Canadian Playwright Under Attack For “Pretendianism”

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World War II is looming in Europe, but in Canada, a group of Indigenous children at a Northern Ontario residential school is putting on a performance of Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well for the royal tour of King George VI.

Such is the set-up of the play 1939, directed by multidisciplinary performer Jani Lauzon, who also co-wrote it with Kaitlyn Riordan. According to the playwrights, the story is partly inspired by Lauzon’s own family history. “My father went to a very specific convent residential school, and they studied Shakespeare as well as Latin and Greek, and the idea there was that all the students that were there would become nuns or priests,” explained Lauzon in a 2022 interview for a University of Waterloo speaker series, adding that she learned that her father had attended a residential school only when she was in her thirties, because he had never spoken about it. “I thought, wow, that’s interesting—because you don’t hear about Shakespeare being taught at residential schools.”

1939 is not a straight tragedy, as one might expect given the setting, but something like a comedy; the allusions to beatings are punctuated by mentions of a rival school called Titsworth and a farting priest. According to one review, it received a standing ovation on opening night at the 2022 Stratford Festival in Ontario. This September, it debuted at Toronto’s Berkeley Street Theatre. The Toronto Star called it an “especially poignant piece of theatre,” while Intermission magazine declared it an “overdue addition to the Canadian dramatic canon.” In late October, it will premiere at the storied Belfry Theatre in Victoria.

The genesis of 1939 is described as “both family legacy and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action.” Specifically, Lauzon and Riordan cited Call to Action 83, which directed the Canada Council for the Arts to establish funding for Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists to collaborate on projects that would advance reconciliation. “We can use art as a way to make that happen on a much more profound level than we can by sitting around and trying to create policy,” Lauzon said in the 2022 interview.

The play features Indigenous performers and was developed with Indigenous script consultants, but at its core is Lauzon’s story—about her father and his experience of encountering Shakespeare at a residential school. The authors of the final TRC report wrote, “Without truth, justice is not served, healing cannot happen, and there can be no genuine reconciliation.”

What happens to reconciliation when that truth is nowhere to be found?

Along-time presence in the Canadian theatre world, Lauzon has built an impressive career on Indigenous performances and productions over the past three decades, from co-founding an Indigenous women’s theatre collective called Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble, in 1998, to starring as Cordelia in an all-Indigenous production of King Lear, in 2012. In 2013, she founded a theatre and production company, Paper Canoe Projects, which has produced four of her own productions centred on Indigenous themes and histories. (According to the Canada Council for the Arts, Paper Canoe Projects has received $124,400 in grant funding since 2017, including $65,000 from a program for Indigenous artists; Turtle Gals received $353,400 between 1999 and 2007. Paper Canoe has also received $25,000 in Indigenous-specific art grants from the Ontario Arts Council since 2015.) At Canada’s prestigious National Theatre School, she served as co-chair of the Indigenous Advisory Circle, and she has been nominated for a Canadian Aboriginal Music Award and twice for what is now called Indigenous Artist or Group of the Year at the Juno Awards.

In a 1996 profile by the Toronto Star, Lauzon was hailed as an emerging talent with the “grace of an eagle,” one who might be found performing anything, “an aria or an Indian chant,” on stage. Lauzon has characterized her ancestry as Finnish on her mother’s side and Métis on her father’s. Her young life wasn’t always easy: her mother died when Lauzon was thirteen. Her father relinquished his parental rights, and Lauzon moved in with a foster family that had been friends with her mother. She has recalled meeting Sam Osawamick, an Elder on Manitoulin Island in Ontario, who helped her on her spiritual and artistic journey. “Singing in our culture was meant as a way to heal and forget,” she told the Star. “It’s a form of prayer.”

Lauzon’s Indigenous identity is prominent in her interviews and public appearances, though not always consistent in its presentation. In 2012, during an Ottawa lecture on Indigenous storytelling, Lauzon said her “Odawa-Ojibwe name” meant “North Wind Woman,” and she identified herself as a member of the Bear Clan. Some biographies describe her ancestry as Cree and Ojibwe, and she has claimed that her Indigenous ancestry comes from Saskatchewan and Quebec.

She has also identified with the struggles faced by visibly Indigenous theatre performers, with her being called a “pretty brown” person and being placed in an “ethnic file” by agents, as per an interview with Windspeaker. She recalled in the University of Waterloo interview that an acting teacher once told her she could never be a Shakespearean actor because of the colour of her skin. “I spent the rest of my life trying to prove that man wrong.”

