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A leading researcher on Indigenous identity fraud has been ordered to pay damages and legal fees in a defamation suit filed by a University of Regina academic.
Plaintiff Michelle Coupal says Darryl Leroux defamed her when publicly stating she used a false Indigenous identity to become an expert in reconciliation.
According to the decision, Coupal began identifying as Indigenous in 2010 based on a belief that she had an Algonquin ancestor from the early 1800s. She was initially accepted by the Algonquin nation.
In 2018 she was appointed Canada Research Chair in Truth and Reconciliation and Indigenous Literatures.
In a 2023 purge, the Algonquin Nation removed Thomas Legarde from their root ancestor list, saying the man was French and wrongly identified as Algonquin. Coupal and more than a thousand others lost him as their link to the nation.
In his March 11 ruling, Judge D.E. Labach found Coupal didn’t maliciously claim indigeneity — she believed it to be true.
Coupal declined to be interviewed. Her lawyer, Paul Harasen, said in a statement, “Leroux was not found liable because of his statements that (Coupal) isn’t Indigenous. He was found liable because he went much further and repeatedly stated that she committed fraud. Those are two very different things.”
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Leroux also declined to be interview. His lawyer, Yavar Hameed, said in a statement, “the court’s decision did not focus on the evidence of whether Coupal is an Indigenous person. Instead, it based its conclusions on whether the plaintiff subjectively felt that she was Métis, and then later Algonquin, at various points in time in her academic career, based on things she understood or was told,” adding, “the public discourse around the appropriation of Indigenous identity by non-Indigenous people is important and Leroux plans to appeal the ruling.”
Veldon Coburn is a citizen of the Algonquins of Pikwàkanagàn First Nation and a professor whose research focuses on Indigenous identity politics, Canadian–Indigenous relations and settler colonialism.
“There is a lot to be left desired in terms of the court’s relationship with understanding Indigenous peoples,” says Coburn, who filed an affidavit for the defence and has worked alongside Leroux.
“I wouldn’t invest a lot political capital into this particular decision. A higher court can rule on the law of it.”
Michelle Good is a retired lawyer from Red Pheasant Cree Nation who says non-Indigenous people working in Indigenous roles without lived experience as an Indigenous person is harmful.
“Large numbers of people are trying identify themselves as Indian bands to be able to participate in treaty discussions that are beneficial to them and them alone,” says Good.
“It threatens to, in effect, remove the basic meaning of indigeneity. It’s another form of assimilation.”
She says an appeal of the ruling is possible but not easy.
“What you need to find is an error of law or an error in fact,” Good says.
She along with many top scholars are currently working on a book called The Pretendian Compendium; The Complex Phenomenon of Indigenous Identity Fraud, set to be released in 2027.
Leroux has testified as an expert in Indigenous identity fraud before the Standing Committee on Indigenous and Northern Affairs and authored Distorted Descent, exploring the phenomenon of white people race-shifting to a self-defined Indigenous identity.
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