Jani Lauzon’s list of accolades is long. As a playwright, she has written and starred in many acclaimed plays with Indigenous themes; co-founded an Indigenous women’s theatre collective; founded a production company that has produced plays centred on Indigenous stories and histories; and served as co-chair of the Indigenous Advisory Circle at Canada’s prestigious National Theatre School. As a musician, she has been nominated twice for what is now called Indigenous Artist or Group of the Year category at the Juno Awards, as well as for a Canadian Aboriginal Music Award. For more than three decades, she claimed to be Métis.
But contributing writer Michelle Cyca’s recent investigation in The Walrus questioned both that personal claim as well as her assertion that her play 1939—about a fictional residential school that puts on a Shakespeare performance—was partly inspired by her father’s purported experience at a residential school where she has said he studied Shakespeare. The investigation revealed serious and concerning holes in both of these stories.
I spoke with Cyca to learn about the responses to the article and the impact of these kinds of investigations.
You have reported on Indigenous identity theft—or pretendianism—before. What drew you to investigate this case?
There have been a lot of stories about high-profile people accused of pretendianism in the media in recent years—author Joseph Boyden, director Michelle Latimer, musician Buffy Sainte-Marie, and recently politician Randy Boissonnault. But I think it might surprise people to know that these are just the tip of a massive iceberg. Métis retired lawyer and author Jean Teillet has estimated that tens of thousands of people in Canada are falsely claiming Indigenous identities. And as someone who covers this topic, I get a lot of tips in my inbox about alleged pretendians. But many of them are tough to investigate: the claims are vague and nonspecific, the individual does not have much of a public profile or a record of their public claims, or it’s not clear whether they have leveraged those claims for power or profit—which to me is the key piece of whether someone’s belief about their Indigenous identity meets the bar for investigation.
With Jani Lauzon, I could see from a few quick Google searches that she had many, many public statements about her identity, and I could also see that she had carved out a niche for herself in the Canadian theatre world as an Indigenous performer, director, and writer. But what really interested me was her depiction of residential schools, and how it reflected what she claimed as a family history with one of these institutions. Residential school denialism is a growing issue in Canada, and I felt like it was worth digging into whether the history of these institutions was being misrepresented in a dangerous way.
At the beginning of your reporting, you reached out to Lauzon to see if she would be open to an interview. You were surprised that she responded with several lengthy emails. Why were you surprised?
Often the person at the centre of a pretendian investigation will decline to speak with the media—Buffy Sainte-Marie and Randy Boissonault both declined; Gina Adams, the artist I investigated a few years ago for Maclean’s, never responded to my calls or emails. I would say that a lot of public figures are hesitant to speak directly with journalists, particularly when they are the subject of an investigation into a topic as controversial and sensitive as Indigenous identity fraud.
But Lauzon got back to me pretty quickly, and she did respond to all of my questions at length. That made me think, initially, that she might be open to setting the record straight or offering some kind of apology for misrepresenting herself—but ultimately, she has chosen to double down on her claimed connections to Indigenous identity and the intergenerational legacy of residential schools.
Lauzon told you that she spent decades trying to confirm her Indigenous ancestry, which she says is through her father’s side. It took you a few days to confirm her ancestry, which, going back five generations, was French Canadian on her father’s side.
As is often the case in these investigations, I wasn’t the first person to be curious about Lauzon. Other people had already raised suspicions about her claims, and a source with significant experience researching genealogy had already put together her family tree, which they shared with me. French Canadian families are exceptionally well-documented, and records go all the way back to the 1600’s; you can search them using websites like NosOrigines. So it’s usually possible to reconstruct several generations of recorded ancestry without a lot of effort; in Lauzon’s case, it was easy to find the names and other pieces of information about her parents through things she’s posted online, and because I knew her dad was from Kimberley, I was able to find information about his parents through a pretty basic online search. I searched newspaper archives to find articles about her father’s family, none of which mentioned Indigenous identity.
It can be tricky to investigate a vague claim; it’s easier to examine a purported connection to a specific Indigenous community, but Lauzon never clearly claimed a specific Métis settlement, First Nation, or family line. But because her father’s family tree was so well-archived, it was possible to see that if she does have an Indigenous ancestor, it would be a very distant one—and this squared with her statements to me about believing she had an ancestor four or five generations back but not being able to identify them.
Lauzon admitted to you, after receiving results from a genetic test in 2022, that “what is clear is that what I thought my ancestry was, is most likely not what it is.” How do you feel about her response that calling herself Métis was just what many people did decades ago when they believed they had some Indigenous background?
