{"id":59343,"date":"2019-12-29T02:46:08","date_gmt":"2019-12-29T02:46:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=59343"},"modified":"2019-12-29T02:46:33","modified_gmt":"2019-12-29T02:46:33","slug":"race-shifters-white-people-who-identify-as-indigenous-nb-media-co-op","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=59343","title":{"rendered":"Race-shifters: white people who identify as Indigenous NB Media Co-op"},"content":{"rendered":"

Race-shifters: white people who identify as Indigenous<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

NB Media Co-op<\/a>
\nFredericton, New Brunswick, Canada
\n2019-11-22<\/p>\n

Susan O’Donnell<\/strong><\/a>, Adjunct Professor of Sociology
\nUniversity of New Brunswick<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"Race-shifters:<\/a>
\nSportsman and Indigenous guides (carrying snowshoes), with game in winter. Gabe Atwin far left, ca. 1875. Image from the Provincial Archives of NB.<\/em><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

The number of people across Canada<\/a> who self-identify as Indigenous is growing rapidly. Some of that growth can be explained by the Indigenous children of the Sixties Scoop<\/a> and residential school survivors re-discovering or accepting their Indigenous identities. However an entirely different group of Canadians has emerged. \u201cRace-shifters<\/a>\u201d are white people with no or a small amount of Indigenous ancestry who identify as Indigenous.<\/p>\n

Race-shifters live in every province, mostly in communities with large populations of French ancestry. In this province, for example, in 1996 and 2016, the population of New Brunswick<\/a> was roughly the same. However in the 1996 census, only 950 people self-identified as M\u00e9tis<\/a>, but in the 2016 census that number jumped to 10,200. How is this possible?<\/p>\n

The confusion includes the misconception that anyone with Indigenous ancestry can call themselves M\u00e9tis. On the contrary, \u201cM\u00e9tis\u201d has a specific definition in Canadian law. In 2003 the Supreme Court Powley decision<\/a> described a M\u00e9tis person as \u201cone who self-identifies, has an ancestral connection to a historic M\u00e9tis community, and is accepted by that community.\u201d Anyone can self-identify as \u201cM\u00e9tis\u201d when answering a census question, but not everyone of them is a member of the historic M\u00e9tis Nation that originated in the Red River Valley<\/a> of Manitoba<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Darryl Leroux<\/a> has been exploring the race-shifting<\/a> phenomenon for more than two decades. The social scientist from St. Mary\u2019s University was in Fredericton<\/a> Nov. 20 to speak about the process he has called \u201cwhite settler revisionism,\u201d a new wave of colonialism and to launch his new book, Distorted Descent: White Claims to Indigenous Identity<\/em><\/a> published by the University of Manitoba Press<\/a>…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The number of people across Canada who self-identify as Indigenous is growing rapidly. Some of that growth can be explained by the Indigenous children of the Sixties Scoop and residential school survivors re-discovering or accepting their Indigenous identities. However an entirely different group of Canadians has emerged.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,19,459,8,3015,6462,26,394],"tags":[27642,30581,9463,30580],"class_list":["post-59343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-canada","category-history","category-media-archive","category-native-americans","category-passing-2","category-politics","category-socialscience","tag-darryl-leroux","tag-nb-media-co-op","tag-new-brunswick","tag-susan-odonnell"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=59343"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59343\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59345,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59343\/revisions\/59345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}