Lauzon is a proponent of something called “body memory” in the creative process. She described it in a lecture: once, while workshopping the text of a theatre piece, Lauzon recalled suddenly coming up with a mouse character. “I was sharing this information with a friend of mine who’s Haida from the West Coast, and she said, ‘Oh yeah, mouse woman . . . those are our teachings,’” Lauzon said. “I thought: Isn’t it interesting that this information was there inside me? . . . But it’s there for all of us, if we choose to go inside of ourselves and to remind ourselves who in fact we are.” This belief in a kind of mystical, subconscious Indigeneity is echoed in 1939, in an exchange between a Mohawk girl named Evelyne and another child, Susan, who has forgotten her parents and where she comes from. “Maybe if I keep pretending to be Indian, I’ll learn how to be one,” Susan says. Evelyne tells her, “Whether you know who they are or not, your ancestors are always inside you.”

Lauzon wrote the 2018 play I Call myself Princess, which was inspired by the life of Creek/Cherokee opera singer Tsianina Redfeather Blackstone. “The broader theme of the play is appropriation and the place that Indigenous people had in their own identity at that time,” Lauzon said in a press interview. To another interviewer, she decried cultural appropriation, saying, “To really know something, it’s experiential. You have to really have lived it to understand it, understanding it from that place of knowledge.” By then, Lauzon and Riordan were already at work on 1939.

1939 was commissioned by the Stratford Festival, one of the most celebrated annual theatre festivals in Canada with a focus on Shakespearean plays, as part of its response to Call to Action 83. By email, a festival spokesperson wrote, “Jani was hired for 1939 as a talented artist with deep connections in the Indigenous community. As both a director and co-playwright, she led a full and collaborative process, and the play was guided by Indigenous Elders, Survivors and ceremony throughout its development process.” They also added that “Jani’s presence and contributions have helped us to develop our processes when it comes to the creation of Indigenous work and decolonization of the workplace.” The festival has a policy of self-identification and says it has worked with over 100 Indigenous artists in a variety of roles; five have served as playwrights and six as directors, including Lauzon.

Lauzon has told many stories about herself, and some are easy to verify. She was born in 1959 in Kimberley, British Columbia, a small city in the East Kootenay region of the province, associated with mining, Bavarian decor, and a twenty-two-foot-tall cuckoo clock. It was also the hometown of her father, Paul. According to genealogy records viewed by The Walrus, his parents were born in Quebec but were long-time residents of Kimberley; his father, Armand, ran for town mayor in 1944. Before Paul died, in 1995, Lauzon says, he told her that he attended what she believes to be a residential school.

By email, Lauzon told The Walrus that the residential school her father attended was the Ker Maria Convent, a Catholic school in Pincher Creek, Alberta, that was established in the early 1900s. As evidence, Lauzon shared a link to a list of schools submitted between 2007 and 2015 to what was then called Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada, for consideration in the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement. That list of institutions included day schools, Indian hospitals, and provincially run residential schools; it also listed public high schools and elementary schools, religious and vocational schools, general hospitals, public colleges and universities, and schools for the blind, among others. More than 1,500 institutions were submitted for review as possible Indian residential schools; only ten schools were added to the settlement agreement. Ker Maria was not one of them.

Many Métis children, and other children described pejoratively as “halfbreeds,” without connections to the Red River Valley—the birthplace of the Métis Nation—did attend residential schools, though not in high numbers prior to World War II, says Sean Carleton, a historian and associate professor at the University of Manitoba. During the 1930s, when Lauzon’s father was a child, the economic depression led to a federal policy of discharging, due to costs, any child of questionable standing regarding their “Indianness,” according to the TRC report. “It is true that there are ‘residential schools’ that did not make the official settlement list,” Carleton says, pointing to the example of St. Boniface Industrial School in Manitoba; the criteria used by the federal government was narrow, and many institutions that explicitly focused on assimilation and control of Indigenous people—such as day schools, provincially run residential schools, and Indian hospitals—were excluded from the list.

