Bolt: Why does Australia protect race fakes like Bruce Pascoe?
Canada has cancelled celebrated “Cherokee” author Thomas King after exposing him as a racial fraud, while Australia continues protecting Bruce Pascoe despite similar allegations. Why do our cultural elites have such little respect for the truth?
The contrast should embarrass Australia. We protect race fakes like Bruce Pascoe, but Canada has just shown it calls out its own.
Just ask famed “Indian” writer and academic Thomas King – now outed and cancelled as a fake Cherokee.
Canada has always had less patience with what’s now called “Pretendians”, who’ve been notorious ever since the great Indian ecologist Grey Owl was revealed after his death in 1938 to be the not-so-great English impostor Archibald Stansfeld Belaney.
Pretendians became an industry as identity politics took off, the Noble Savage myth returned and being white became synonymous with being a planet-wrecking, colonising racist.
Author Joseph Boyden is a classic case. He has valorised “First Nations” people while identifying himself first as of Mi’kmaq and Métis ancestry, and then Nipmuc and Ojibway. Turns out he’s none of the above.
Then there’s Oscar-winning singer Buffy Sainte-Marie, who dressed in Indian beads and fabrics and claimed to have been born on a reserve to Cree parents. Alas, her parents were actually of Italian and English ancestry.
And now there’s King, the 82-year-old “Cherokee” author of the bestseller The Inconvenient Indian, in which he pleased the West’s self-hating white elites with fashionable rants about how “whites want Indians to disappear” and had once found it “encouraging” to see “Indians were dying off in satisfying numbers from disease and starvation”.
He even claimed – with zero evidence – that “up to 50 per cent” of an estimated 150,000 Indian children at residential schools “died from disease, malnutrition, neglect and abuse”, a completely bogus figure, much like the Australian Human Rights Council claim that up to 100,000 Aboriginal children were “stolen” from their parents in an act of “genocide”.
What a career King had in peddling such slop. His many other books with Indian themes sold well, he was hired as an academic in Indigenous studies, and was promoted rapturously by Canada’s version of our ABC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
His many prizes include the ultimate honour – Companion of the Order of Canada.
But, oh dear. King has now been confronted by genealogists of the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds and confessed to being a fake, although he insists an honest one. He blames mum for telling him dad was Indian.
He’s returned his Aboriginal award, and the Edmonton Opera has scrapped its production of a work based on his Indians on Vacation.
But now contrast. King is cancelled, but in Australia such fakes are protected.
Take Bruce Pascoe, author of the bestseller Dark Emu.
Pascoe first publicly claimed he was Aboriginal some time after a Canberra Times reviewer in 1988 said his novel Fox, imagining an Aboriginal hero, would have been better had Pascoe been Aboriginal, too.
Soon he was, to immense success. Pascoe won a NSW Premier’s award for best Indigenous author. He was fawned over by writers’ festivals and our ABC, which also promoted him in videos for children.
His Dark Emu was even taught in schools, despite citing bogus sources to claim hunter-gathering Aboriginals were actually farmers. Melbourne University even bought into this nonsense by hiring Pascoe as its Enterprise Professor of Indigenous Agriculture. Governments gave him grants to grow Aboriginal crops.
Yet for years I’ve shown that Pascoe is a fake Aboriginal spruiking fake history.
He kept changing his story about his supposed Aboriginal ancestors – first, they were on his mother’s side, then on his father’s – and to this day refuses to give any proof.
Professional genealogists from the darkemuexposed.org website have since confirmed his ancestry is 100 per cent British, and Pascoe even admitted on SBS that “many” of his own family didn’t accept they were Aboriginals.
So why do so many institutions still cover for him?
The ABC still promotes Pascoe as a Yuin, Bunurong and Tasmanian Aboriginal man, as did Books & Publishing, the biggest journal in our publishing industry, just this week. The Nine newspapers also don’t admit he’s just a white guy, and nor does Melbourne University.
This refusal to confront race fakes is typical in Australia, unlike Canada.
I’ve publicly identified two Labor politicians and seven prominent academics who claim to be Aboriginal, but have no Aboriginal ancestors in their genealogy, as confirmed by darkemuexposed.org’s genealogists. None would prove to us they were Aboriginal, yet none were publicly disowned by their party or their university.
No NSW premier has even demanded Pascoe return his premier’s prize for best Aboriginal writer.
Why do our cultural elites have such little respect for the truth? Shouldn’t Canada’s example shame them?
Originally published as Bolt: Why does Australia protect race fakes like Bruce Pascoe?
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