Not Such a Good Story after All

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Whatever the general Canadian experience, Thomas King’s public confirmation that he has no legitimate Cherokee connections was not a shock to many Indigenous writers and scholars. His claims have long been a point of quiet conversation in Indigenous literary studies and CanLit, and many of us stopped assigning or engaging with his work long before this revelation. But now that he’s confirmed what many community-grounded Cherokees have been saying for almost two decades, we’re once again grappling with the aftermath of the revelations and undertaking the relentless labour of rebuilding and repair, as we’ve done after Joseph Boyden, Gwen Benaway, and so many others. We’ll almost certainly be forced to do this again in the future.

This case has a very personal edge for me as a Colorado-born, enrolled Cherokee Nation citizen-scholar who’s lived in Canada since 2002. I’m on record as having repeatedly endorsed King as a fellow Cherokee writer, most extensively in the first edition of my book Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History (2006), in which I discuss King’s novel Truth and Bright Water as the most Cherokee of his works. Being so far from other Cherokees and from more recognizable contexts, I frankly wanted King’s Cherokee-themed work to come from an identifiably Cherokee place, and I looked for any crumb of familiarity there. Having not grown up in community in northeast Oklahoma myself, I was loath to question other people’s treasured family stories or self-identification, and I naively struggled with the idea that people would build entire careers based only on vague, unanchored family claims. Even in 2006, that reluctance was questionable, but I long held it as a guiding principle.

It was a flawed principle that would repeatedly undermine my work and its integrity. Fully half of the writers I discussed in the first edition of Our Fire Survives the Storm were (and remain) unsubstantiated Cherokee claimants like King. A book ostensibly dedicated to celebrating Cherokee literary expression was almost fatally compromised by platforming so many writers who could demonstrate no verifiable connection to Cherokees besides an aspirational one, and other Cherokees rightly challenged me for naming so many people as Cherokee without evidence. (Given that we have one of the most comprehensive kinship records of any Indigenous nation in the world, the likelihood of someone having legitimate Cherokee connections without tribally verifiable proof is almost negligible.)

The questions about King kept piling up, and whatever answers could be gleaned remained vague and unsatisfying. The last time I wrote about him as Cherokee was in 2018—the same year that US Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren released DNA test results she believed supported her claim of being Cherokee and Delaware in spite of her having no actual evidence of relations or history with either tribe, a public relations debacle that remains notorious in Indian Country. That was part of a fundamental shift in my understanding of the consequence of these matters.

In 2020, the Digadatseli’i Cherokee Scholars group released the Cherokee Scholars’ Statement on Sovereignty and Identity. Digadatseli’i is a collective of enrolled citizen scholars of the three federally recognized Cherokee tribes: the Cherokee Nation and United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma, and the Eastern Band of Cherokees in North Carolina. We’d been working for five years on a collective statement about Cherokee identity, and those long discussions were difficult but generative. I’d started off in those first conversations in 2015 as an inclusivist who argued for the necessary value of self-identification, but by the end of those discussions, I had added my voice to our collective public commitment to Cherokee sovereignty. By 2020, my uncritical inclusivity had taken many hits: friends and colleagues with vague or entirely questionable claims retreating into hostile defensiveness or performative anguish to avoid honest scrutiny; students applying for admissions and grants with manifestly false or stereotyped claims to Cherokee identity; writers presenting themselves as authorities on Cherokee matters while never being able to explain just how they’re connected to our nations. Warren’s turn to DNA was a particularly dangerous shift in public discourse, as it reinforced essentialist ideas about race that displaced tribal sovereignty and erased a vast and dependable Cherokee documentary record.