“Each location on that list was as a result of a Survivor asking for it to be included,” Lauzon wrote in a follow-up email. But that logic is backward: one doesn’t become a survivor by claiming their alma mater to be a residential school, nor does an institution become a residential school through the presence of a person who claims to be Indigenous. A 1974 book about the history of Pincher Creek detailed the founding and existence of Ker Maria, as a convent school for Catholic children, but made no mention of any Indigenous students, nor of a mandate that included them. While it’s entirely possible some Indigenous children attended the school, that possibility alone—her father saying he attended Ker Maria and her inferring that it was a residential school—appears to be what Lauzon is basing her entire story on. And despite Lauzon presenting 1939 as “born [of] family legacy,” The Walrus has found no evidence the school her father attended was a residential school for Indigenous children. There’s also no proof that he was Métis at all.

Lauzon’s father attended the Vancouver School of Art—now Emily Carr University of Art + Design—and she has recalled him as an artist, painter, and “great piano player.” He was not a constant presence in her life, and she describes her relationship with him as complicated. Lauzon has consistently attributed her Métis identity to him but never in any specific detail—not in the context of a community or a single relation.

Lauzon’s claims about her father’s Indigenous identity are contradicted by genealogical, baptismal, and census records obtained by The Walrus, which show only French Canadian ancestry on her father’s side, going back five generations. When asked to explain this discrepancy and others, Lauzon replied that her father had told her that his mother was partly Indigenous, while admitting that her grandmother “did not share this view.” As far as Lauzon knows, one of her sisters does not identify as Indigenous, while the other “agrees that we have Indigenous ancestry.”

Over thirty years, Lauzon began looking for evidence of this ancestry in church and government records; at one point, she thought she had found an ancestor five generations back, but it turned out to be basically a dead end. She brought her research to the Métis Nation of Ontario—an organization with a history of notorious lenience in accepting applications with scant evidence—but was advised that she did not have sufficient basis for her application. She engaged a genealogist, who suggested Lauzon get a genealogy test. Lauzon said that she finally received the results of a 23andMe test in 2022. “What is clear is that what I thought my ancestry was, is most likely not what it is,” Lauzon admitted in her letter to The Walrus. On its website, 23andMe notes that it has “several features that can reveal genetic evidence of Indigenous American ancestry, although they are not considered a confirmatory test or proof of such ancestry in a legal context.”

In his 2019 book Distorted Descent, scholar Darryl Leroux writes that only thirteen Indigenous women are recorded in marriage registries in New France prior to 1680, but small settlements and intermarriages have produced a contemporary situation where “upwards of 10 million white French descendants [in Canada and the US] likely share the same small number of Indigenous women ancestors born primarily in the 1600s.” And some of those French Canadians, Leroux writes, use this sliver of distant ancestry to refashion their own identities as Indigenous—bypassing entirely the kinship and citizenship structures of Indigenous nations.

Despite a lack of clear evidence of Métis ancestry, Lauzon represented her father’s history as that of a residential school survivor and brought this representation to life on stage. Canadians have made this comparison before: former prime minister Jean Chrétien said his experience at a Quebec boarding school was also “extremely hard” and lamented the diet of “baked beans and oatmeal” in an interview in which he denied ever hearing about abuse at residential schools during the six years he served as minister of Indian affairs and Northern development.

Since unmarked graves at former residential school sites across Canada began to garner international attention in 2021, there has been a growing backlash brewing among Canadians who attempt to refute the well-established facts of the residential school system, which operated for more than a century. In September, Leah Gazan, a member of Parliament, tabled a bill to criminalize residential school denialism in response to the phenomenon. “If the government is serious about reconciliation, then they need to protect survivors and their families from hate,” Gazan said. The issue of residential school appropriation is a different but related phenomenon—one that also sees non-Indigenous people twisting and distorting the history of these institutions for their own purposes and gains. They are two sides of the same coin, representing the erasure and replacement of Indigenous realities with fictions masquerading as truth.

Media coverage of Indigenous identity fraud has demonstrated that the phenomenon of playing Indian, while not new, is receiving increasing public attention. More people than ever are identifying as Indigenous, especially Métis: 624,220 Canadians claimed Métis identity in the 2021 census, compared to 204,120 in 1996—an increase of more than 200 percent over a twenty-five-year period.