It’s certainly true that many people have used “Métis” in this way, both in the past and the present—something the Métis Nation takes serious issue with as it’s a misrepresentation. And it’s also true that more and more so-called “Métis” organizations are popping up in Canada, driven by the rise in self-identified Métis people who have only very distant or specious Indigenous ancestry. But many also use “Métis” the way Lauzon did, to gesture at an Indigenous identity that they simply can’t get more specific with because they don’t have anything concrete: no community, no living relatives, no historic connections. What I found surprising with Lauzon is that she has been deeply immersed in Indigenous communities for decades, and she is someone who emphasizes how much Indigenous consultation and engagement she does for her work. So it strikes me as implausible that she wouldn’t know that it was an inaccurate and inappropriate way for her to describe her identity, certainly by the time the investigation was published in October.
This all appears to come from a moment in her thirties when her father allegedly told her that he had attended residential school. It also took you a few days to conclude that there was no evidence that the school her father attended—a Catholic boarding and day school in Alberta—was an Indian residential school. Why is Lauzon still, even after the investigation, so adamant that this was a residential school?
Lauzon found Ker Maria Convent, the school she believes her father attended, on a list of schools submitted for consideration in the Indian residential school settlement process. This list was very extensive, with more than 1,500 entries—it includes the public high schools in Vancouver that my parents attended, for example.
The federal criteria for recognizing Indigenous residential schools were very narrow: the institution had to be federally-operated, and it had to have a residence in which children lived away from their homes. This excluded a lot of institutions that were expressly created for the assimilation of Indigenous children: day schools and provincially-run institutions did not meet the test, for example. But we found no evidence that Ker Maria slipped through one of these bureaucratic cracks. I found a number of news clippings mentioning the school from the 1930s
and ‘40s, when Lauzon’s father would have attended. Most relate to its music program and various concerts and competitions. None mentioned Indigenous students. Residential schools typically focused on religious education and manual labour, with limited educational opportunities. The experience Lauzon’s father had at school may not have been pleasant, but we have seen no evidence that it was a residential school experience.
Lauzon refuses to acknowledge this. She believes her father was Indigenous, therefore she thinks his experience was that of a residential school student—because the school was on the list. My father, who is First Nations, attended a public high school in Vancouver in the 1960s that also appears on the list. Is it reasonable to suggest that he is a residential school survivor, too? In my view, absolutely not; an Indigenous student here or there does not turn an otherwise ordinary institution into a residential school.
It’s also worth underscoring that even Lauzon has claimed her ancestry would be four or five generations back, which would be three or four for her father. But children with a single Indigenous great-great-grandparent were not the demographic of residential schools—particularly not during the Great Depression when many institutions were trying to limit enrolment due to costs and were removing children of “questionable” Indian status. Her story simply does not make any sense in the historic context of residential schools, which anyone can read in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission volumes.
You coined a term in the article: residential school appropriation. Can you explain what that is and how it relates to this story?
The appropriation of Indigenous identities is a serious and prevalent form of fraud, but it also has a more insidious impact: distorting the reality of what it means to be Indigenous through these performances that are rooted in appropriation, pan-Indigenous stereotypes, and tropes. As scholar Kim TallBear has said, “Indigenous” has become so broad that it’s almost meaningless. Lauzon, by trying to reframe her father’s experience at a Catholic boarding school as one of an Indigenous child at residential school, is doing something similar: stretching the true history of these institutions beyond recognition.
The attention on unmarked graves at former residential school sites in Canada has prompted a surge of public interest in these institutions and what happened to the children who attended them, but there has also been a backlash of denialism from people who refuse to acknowledge that history. Appropriating and misrepresenting the history of residential schools is a transgression against survivors and their families, and it also risks fuelling denialism by distorting the facts.
During your reporting, before the article was published, someone within Lauzon’s orbit emailed members of staff at The Walrus trying to get the article stopped. What were these arguments and what do you make of this?
There seemed to be a few things behind this argument. One is that this individual, who did not want to be interviewed for the story, knew Lauzon personally and believed she was genuinely Indigenous. I think it’s very common and understandable; no one wants to believe that they have been deceived, or that a person they respect would be capable of such a deception. But the other part of their argument was that an investigation wouldn’t help anything, and would only do more harm—by making theatres more wary of staging Indigenous productions or engaging with Indigenous theatre professionals, for example. I’m not immune to that concern, and I feel tremendous empathy for the Indigenous people who are impacted by investigations like this, like the many people who lent their talents and insights to Lauzon’s play 1939. But ultimately, I don’t believe that justice can be advanced by avoiding or concealing the truth. And I also think this investigation demonstrates that there are serious issues with how arts organizations, including theatres, engage with Indigenous communities and respond to concerns about Indigenous identity fraud. I don’t believe that systemic issues change without public pressure—and that requires stories like this, which provide facts and context to the public.
Lauzon responded to your emails and sent separate responses to questions from our fact checker. After the article, she posted a statement on Facebook that’s now on her website. What did it say?
