Canuck Pretendian shocked to learn truth about himself

Looks like the US of A isn't the only country where Pretendians (e.g. Senator Elizabeth Warren) rise to lofty heights, only to fall with a thud when they are outed as being, errr... white. Canada has them too, and has had them for at least a century, going back to the time of Grey Owl, shown at left in a portrait by Yousuf Karsh.

Grey Owl, was a popular Canadian writer, public speaker and conservationist. Born an Englishman, he immigrated to Canada and, in the latter years of his life, passed as half-Indian, falsely claiming he was the son of a Scottish man and an Apache woman. He achieved fame in the 1930s with books, articles and public appearances promoting wilderness conservation. Shortly after his death in 1938, his real identity -- Archibald Stansfeld Belaney -- was exposed. He was one of the first Pretendians.

Fast foward to this weekend, when celebrated Canadian author Thomas King told the meeja that he was shocked, shocked to find out that, despite believing so nearly all his life, he is not an Indian Indigenous First Nations person. 

Like Mr Belaney, Mr King wrote books about Indians, including The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative and The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America. Now, in a piece for the Groan & Wail [Globe & Mail, shurely. Ed.] titled "A most inconvenient Indian", the California born author says he learned of rumours several years ago that questioned his heritage. 

Mr King says he made a concerted effort this year to find their origin, which brought him to an American organization called Tribal Alliance Against Frauds, which investigated his past with help from a University of British Columbia scholar, and found no Cherokee heritage. 

Mr King writes that he did not purposefully pretend to have Indigenous roots. His father left the family when he was only 3, he says, and his mother rarely spoke of the man but said he was part Cherokee. King says the revelation a couple of weeks ago was "so very devastating, though 'devastating' is too pedestrian a word. At 82, I feel as though I’ve been ripped in half, a one-legged man in a two-legged story. Not the Indian I had in mind. Not an Indian at all."

Well, I'll take his word for it, as long as he promises never again to read out the Stolen Land Acknowledgment which is now de rigueur at all public events and ceremonies in the Great No-longer-white North.