This is not just due to diminished stigma associated with being Indigenous—or just the increase in jobs, grants, and opportunities targeted to people who identify as Indigenous which have emerged in response to the TRC’s ninety-four Calls to Action. It is also because the concept of Indigenous identity itself has become distorted, encompassing an increasingly large number of Canadians whose claims to Indigenous ancestry are distant, speculative, or simply false. In a recent paper published in the journal Genealogy, Leroux points to 2,000 people who, in order to gain membership, attributed their Algonquin ancestry to a single French Canadian couple, based on two historical documents that turned out to be forged.

In recent years, a number of self-proclaimed and unrecognized Métis groups have sprung up, some even issuing their own “status cards.” Membership criteria among these groups is lax; Mary Lou Parker, who calls herself the “grand chief” of the Eastern Woodland Métis Nation in Nova Scotia, told the CBC in 2019 that she didn’t think they had ever denied anyone membership, saying, “As long as you’ve got a drop of Indian blood in you, you’re Métis.” And tensions are high between provincial Métis governments: the Manitoba Métis Federation split from the Métis National Council in 2021 over concerns regarding the membership policies of the Métis Nation of Ontario; last month, the Métis Nation-Saskatchewan followed suit.

These public battles have produced uncertainty about who, exactly, is Métis. “Métis are a very distinct group of people from Western Canada. The ethnogenesis of Métis people, or Michif people, happened over here,” says katherena vermette, a Michif writer from Treaty 1 territory in Manitoba who this year published a novel, real ones, that contemplates the impacts of Métis identity fraud. Her connection to the Métis Nation extends back at least five generations. “We had collective agreements, laws, communities, languages, and cultural practices. We weren’t individual people with one single Indigenous ancestor way down the line,” she says. “There’s a common story: there’s a rumour of Indigenous ancestry, but you don’t know what to do with it. You feel connected to the culture, but you have no claim to it. That’s a common Canadian experience—but that’s not a Métis experience.”

Survivors of the Sixties Scoop and Millennium Scoop often struggle with not knowing where they come from, as a result of being forcibly removed from their kinship networks and communities. “What I hate about these fraud cases is that it makes people go further underground, because they’re afraid they’re not Indigenous enough,” vermette says. It is these Indigenous people who are harmed by false claims and whose own trauma is used by pretendians to deflect suspicion. After director Michelle Latimer’s identity claims became the focus of a 2020 CBC investigation, Blackfoot filmmaker Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers wrote in Now Toronto, “[Latimer] was trusted because the Indigenous film community is protective. We want to avoid doing harm to those who have experienced the trauma of displacement.”

Early last month, speaking at the Truth First symposium hosted by MacEwan University in Edmonton, Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate scholar Kim TallBear described the problems created by an increasingly vague, subjective identity category. “‘Indigenous’ is being promiscuously deployed right now,” she said. “It’s drawing attention away from collectivity and belonging to First Nations, Métis, and Inuit and Canada, and to tribal communities in the US. The concept of Indigenous has recently become so expansive . . . that it risks becoming meaningless at best.”

Lauzon’s identity, free floating and malleable, evoked what Lenape scholar Joanne Barker has termed the “Kinless Indian,” one “without any but an invented relationship to Indigenous people, cultivated through family or local folklore,” whose claim of Indigenous identity absolves them from complicity in colonialism—an attractive prospect for Canadians grappling with the shameful legacy of something like residential schools.

Despite the ubiquity of Indigenous identity fraud, most institutions have yet to clarify mechanisms for justice or accountability. Celeste Pedri-Spade, associate provost of Indigenous initiatives at McGill University, recently led the development and implementation of a robust policy of citizenship validation. And in June, Karima Manji received the first criminal sentence in Canada related to Indigenous identity fraud: three years in prison for enrolling her twin daughters, Amira and Nadya, as Inuit beneficiaries. (Manji also had a previous conviction for fraud.) But as reporting on these cases shows, time and again, Indigenous people speak out about their concerns and suspicions of fraud—often for years—before anything is done to stop it.

Victoria’s Belfry Theatre announced in May that 1939 would be part of their 2024/25 season. In the summer, an Indigenous staff member at the theatre tasked with reading the script was alarmed by some of its contents. The residential school setting felt like a backdrop to fill seats, they told The Walrus. (Indigenous individuals who read the script at the Belfry’s request asked to remain unnamed, citing legal and personal concerns.) After a discussion with Isaac Thomas, the theatre’s executive director, they agreed to consult with other Indigenous members of the arts community in Victoria.

