… Bared.
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Caroline Tait, a Métis professor and medical anthropologist who has worked alongside Bourassa for a decade at the University of Saskatchewan, said she grew suspicious of [Carrie] Bourassa’s story because she initially only claimed to be Métis, but later added Anishinaabe and Tlingit heritage…
Winona Wheeler, an associate professor at the University of Saskatchewan and member of the Fisher River Cree Nation in Manitoba who helped Tait research Bourassa’s genealogy, told CBC that she was disgusted when she witnessed Bourassa’s TEDx speech.
“I was repulsed by how hard she was working to pass herself off as Indigenous,” Wheeler said. “You’ve got no right to tell people that’s who you are in order to gain legitimacy, to get positions, and to get funding. That’s abuse.”
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And listen. Now that we know this is a thing, that on a regular basis people are going to be faking minority identities in order to gain advantages, we need to start noting common features of the con.
As a dedicated follower of all sorts of identity frauds, UD has certainly noticed a few characteristic elements, most of them arising from the fact that the sort of person capable of conceiving of, let alone carrying out, such a wacky, brazen, incredibly high-risk act tends to be mentally unstable.
Call their most self-damaging syndrome Fulminating Fraudulence, in which they can’t leave fake enough alone and must always be metastasizing (Anishinaabe, Tlingit…), and always be appearance-embellishing (for that TED talk, Bourrasa practically disappeared under the weight of native drapery).
Recall a GW student’s description of Jessica Krug in the classroom:
[S]he was very adamant that she was from the Bronx — she had a very heavy accent throughout the whole class. She would come in with huge hoops and a nose ring and a crop top and tight, tight cheetah pants. She has a big tattoo on her arm of the socialist symbol [the hammer and sickle]…
If she hadn’t been unmasked, Krug would have been twirling Enver Hoxha nipple tassels.