From "Exotic" to "Cancelled" In Ten Seconds

She lied about a crafted identity from which she could obtain fame and privilege (as well as money). If the "cancel culture" has gone too far, so has the "noble savage" identity, the Totem Pole of the Oppressed and other tribal affections that were tiresome before and tiresome now:

I’d signed up for AncestryDNA as an impulse buy, with no particular agenda. But in retrospect, it turns out Kim and I were ahead of our time. As Canadian filmmaker Michelle Latimer recently found out, this kind of information can now make or break your career.

Last week, Latimer announced her resignation as director of “Trickster,” a CBC drama based on an Eden Robinson novel about an Indigenous teenager who channels supernatural figures from Haisla mythology. When Latimer originally secured National Film Board (NFB) funding, she’d indicated she was of “Algonquin, Métis and French heritage” — information she’d sourced to her own family lore. But a CBC investigation found that Latimer’s Indigenous heritage is limited to two 17th-century ancestors. Nowhere in the annals of the Canadian arts establishment is it definitively specified what DNA fraction one must possess to claim Indigenous status — a quarter, an eighth, a sixteenth. But whatever that standard may be, Latimer apparently doesn’t meet it, which is why this former darling of Indigenous film and television has been well and truly cancelled. ...

Latimer isn’t alone. If you look down cancel culture’s Canadian victim roster, you’ll find a surprising number of card-carrying progressives who’ve dedicated much of their careers to Indigenous storytelling. Joseph Boyden supplies the most well-known example. But there’s also cancelled Governor General’s Award winning writer Gwen Benaway (who may or may not be Indigenous, depending on who you ask); vocalist Connie LeGrande (who is Cree, but got targeted for intra-Indigenous cancellation in 2019 anyway, on the innovative theory that First Nations shouldn’t be allowed to apply Inuit throat-singing techniques); and partly Mi’kmaq poet Shannon Webb Campbell (whose book was pulped in 2018 when relatives of the Indigenous women she’d written about complained to her publisher). And then there’s Steven Galloway, who was originally cancelled on the basis of false accusations of sexual assault at the University of British Columbia, but then was further targeted with the (equally false) claim that he’d cynically weaponized his Indigenous roots to claim victim status. At Canadian Art magazine, meanwhile, an Indigenous writer tried to cancel Cree artist Kent Monkman, on the basis that his blockbuster success with a white international audience constitutes proof that he’s betrayed his ancestry. Even long-time CBC contributor Jesse Wente, who just became the Canada Council for the Arts’ first Indigenous chairperson, is under fire for failing to snuff out Latimer’s race deception when he was warned of it back in August — or as one angry Twitter user put it last week, “ass-kissing and gate-keeping on behalf of the white man’s Indian princess, aka Michelle Latimer.” ...

This is hardly the first time that our cultural institutions have been captured by an unrepresentative clique of ideologically incestuous cultural grandees. For most of my life, in fact, Canadian cultural life was dominated by small cliques of Ontario WASPs whose antiquated conception of Canada centred on men in red serge, rugged Arctic landscapes, long canoe trips, big furry animals, sentimental hockey reveries, the cod fishery, the Plains of Abraham, socialized medicine and the monarchy. Even by the late 20th century, this had become a dull and dated vision of our country — a sentimental pastiche with little relevance to an increasingly urban and multicultural country. And so it shouldn’t have surprised us that when progressives made a dedicated push to redefine our national soul, they encountered little resistance.

The alternative vision of our country that has now become ascendant within progressive circles (the arts, in particular) has little to do with Group of Seven paintings or the Canadian Pacific Railroad. Instead, it casts Canada as a genocidal colonial state existing in an ongoing condition of original sin. This national vision is nihilistic and bleak, and has little support among ordinary Canadians. But it does at least offer its adherents a heroic subplot, by which Indigenous peoples (artists and writers, in particular) are celebrated as a priestly caste of moral savants who shall confer grace upon the rest of us. And even a boring old settler like me has to admit that’s a lot more exciting than a CBC documentary about Lawren Harris freezing his ass off on Mount Robson.

 

Why?

Because fanciful delusions are a lot more uplifting and ingratiating than cold, hard or even mundane truths.

Typically Canadian. Pretense is a diversion from comforting but now toxic dullness.