The Thomas King saga proves Canada’s cultural establishment must end its identity obsession once and for all

I’ve read several Thomas King books over the years. Like a lot of people, I always assumed he grew up in an Indigenous community in Alberta, where many of his works are set. But it turns out that King grew up in California (his actual cultural background is Greek) and his only claim to Indigeneity was a family rumour that his father—a man he’d never really met—was part Cherokee. It turns out the rumour was false. After hearing whispers for the last few years, the 82-year-old author took matters into his own hands, went over the evidence with an Indigenous genealogy organization, came to what he calls a shocking realization, and made it public. For decades, King claimed a fully fledged Indigenous identity that got him a teaching job at the University of Lethbridge. From there, he started writing about Indigenous life from the perspective of a seemingly Canadian-born Indigenous man. He was so successful that he became a household name and even had his own long-running CBC radio comedy show tenderly portraying contemporary native life. As it turns out, King’s identity—and the career he built upon it—were resting on a completely false foundation. But his work is good. He’s an excellent writer, a keen observer, and he has been unfailingly passionate about portraying Canadian Indigenous life in all its complexity and enduring beauty. Understandably, the reaction has been calls to erase King, excise him from the canon as if he never existed. Indeed, the writer Robert Jago makes that very demand, writing in the Toronto Star the day after news of King’s fraudulent identity broke: “Now his work needs to be moved to the fantasy section.” What he really means is dump it in the garbage. The space on the “bookshelves” should be reserved for, as he puts it, “authentic, grounded and real Indigenous people.” I get what he’s saying and why. But the deeper revelation of King’s fraud is that the systemic obsession with so-called cultural appropriation as applied to the literary arts is also a fraud. Think about it this way: fellow author Joseph Boyden and King weren’t who they said they were, but they were fine, interesting writers who completely disproved the idea that you cannot passionately, convincingly, and beautifully depict a culture that is not your own. So, while we are “dumping” King, can we take a moment to look at the 20 years of abysmal, failed cultural policy that made King possible? Otherwise, after we get rid of King the way we got rid of Boyden and Buffy (off the radio, out of the schools, removed from the bookstores), it’s back to business as usual: a vigorous return to the failed policies that have brought us, again and again, these bizarre, incongruous moments of identity dissonance. Policies that have meant spending a billion-plus tax dollars a year on agencies dedicated almost exclusively to the creation of narratives about and around who “authentically” identifies as what, and henceforth receives the state’s approval to tell their story. (Annual funding for just a few of the arts organizations actively advancing this cultural agenda: CBC: $1.3 billion; Canada Council for the Arts: $300 million; Telefilm Canada: $145 million; National Film Board of Canada: $82 million). Let’s learn our lesson and ditch identity politics purity tests  Let’s back up for a minute. Once upon a time, I was thrown out of Canadian culture for arguing that cultural appropriation as applied to the literary arts is a nonsensical idea. My argument was that writers should not be limited to only creating characters they share DNA with. That’s just plain stupid. What was the response? I was attacked, mobbed, and ultimately “cancelled” for stating this obvious truth. Ever since, the doctrinaire Left’s obsession with identity has been held over the arts and culture scene in Canada like a sword. Say the wrong thing and get your neck cut off. If I or anyone else who looked like me dared to depict an Indigenous—or black or Asian—character in our writing, we’d be immediately accused of “appropriation” and thrown out of the party. Yet during that same time, we’ve had a seemingly never-ending stream of scandals around impersonators and appropriators. Clearly, the rules don’t work. They just encourage the grifters while preventing the kind of risk-taking, fusions, and experiments that give art its vitality and necessity. For culture to matter, it must be much, much more than grievance-based identity politics over and over again. For the last 20 years, the arts bureaucrats have been very busy funding any culture that they are told has to do with equity, reconciliation, and “priority groups.” Very little else gets funded and promoted. But the hard truth is that as this has gone on, we’ve watched every single possible metric of audience engagement with Canadian arts decline. Nobody is buying, everybody is bored (to tears), and the artists are terrified to innovate, speak their minds, or deviate from narratives that don’t adhere to the strictest identitarian moral screed. This is not specifically about Indigenous culture. This is about the endless quest for racial and ideological purity in the arts. It’s about our current stultifying mix of