Distorted Descent: White Claims to Indigenous Identity

Abstract

Darryl Leroux’s Distorted Descent provides a fascinating glimpse into the broader colonial structural issues at play in what he calls the “race-shifting” or “self-Indigenization” phenomenon that has taken hold over the last decade or so in the United States and Canada. Leroux spends the majority of the book focused on white settlers of French descent in various communities across eastern Canada and the United States, breaking down the methods and justifications they use to craft a contemporary Indigenous identity. For the most part, Leroux’s focus is on white people who either claim Métis identity using genealogical methods that connect them to an Indigenous (usually First Nations) relative as far back as twelve generations or claim Indigeneity for a distant non-Indigenous relative. It is important that Leroux distinguishes between white settlers claiming Indigenous heritage when there is none to be found and Indigenous people struggling to reconnect to communities after US and Canadian assimilationist policies and institutions, such as the “sixties scoop” and residential/boarding schools, severed ties.Leroux’s intensive research into online French genealogy message boards yields a series of patterns through which white settlers make fraudulent claims to Indigeneity. Distorted Descent offers names for these patterns; for example, settlers using an Indigenous relative three hundred years in the past are manufacturing Indigeneity through “lineal” descent. Settlers attempting to claim Indigeneity by rewriting a distant settler relative as Indigenous do so through “aspirational” descent.Much of the book serves as a well-researched and astutely historical critique of settler focus on blood quantum and generational cut-offs as sole indicators of Indigeneity. It traces the ways in which settler concepts of genetics have been used to erase Indigeneity and claims to territory in both Canada and the United States. Importantly, blood quantum models of determining Indigeneity have served to undermine Indigenous systems of kinship, and this trend continues in the recent upswing in white claims to Indigenous identity. Leroux draws on the work of esteemed Métis scholars Chris Andersen and Brenda Macdougall, for example, to outline how settler ideas of Indigeneity have ignored structures of kinship and claiming in the Métis nation, actively threatening Métis sovereignty as a result.The crucial part of Leroux’s argument is not in his study and description of the phenomenon itself but in his framing of race shifting and the self-Indigenization movement as part of broader patriarchal white supremacist structures of colonial dispossession, even beyond Leroux’s identification of the roots of many of these so-called Indigenous groups in white supremacist organizations. In claiming a false Indigenous identity, many settlers have used their invented status to actively undermine and dispossess living Indigenous groups. Leroux brilliantly frames this as “[facilitating] white futurity in response to conventional reconciliation frameworks” (219). Leroux places this “new” phenomenon in context, thus presenting it as a continuation of centuries of colonial oppression—just with a different face.It is important to note that Leroux is not a historian—his roots in sociology and anthropology are clear in this book—but it is precisely the importance of a historical framing of many of the topics in Distorted Descent to which I would like to turn. While most of the book is dedicated to white settlers claiming Métis identity, there are sections where Leroux discusses settler claims to First Nations/Native American identities for similar purposes. The quick shift between two very different groups of Indigenous peoples at points throughout the book—the individuality of single nations aside—risks conflation of unique circumstances and historical and contemporary relationships with colonial power. Various nations and Indigenous groups have different practices of kinship and claiming that get lost in Leroux’s contemporary analysis of the issue and heavier focus on fake Métis claims without making the book solely about claims to Métis identity.While the book does talk about some differences between assimilation policies in the United States and Canada, it misses an opportunity to look at how historical differences between Indigenous relationships with US and Canadian settler states in place impact the kinds of rhetoric used to dispossess Indigenous peoples and how settler recognition—and de-recognition—are shaped by these contexts. These factors need to be considered when discussing issues of fake claims to Indigeneity, particularly in the northeastern United States, where there is a much longer history of colonial dispossession than in western regions. Indigenous nations like the Mashpee Wampanoag, for example, have continued to struggle for federal recognition in the face of a centuries-long attack on their sovereignty and claim to their home territory. While there are indeed white settlers taking advantage of this, the conversation is a great deal more nuanced than the scope of this book could address.Overall, Distorted Descent joins the ranks of important works, such as those of Kim Tallbear, about colonial attempts to control Indigeneity, and it will inform what will no doubt remain a robust and crucial conversation in this contemporary moment.