Published online by Cambridge University Press
4 Jessica Kolopenuk
and encouraged me to continue working in service of our people. The entire pro-
cess of validation was community initiated, discussed and clarified. Being accused
of not being claimed by those you claim is not an indictment. It is an invitation.
This case study is instructive because I am an Indigenous person who, like many,
did not grow up on reserve and is multigenerationally dispossessed through previ-
ous Indian Act registration rules, residential schooling and the Sixties Scoop; but I
am not disconnected. Stories about disconnection and family dysfunction caused
by colonial policy tend to animate pretendian lore. However, despite colonial pol-
icies, my family, again like many, has always maintained our relationship to our
family on and off reserve, to our territory and to our nation. My experience attests
that you can be dispossessed and still connected through ongoing Indigenous rela-
tions beyond vapid ancestry claims alone. I make this assertion by also speaking
directly to the experience of being a white-looking Indigenous person who takes
seriously the responsibility of exposing whiteness as a system of power that condi-
tions the possibility of pretendianism in academia.
Pretendians account for some of the white-looking“Indigenous people” in uni-
versities, but we must also acknowledge that real Indigenous people who look white
make up a large proportion of Indigenous academics—and that collectively, we pro-
duce knowledge about indigeneity from this standpoint. White-looking Indigenous
people experience the violence of colonial dispossession (as all Indigenous people
do) while also experiencing effects of white privilege in daily interactions with indi-
viduals and institutions. The complexity of this embodiment is dizzying but none-
theless real and in need of further analysis. After all, which characteristics, if not
ones connected to whiteness, enable individuals and families to“hide in plain
sight,” as is so often argued by pretendians and some real Indigenous people?
We must begin analyzing the densities of whiteness.
The density (Andersen, 2009), immediacy (Hokowhitu, 2009), embodiment
(Moreton-Robinson, 2015) and relations (TallBear, 2018) of my indigeneity/white-
ness mean that I simultaneously experience dispossession and privilege—an unde-
served penalty and an unearned benefit—both ontologically linked to colonial dis/
possession. I raise this experience to speak to instances where white-looking
Indigenous people in Canada describe being victims because their physical appear-
ance makes them feel less Indigenous (Cyca, 2022). I do not deny the existence of
internalized racial hierarchies and lateral violence between Indigenous people—I
have experienced them myself—but I reframe the dynamic of being Indigenous
and looking white by talking about the responsibility we have in addressing the pre-
tendian problem from this positionality.
One might feel defensive when their indigeneity is questioned—a feeling I had
initially in the above case (because of its groundlessness) but which I suggest
needs to be processed and dispelled quickly. Making false or unsubstantiated accu-
sations about an individual’s indigeneity is not consistent with Indigenous gover-
nance and relationality on the northern prairies from which I originate. But
when this happens, it is indicative of the broader field of colonial power in
which whiteness has become relationally productive of indigeneity. The possibility
of pretendianism is conditioned by the Indian problem—itself a product of white-
ness and legal and discursive relations of colonial power. The production and re/
iteration of indigeneity as a rights-bearing subjectivity and the incumbent property
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423923000239 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Canadian Journal of Political Science 5
interest of its possessors have made its appropriation possible. Indigenous people-
hoods that predate colonialism are illegible but sensed by technologies of colonial
governance, and so partly remade in the ontological image of whiteness. Naming
and analyzing whiteness as a system of power that limits and contorts
Indigenous peoplehoods will do more for collective anticolonial pursuits than
will vilifying our own people who invite us to prove our relations. Indigenous
women have especially been role models in asking for peer accountability in acade-
mia, just as Indigenous women have been vital in making Indigenous identification
policies such as Indian Act registration less discriminatory.
While questions about one’s relations is an appropriate practice, remaining silent
when false accusations or genuine questions arise results in missed opportunities to
model the richness and diversity of what real Indigenous relationality looks like
locally. We also deny the everyday governance of our community-based practices
of validation to take place (even if it is on Facebook) and leave official authority
to institutional policies that define and regulate us. If insecurity in one’s indigeneity
results in one’s silence or in the defence of pretendians, then white-looking (real)
Indigenous academics risk reproducing the precondition of pretendianism—the
system of whiteness that produced Indianness as a matter of racial rather than rela-
tional identity. Staying quiet will not address the pretendian problem; it will allow it
to thrive and, in doing so, will contribute to the backlash against Indigenous
women who have led efforts to defend Indigenous relationalities on multiple fronts.
Competing interests. The author declares none.
The Pretendian Problem - Volume 56 Issue 2
