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It’s been almost a quarter century since the Supreme Court of Canada told us that Indigenous oral traditions must be considered “on an equal footing” with other types of historical evidence. Alas, as the attack on famed Canadian filmmaker Michelle Latimer shows, the CBC still hasn’t gotten that memo. Thus does it fall to me to pour my emotional labour into educating the cultural reactionaries who staff our national broadcaster.
As a genealogical investigation performed by two university professors has now confirmed, Latimer traces her Indigenous ancestry, through both maternal and paternal grandparents, to an area of western Quebec that has long been home to Algonquin and Métis communities. The 1927 flooding of that region (known as Baskatong) generated diaspora groups whose histories we can piece together through evidentiary fragments. This kind of example shows why even imperfect family accounts, such as those that Latimer learned at home as a child, are
Michelle Latimer, right, is a Canadian woman who has won awards for her documentary,
Inconvenient Indian before people started to questions whether she was really, even partially, of Canadian Indian descent, as her grandfather had told her she was.
Her grandfather had used the term Métis
, which is French for mixed and is the same thing as the Mexican term
mestizo.
When people started to question this, she apologized for not confirming her ancestry. a mistake. As Vox Day points out in his book
never do this. Her fil, which seems to be the usual anti-white propaganda was set to have its international premiere at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, but was indefinitely pulled from distribution by the National Film Board of Canada while Latimer s identity is investigated according to WikiPedia.