Thank you.

I think there there are many reasons. There's not just one reason. There are a number of social reasons that help to explain. There's a certain way in which individuals, in particular, are looking for some sense of belonging. Post the major changes that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s with civil rights movements and with other movements against racism and colonialism, what you see is that white Americans and white Canadians want to distance themselves from being white. They want to somehow evade either responsibility or guilt for some of the historical and contemporary ways in which racism is experienced by indigenous peoples and by other racialized people.

I think that's part of it. As part of that movement, you see that there's a valorization for what are called “ethnic minority groups”. In the United States and in Canada, you see Italian Canadians and Italian Americans, Irish Canadians and Irish Americans, Scottish...etc., who start to value their particular ethnic identity in order to move away from being seen as simply white. That's part of the story. There's a way in which white Canadians no longer want to be understood as white, and one way to do that is to rely on ancestry from a long time ago.

I also think it's part of this process of what we call “settler colonialism”, which really seeks to eliminate, in different ways, indigenous peoples from the landscape, whether that's through assimilation or through other policies that especially aim to render indigenous political entities as simply cultural organizations that the state or the Crown has no responsibility towards. There's this idea, generally, that circulates—and I think one of my colleagues, Kim TallBear, has written extensively about—that indigenous peoples will disappear one day, and this is part of that disappearing act. If all Canadians or millions of Canadians who were not indigenous suddenly claimed to be indigenous and were accepted as such, what would happen to actual indigenous people?

I think that's also part of what's going on—this larger movement. Maybe I'll just leave it at that. I don't think it's just a question of people doing this for financial gain; although, that is certainly part of it in some cases. There are other reasons as well.

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