Lauzon’s lengthy statement covers a lot of ground. It does not contradict any of the key facts in our reporting: Lauzon has never been able to identify an Indigenous ancestor. In her statement, she suggests her father was not the primary inspiration for 1939, but rather a recorded video interview with the late Helen Thundercloud, who Lauzon says learned Shakespeare from an “inspiring” teacher at residential school. The Walrus does not have access to this recording, but an “inspiring” educational experience at residential school would have been unusual—and Lauzon admits they took “poetic license” with the depiction of residential school education in the 1930s.
Lauzon also emphasizes her belief that her father’s school should be included, citing the Aboriginal Healing Foundation. But in her statement, she misquotes a 2003 AHF report, claiming the foundation’s definition of a residential school is “[a] school system in Canada attended by Aboriginal students.” That’s not what the report says. In actuality, it reads, “‘Residential Schools’—means the Residential School System in Canada attended by Aboriginal students.” She changed “the Residential School System” to suggest the AHF’s definition includes any school system in which an Indigenous student attended.
While it’s true many institutions, specifically for Indigenous children, were excluded from the official settlement list, none of the available records accessed by The Walrus suggest that Ker Maria was such a school. Lauzon here is suggesting that her reclassification is somehow a push for justice, a way of honouring Indigenous children who were denied compensation and recognition by the government. But twisting the facts in this way to support her own unsupported beliefs about her family does nothing to bring justice to residential school survivors—it only serves her own interests.
In her statement, Lauzon claims that based on her 2022 genetic test results, she does have a small percentage of Indigenous DNA. What do you make of that as a defense?
When asked about her understanding of her ancestry, Lauzon confirmed that she has not identified any Indigenous relatives in her family tree, and while she did say she took a 23andMe test, she has not given any more details—for instance, the percentage. But regardless of what it is—and I would assume it’s a fraction of a percentage—it’s not the basis of a legitimate claim. 23andMe has been very clear that the test is not conclusive; rather, it shows “some sections of your DNA match a limited set of Indigenous American reference individuals more closely than they do other global reference populations.” It’s not legally recognized, nor is it recognized as legitimate by any Indigenous nation.
Lauzon says that The Walrus somehow acquired the results of her DNA test. Can you clarify?
Lauzon seems to believe that we have accessed her records. I’m not sure why she thinks this, and she has been informed more than once by The Walrus that neither I nor anyone else at the magazine has seen her DNA test results.
It’s been over a month since we published the investigation. What kinds of responses have you received?
The responses I’ve received personally have been very positive, from people who appreciate the reporting and the attention it brings to the issue of Indigenous identity fraud. Though I know many of Lauzon’s friends and associates have supported her and criticized the article as an unfair attack on her, none of the facts in it have been disputed or disproven.
But I have been surprised that there hasn’t been any response from any of the institutions that have worked with Lauzon for years, or who partnered on the production of 1939. It’s disappointing to see institutions that talk a big game about their engagement with Indigenous communities and their commitment to truth and reconciliation avoid this issue.
We published the investigation right before 1939 premiered a four-week run at the Belfry Theatre in Victoria. Did it finish its run? Do you have a sense of the play’s future?
The story was published the day before the play officially opened, though Lauzon and the Belfry did know for more than three weeks that the investigation was in progress. The play went ahead as scheduled, but the Belfry announced halfway through the four-week run that they would be ending the play early, on November 10. This was attributed to “serious health and wellness issues” within the cast. That’s the last update they’ve shared publicly on the play.
I don’t have a sense of the play’s future, but it’d be hard to imagine it being staged again without engaging with some of the issues identified during the reporting.
So the Belfry didn’t make any statement at all?
The Belfry did not directly acknowledge the investigation outside of a vague and nonspecific post on their website on October 31, that did not reference the article or the claims against Lauzon, but noted that the play “exists in relation to a larger body of Indigenous work, both at the Belfry and elsewhere.” They also published a post on their website describing the process of engagement and consultation that went into the play’s development in mid-October—after I had reached out to them for comment, but before the article was published. It felt like a kind of response, or at least an effort to pre-empt some of the concerns they anticipated the article might raise.
On Facebook and Instagram, comments on posts about 1939 after the article’s publication had been limited or turned off, and the theatre made no public response or acknowledgement of the article. You can still see some of their past posts about the play, but comments are disabled or limited. To me, this suggests they want to move on from the play as quickly as possible and perhaps hope people will just forget about it.
What do you see as the future of this kind of reporting?
A lot of investigations—including mine—have focused on individuals, without enough consideration of the corresponding various systems or institutions that enabled these individuals to turn those claims into, for example, a high-profile career or profitable opportunities. Indigenous identity fraud will never be stopped through the whack-a-mole process of outing one pretendian at a time. For one thing, there are simply too many of them, and most are probably gambling on the probability that the spotlight of journalistic scrutiny will never fall on them. And the reason this kind of fraud is so widespread is that organizations—from small theatres to institutions that dole out major grants and opportunities—have done little to address it. It’s their turn in the spotlight.