sanctimony, censorship, and repression in the name of ensuring that our cultural creations are as predictably politically correct as possible. I’m not saying writers should be free to misrepresent themselves and reap the rewards. I don’t believe for a second that King didn’t once contemplate his own flimsy hold on an Indigenous identity while Boyden, Buffy, and even the director of the documentary film based on his own book, The Inconvenient Indian, were all being torn apart for pretending to have Indigenous ancestry. But we must learn our lesson this time round. To double down yet again on identity politics and the sin of cultural appropriation in literature after the King affair is to learn nothing from King’s disgrace. Let’s look at it from a different perspective. Let’s say that someone appropriates Indigenous culture in their writing by claiming a made-up identity. But this time, that someone does it badly. Throughout most of history, bad writing has ended up where bad writing usually ends up: nowhere. But in the Canada of the last 20 years, bad writing has been elevated because, well, political correctness in the woke era means taking terrible writing and giving it an award in the name of equity. Such was the case in 2019 when identity-oppression-obsession led the higher-ups to give Indigenous-transgender poet Gwen Benaway top prize in Canadian literature, the Governor General’s Award for poetry. A year later, she too was exposed as a “pretendian” on social media after the writer/activist Alicia Elliott appointed herself official investigator of her former “best friend.” Before this, Benaway was becoming quite sought after, a frequent contributor to various publications and events. After, she disappeared. The situation is made even more grievous because, unlike in the case of King, Benaway’s writing is awful. Her signature mix—trans talking points sprinkled with Indigenous key words—is so blatantly contrived it’s as if it was conjured out of a ChatGPT woke verse generator. From her poem Aki, meaning “the land” in the Ojibwe language: “say I belong here,/this place, now—/and for every time/they misgender me/by the wrong pronouns/or the old name,/let her answer for me:/Gaawiin, nidanis/no, my daughter/is the same woman/I made her/at birth.” Over the last three decades, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, and Austin Clarke have all been nominated for that same award and found unworthy. That this, instead, was elevated to the highest circles of Canadian literature tells us quite a lot about where we are as a culture. Benway’s win was solely based on this misguided political agenda: whoever’s identity is the most authentically oppressed gets the prize. Similarly, when pre-diluvian Buffy St. Marie won the Polaris prize in 2015 for her late-career, utterly forgettable rap-electronica album Power in the Blood, it wasn’t because anyone liked the music. They liked her identity. They liked her politics. She checked the right boxes. That the album was horrid was a minor inconvenience, so to speak. The title track, an unfortunate rap riff on government-enabled corporate excess, starts like this: “Corporation, government, selling me some cover-up.” The hard-hitting rhymes eventually, mercifully dissolve into beats of vaguely futuristic Indigenous inspired chant. Universal Soldier, this is not. She got the prize anyway. She represented the oppressed. Or something? We need a new cultural bargain  All this is what comes out of an official cultural policy mindlessly captured by identity politics. This is where we sit after more than two decades of deciding who to celebrate, who to uplift, and promote based on their supposed proximity to authentic intergenerational oppression. We look to the gatekeepers to elevate works of genuine accomplishment for greater appreciation. When they fail the public so badly—banishing this, praising that, all based on skin colour and identity—the public starts to look away. The simple truth is that the artist’s identity should not be the primary basis by which we judge work. Is the material great? Is it epic? Is it beautiful? That’s all we should care about. And if the writer is faking their identity to advance their career? Well, eventually they will get caught and punished. But the lesson isn’t that they shouldn’t have written beautifully about things they believed in. The lesson is that they took the easy way out and now must suffer the consequences, regardless of how well they wrote. So let’s make a new bargain: Tell the truth about who you are, and we, in turn, will not judge you or limit your imagination based on the colour of your skin or your lineage. Some things, once broken, can’t ever be put back the way they were. Buffy’s now been stripped of her Juno and Polaris awards because, apparently, as a non-Canadian, she was never actually eligible in the first place. However, calls to make things right and give her awards to the runner-up remain unheeded. Our current cultural policies leave many creators unjustly passed over–unrecognized, unrewarded. What’s done cannot be undone. By all means, pull Thomas King from the shelves. But let’s not stop there. Let’s, finally, learn from our mistakes. Reducing the arts to the performance of identity politics has been a toxic disaster.