Whose Business Is It?

Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond has accomplished a great deal in her life as an advocate for youth, children and families, missing and murdered Indigenous women -- one of the few people in public life who proceeds with modesty, grace and integrity. So imagine my horror when I read yesterday of how that integrity has been called into question. Prior to yesterday, I did not know that Turpel-Lafond is (was?) Indigenous, until inconsistencies in her claim to Cree ancestry were raised in an article posted on the CBC website.

Unlike previous cases where Indigenous ancestry is complicated by family secrets, personal trauma, community dislocations and life-saving detours around the strictures of a genocidal Canadian federal government (the Indian Act), where those whose conditional claims at Indigenous ancestry have been frog-marched to the extreme end of the identitarian binary, Turpel-Lafond has received support from high ranking members of Indigenous governance structures such as the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, a NGO in Special Consultative Status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, who rightly point out her accomplishments, as if the ends justify the means.

Of course Turpel-Lafond's claim to Indigenous ancestry has attracted critics as well, many of them Indigenous women who, like Turpel-Lafond, have law degrees, and who argue -- I would say correctly, for the most part -- that claims to ancestry are contingent on relations to the communities in which those identities are rooted and formed. Indeed, I have never seen so many Indigenous lawyers speaking on this topic as I have in the case of Turpel-Lafond.

Western law, as I have come to know it, is the last place where the ends wholly justify the means -- an example of this ends-over-means "reasoning" being the 1961 Eichmann Trial, as chronicled by Hannah Arendt in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), a trial that was produced, written and directed by the nascent state of Israel. Given the structure of support for Turpel-Lafond, I expect a similar apparatus will emerge in its attempt to make a case not so much for her absolution but for her consecration, a state of exception that only well-financed lawyers and politicians can construct.

From my recent readings I see Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond as more than a saint-in-the-making. Both she and her husband George Lafond (an advisor at a "diversified" mining company with "long-life assets" operating in North and South America) are a power couple resident in a political-economic dimension far beyond the symbolic arenas of so-called "pretendian" artists and curators, and therefore will have advantages previously unseen to those familiar with the question of who, how, when and why is someone Indigenous. How this plays out will be both fascinating and, to paraphrase UBCIC Grand Chief Stewart Phillip: "None of [my] business."