Raising Indigenous Kids in the Age of Pretendians

I’ve been thinking about how Indigenous kids grow up in a swath of experiences—those we give them deliberately, those they seek out themselves, and what they are simply exposed to.

This summer, I took my youngest to the fairgrounds in Saskatoon. The sun was murky and orange as forest fire smoke obscured it. The acrid smell that makes the back of your throat feel raw is a summer familiarity now. In the fairgrounds, the bright lights were flashing, the teddy bears were puffy, the popcorn and the Doukhobor bread were bursting out of their confines, and the majority of the thousands of kids—screaming in exhilaration from way above our heads, their hair flying around; fingers sticky from sugary treats; or impatiently waiting their turn on the ridiculous rides—were Indigenous. Brown-skinned, dark-haired kids from all over the province. This was the first time I had been in a public setting in Saskatchewan where the majority of the crowd was not just non-white but Indigenous, living out a night of excitement in the middle of the summer.

As we stood in line ourselves, we could hear Cree- and Dene-inflected banter about the number of hours everyone had driven to get to Saskatoon just for the night of entertainment; aunties throwing their heads back in big-mouthed laughter; young parents with carefully braided hair, pushing their candy-floss-tangled toddlers in strollers; couples in summery outfits hurriedly crossing the street from the hotels close to the fairgrounds; and acne-faced teenagers delightedly checking each other out and holding hands—everyone, by far, visibly Indigenous. It reminded me of the feeling of being in Mexico, surrounded by millions of brown-skinned people; and it reminded me of being in Nunavut, where you attend an assembly at any school and look at a sea of black-haired kids sitting cross-legged on the floor; or in Greenland, where nearly everyone standing in line at the grocery store is Inuk. And it reminded me of being at powwows and other Indigenous-specific events across Canada.

In the midst of it all was my daughter, who was once a little baby riding in my amauti, now feeling the pure exhilaration of flying weightlessly through the air for a precious few minutes. Outside of the fairgrounds, and in our everyday lives, my daughter has a range of daily experiences, like other Indigenous kids. In one moment, she speaks our language to me and, in the next moment, speaks English to someone else. She salivates over ice cream and caramel and knows how to hook her fingers into the gills of a freshly caught fish to carry it. She and her siblings wear both homemade annoraat and store-bought clothing. Straddling our cultural aspects of life along with the mainstream is a normal Indigenous experience, and each child, each family, each community has different approaches to creating an identity out of this mix, this swath.

When she started school last fall, one of the new teachers could not tell the difference between her and one of her friends; the two little girls explained to the teacher several times that one of them had travelled to Greenland, and the other to northern Baffin Island for the summer. My daughter has observed that many Inuit have a European or baptismal name that is used at school and an Inuktitut name that is used at home, though it is becoming more and more common for children, like my daughter, to only go by their Inuktitut names. All these types of experiences are in the wash of every day—the high points, the low points, the code switching, the racist microaggressions, and everything in between are the hallmarks of modern Indigenous childhood.

I think about the generations of Greenlandic Inuit older than me, whose childhoods were split between hunting caribou and seals in Greenland and being taken away to Denmark, forced to become perfect brown-faced, black-haired Danes. The previous generations of Inuit wrested their Inukness from the systems that wanted to deny it and bestowed it on me and my peers, and I, in turn, have given my Inukness to my children. This is the deeply personal, purposeful, idiosyncratic process that people often call “resilience” or “intergenerational strength”—words that are tossed around in the media without much in-depth understanding of the terms. We have this strength in spades, and it takes a lot of daily energy and concentration to enact it.

I am one of thousands of Indigenous mothers calling on her whole being to raise her children, wanting to augment the good and minimize the bad. Flawed as I am, I see myself as a force that provides richness for my children, encouraging them to explore the world and express themselves. I try to bring my kids to as many of my activities as possible, and participate and facilitate in their activities too—from going to the fairgrounds, watching them compete at the Arctic Winter Games, or having them join me in artist residencies.

I think about the Canadian and Indigenous arts scene where I mostly work. In this arena, there are many Pretendians and Descendians who have made a name for themselves; Buffy Sainte-Marie and Thomas King being the most notorious grifters in the recent past. Pretendians are those who have a completely invented Indigenous ancestry, along the lines of one of the first prototypes: Grey Owl. A conservationist who claimed to be Indigenous, he was outed posthumously as Archibald Belaney, who was born in England. Descendians are also white people, but have Indigenous ancestry at some point in their genealogy. Typically, they have been brought up white and do not have lived experiences as Indigenous people until they choose to identify as Indigenous, usually in their adulthood.

While it is true that many Indigenous people have been taken away from their cultures, languages, and communities—sometimes for generations at a time—and many Indigenous people are doing hard work to reclaim what has been lost—sometimes only starting in their own adulthoods—Pretendians take advantage of this vulnerable reclamation space.

• Many Indigenous Mothers Must Travel Hundreds of Kilometres to Give Birth. Meet the Midwives Changing That
• My Father Was Found in a Residential School Incinerator When He Was an Infant
• There Are More Indigenous Children in Care Now than at the Height of Residential Schools

I look at how Pretendians and Descendians create an illusion of paucity or scarcity in order to gain the limelight. Many of them claim to be the first Indigenous person to receive accolades or prestige or power in whatever field they establish themselves in. What they are trying to do is establish their singularity and take the centre of attention in a white world. Yet this is contrary to the practice of Indigenous parents, who spend so much of our energy and time participating in and contributing to the collective.

There is such a contrast in the mode of existing, in the way of communicating, and in the way that space is taken between Pretendians and those with lived experiences as Indigenous people. Pretendians appropriate the looks and body language of Indigenous people to create a feeling around them that they are living and giving an authentic Indigenous presence. That their accomplishments reflect Indigenous success.

My mind returns to the Saskatoon fairgrounds and all those Indigenous children. Indigenous communities have some of the youngest populations in Canada. We’re concentrating on raising those children and young people. While I don’t want to make it seem like Indigenous communities are purely child-centric—many Indigenous people are childless, both by choice and for reasons that were forced on them—mainstream Canada needs to understand that Indigenous adults need the time and space to do the best job they can for Indigenous children, to accomplish all the everyday mundane, all the amplification of confidence and radical joy, all the quelling of racism and colonization. We need to de-emphasize the individualistic ideals of success that the Thomas Kings of the world pursue and instead emphasize the collective good that Indigenous people and families bring to each other.

The Indigenous parents I saw at the fair have cluttered porches full of different sized shoes and folded up strollers, are paying for day care and diapers, rushing to kids’ sports, sewing kid-sized regalia, grocery shopping for the whole family, fishing and hunting, taking leave from work to look after sick kids, staying home to raise the kids, wrestling to get them into snowsuits in the winter and out of swimsuits in the summer, throwing birthday parties, folding mountains of laundry, all while short on sleep; and busy as we are, we’re taking a summer evening to have some fun.

This is what brings radical change for the generations to come.