One consultant, whose family members attended residential school, was struck by how sympathetic the story was to the residential school staff, who are portrayed as well intentioned. The character of Miss Ap Dafydd, who is in charge of the Shakespeare play, confesses to the children that she was beaten in school for speaking Welsh; that’s why she wants the children to “embrace the education we’re providing to you,” to spare them the suffering of being different. Another consultant pointed out that one character is identified as “Algonquin Métis” though he has a First Nations mother and a white father—reinforcing a common misperception that “Métis” is a catch-all term referring to someone of mixed ancestry. “It felt like [the play] was made for settlers, not Indigenous people,” one person who reviewed the script told me. After reading, both consultants had questions about Lauzon’s own background and connection to the story.

Those who shared their concerns about the script and Lauzon in September said they have yet to receive a response from the Belfry. The Indigenous staff member was told that the play would continue and further consultations with Indigenous community members would be cancelled. Feeling as though their concerns had been dismissed to protect Lauzon and the play, the Indigenous staff member quit at a staff meeting. Another non-Indigenous staff member has since resigned. When reached for comment, Thomas said, “responding to the concerns expressed by some community members, the Belfry has asked Jani to clarify her Indigenous heritage.”

The Belfry Theatre has weathered criticism before and adjusted its productions accordingly; in January, the theatre withdrew the play The Runner from its lineup after it was targeted by protesters for including “violent and racist rhetoric of Zionism.” On the decision to pull the play, the theatre issued a now-deleted statement reading, “We believe that presenting The Runner at this particular time does not ensure the well-being of all segments of our community.” But the concerns about 1939 do not seem to have elicited the same response, despite an artistic statement on their website noting a commitment to supporting the work of Indigenous artists. 1939 will premiere on October 29, ostensibly offering audiences a deeper understanding of the history of residential schools.

Lauzon wrote in her email to The Walrus that her use of “Métis” was not meant to refer to the historic Métis Nation but rather as a general term for the mixed Indigenous ancestry she believed she has. “I know that this is not acceptable, but the term Métis was what was used when I was growing up.” Lauzon is now sixty-five and still searching for her Indigenous connections. In her initial letter to The Walrus, she said, “I will change my Bio.” (Asked in a follow-up email whether she feels it’s honest to continue identifying as Indigenous and Métis, Lauzon declined to answer. However, she wrote in a subsequent email that she was in the process of reaching out to “a specialist in Indigenous heritage.”)

After The Walrus contacted Lauzon and the Belfry, 1939 ’s program was changed, with Lauzon’s heritage now described as “Indigenous” rather than “Métis.”

In her letter to The Walrus, Lauzon stressed how much Indigenous consultation informed the play, writing that four First Nations women have served as advisers while other Indigenous people have served as spiritual advisers, cultural consultants, and facilitators for post-performance discussions. The Stratford Festival also underscored the extent of collaboration, telling The Walrus, “We stand by the play and the robust Indigenous consultation process. We believe Jani has represented herself fairly.” And on October 16, after being contacted by The Walrus with questions, the Belfry published on their website a post by Lauzon and Riordan, who detailed their consultations. But how many of those Elders and survivors shared their histories and knowledge because they believed they were speaking to an Indigenous person, someone else whose life had been shaped by the Indian residential school system? And how many of them, along with Indigenous performers, will be impacted by the revelations about Lauzon’s claims?

After the investigation into TV director Michelle Latimer’s identity, her television series Trickster—which was based on Haisla-Heiltsuk author Eden Robinson’s trilogy and starred a number of young and ferociously talented Indigenous actors—was abruptly cancelled. Historically, after a revelation of Indigenous identity fraud, those accused tend to disappear from public life; the Indigenous people who trusted them and collaborated with them are left to reckon with the fallout.

Between scenes, the children at the fictional residential school in 1939 write their thoughts and feelings on chalkboards; their writing is swiftly erased by adults—an act that represents the suppression and denial of what Indigenous children endured. But it evokes another ongoing erasure too: that of Indigenous people themselves, by the people who pretend to be us, who claim our identities and histories for themselves, wearing them like a costume for an audience that believes they are receiving something true. And it’s impossible to ignore how many institutions and organizations, ostensibly committed to truth and reconciliation, avert their eyes so the show can go on—erasing the words of Indigenous people who call out for the truth.

Michelle Cyca is a contributing writer for The Walrus.