All Colonizers Are BastardsLook, I genuinely like Darryl Leroux. And I absolutely appreciate his sense of responsibility as someone who previously claimed Indigeneity for the very same reasons he now researches. He is not the first white dude academic doing Indigenous Studies work to be put through a legal process like this. But it IS his responsibility. I don’t always agree with him (altho I do with this situation lol), but that’s some accomplice shit he’s doing taking this hit as far as I’m concerned.
I know a lot of the Métis and (occasionally) First Nations academics who initially took point on the public ethnic fraud conversation many years ago with the various “eastern Métis groups,” Andrea Smith, etc. an holy shit the amount of hate and harassment they were getting was unbelievable. Death threats, human rights complaints, attempts to shut down talks. Hell, first time I ever saw Darryl was at the talk that landed him in Project Sitka and it was NOT radical material. Just early research.
Anyway, the Indigenous academics speaking publicly on it, and the women in particular of course, were getting the most frequent and intense shit, and people frankly were harassed out of speaking about ethnic fraud in any public way, sometimes out of doing public intellectual work entirely.
I can’t recall for sure if there was an explicit conversation in which it was agreed that Darryl would take this on bc he’s a white settler man, but that was certainly the understanding.
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