Importantly, this all took place in the aftermath of the US Supreme Court’s 2013 “Baby Veronica” case, Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl. The plaintiffs, Matthew and Melanie Capobianco, were white evangelicals who were fighting to adopt a Cherokee child over the objections of the girl’s father, Cherokee Nation citizen Dusten Brown, and in defiance of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). (The US had its own parallel to Canada’s Sixties Scoop, and ICWA was passed in 1978 to stem the tide of tribal child theft and the destabilization of Native families and communities.) Conservative Justice Samuel Alito questioned tribal sovereignty and dismissed the Cherokee Nation’s citizenship requirements by invoking the spectre of racial preference and blood quantum in the Court’s majority opinion supporting the Capobiancos’ adoption efforts (see Benson). His comments were widely interpreted among Native legal scholars as a warning shot in right-wing efforts to frame tribal sovereignty as a matter of race-based preference rather than inherent political distinctiveness.

Whether from the political left or the right, there is a direct line of racial essentialism between Alito’s racist opining on Cherokee “blood,” Warren’s bogus DNA claims, and unsubstantiated family stories like King’s. All insist on a reductive idea of racial blood as core to Cherokeeness and, in so doing, actively undermine Cherokee authority over belonging. Further, the ongoing carnage from other false Cherokee claimants like Ward Churchill, Andrea Smith, Maylei Blackwell, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, and so many other writers, academics, artists, and politicians has made it increasingly clear that this is an issue of existential importance to Cherokee survival. My long reluctance to acknowledge these boundaries of belonging wasn’t actually kindness—it was intellectual and moral cowardice that exacerbated anti-Indigenous extraction and misrepresentation.

The situation has only gotten worse in the years since. As of 2020, at least 1.5 million people in the US believe that they’re Cherokees, with nothing to support their claims aside from hope, family lore, and stereotype, far more than the recognized citizenries of the three Cherokee tribes (see Justice, “Cherokee Dispossession”). According to the 2021 Canadian census, 10,825 Canadians make the same claim (Statistics Canada), even though the Cherokee Nation identifies only 145 Cherokee citizens in Canada (and numbers from the Eastern Band and United Keetoowah Band would add only a couple of dozen more at very best) (Terrapin).¹ Like King, some of these claimants have built lucrative careers based on that shaky foundation—none to his level of success, certainly, but significant nonetheless.

But it’s not just King, or Boyden, or Benaway, or the next one to come, whoever it may be. It’s not just unfortunately misguided or deliberately dodgy individuals. It’s deeper, and it goes to the heart of what we say we do in Indigenous and Canadian literary studies.

And here’s the rub: just as he’s not the only Cherokee claimant to build a career on questionable claims, King also didn’t attain his public standing in isolation. He was helped along the way. My own past work helped platform him and his voice, thus further deforming the broader understanding of Cherokee belonging by not upholding Cherokee sovereignty and specificity. Others have done the same. We have hard questions to ask about why the field of Indigenous literary studies in Canada and the US seems to be so vulnerable to those with false or shaky claims, and so hostile to Indigenous nationhood and the right of communities to determine their own protocols of belonging.

King was celebrated and rewarded in Canada in ways that community- and culturally grounded Indigenous writers simply have never been, especially women and genderqueer folx. It wasn’t his heavy lifting that built a community of writers in the field, certainly not compared to writers and mentors like Lee Maracle, Jeannette Armstrong, Beth Brant, Maria Campbell, Marilyn Dumont, Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, and others. Yet he’s earned many of the glories for the results of their often unseen and still too-often unacknowledged labour. Joseph Boyden was similar. But we’d do well to ask why this keeps happening and who gets left out in the process, and about the continuing role that colonialism, misogyny, homophobia, colourism, and anti-Blackness play in literary circles in this country.

Part of it is that many of us have internalized the idea that King himself championed: that “the truth about stories is that that’s all we are” (Truth 2); that, in the end, all someone needs to be an Indigenous writer is to have a compelling and vaguely tragic backstory of community disconnection, and it somehow becomes real, regardless of what the community has to say about it. This certainly worked for King for a long time. It may be one good story, that one, but this particular story comes with bad consequences.

