On September 30th CBC’s The Passionate Eye released a 45-minute documentary titled The Pretendians. The documentary about Indigenous identity tackles complex topics such as who has the right to consider themselves Indigenous. The documentary focuses on how people such as university professors such as Carrie Bourassa from the University of Saskatchewan or Robert Lovelace from Queen’s University have come under intense scrutiny for faking an Indigenous identity. The documentary discusses the issue of being able to claim that you are Metis just because you have “mixed blood”; you must be connected to the historic settlement, culture, and language.
The documentary provides three reasons why they see a mass increase in people trying to claim to be status Indians.
- The 1999 Marshall Decision granted hunting and fishing rights to Indigenous people.
- White-Settler Guilt – More settlers are trying to distance themselves from their ancestors because of their prior treatment of Indigenous people resulting in settlers now “siding with Indigenous peoples.”
- To access the benefits and rights for Indigenous peoples
The documentary tackles issues such as blood quantum and “How much Indigenous blood is enough to claim Indigeneity.” As well as looking at Indigenous Art and if Indigenous artists are the ones benefiting from Indigenous Art. It was stated that 75% of shops in the Gastown neighbourhood in Vancouver sold inauthentic forms of Indigenous art.
This documentary pertains to my final project because it focuses on using technology to preserve local Indigenous knowledge. The documentary reinforces the idea of students (or anyone for that matter) to be critical of not only the media they are consuming but the people they are gaining the information, even when we think that information could be coming from a reliable source.
https://gem.cbc.ca/media/the-passionate-eye/s02e03