I suspect that much of the reason we’ve been reticent about addressing this as a field is also because many scholars and writers have implicitly embraced easily absorbable, individualist ethnicity over rights-asserting collective distinctiveness. For all the affirmations about the importance of Indigenous sovereignty and decolonization and self-determination, when it comes down to it, too many people want to centre the uncomplicated lone literary Indian genius, not the strong and sovereign Indigenous Nations that stand distinct from Canada.

All communities have boundaries, and all boundaries are complicated and challenging. But if we believe in community, we also need to understand why such boundaries exist and what they protect and defend, not just what—or who—they might exclude. Not all boundaries are oppressive or unjust; not all people with claims to Indigenous roots are truthful or accurate or innocent. And maybe a lot of the people we’ve centred in the field ultimately serve the individualist white settler project, their work having just enough surface difference to seem exotic but not so challenging as to make us question the foundations of white supremacy and colonialism in North America. If all we’re doing is adding some quaint cultural colour to the otherwise pallid settler palette, then we’re not doing Indigenous literary studies, but covert CanLit colonialism in redface.

I’m still grappling with the implications of how my own work has furthered harms against not just Cherokees but all our Nations, especially by privileging unsubstantiated self-storying over collective values of verifiable belonging. I now exclusively centre citizenship in all my work, including a new, fully revised edition of Our Fire Survives the Storm (2026). But we don’t all have the luxury or time to do new editions of all our compromised past work, even if we all wanted to. We can’t rewrite the past damage that came from misplaced trust. But we can learn from that history and do better going forward.

It’s time to face this collectively as well as individually, because the real truth about stories is that not all stories are true, and there are lasting harms that result from centring the ones that aren’t. I hope this case will be the catalyst for some long-needed, critical, and courageous conversations about what we’re doing in Indigenous and Canadian literary studies, which writers and contexts we champion, and why. If we don’t, then we’ll be back here over and over again, getting increasingly distant from our communities and wondering why they don’t trust us, our stated values, or our work. Indigenous peoples—our Nations as much as our individual kin—are burdened enough by the myriad harms of the settler imaginary. We don’t need untethered fantasies of false belonging to exacerbate that damage.

 

Note

1. Census figures are courtesy of Carter Thompson, Acting Consulting Analyst Team Manager, Statistics Canada, on February 9, 2026; Cherokee Nation citizen numbers in Canada, obtained via Cherokee Nation Freedom of Information Request, are courtesy of Gwen Terrapin, Independent Information Officer, Cherokee Nation Office of the Attorney General, on January 26, 2026.

 

Works Cited

Benson, Krista L. “Indigenous Reproductive Justice after Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl (2013).” Reproductive Justice and Sexual Rights, edited by Tanya Saroj Bakhru, Routledge, 2019, pp. 85–104.

Digadatseli’i ᏗᎦᏓᏤᎵᎢ Cherokee Scholars. Cherokee Scholars’ Statement on Sovereignty and Identity, 13 Feb. 2020, http://bit.ly/3QKwzT6.

Justice, Daniel Heath. “Cherokee Dispossession through Claimant Self-Declaration: Assessing Cherokee Heritage Claims in the 2020 US Census.” Genealogy, vol. 9, no. 4, 2025, pp. 1–49. MDPI, https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy9040131.

—. Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History, Citizenship and Sovereignty Edition, U of Minnesota P, 2026.

King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. House of Anansi Press, 2008.

United States, Supreme Court. Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl. 4 Jan. 2013. Justia, https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/570/637/.

 

Daniel Heath Justice is a Colorado-born enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation/ᏣᎳᎩᎯ ᎠᏰᎵ and a Spears, Foreman, and Riley citizen descendant. A scholar, editor, essayist, and fiction writer, he works on unceded Musqueam territory at the University of British Columbia, where he is a full professor and UBC Distinguished University Scholar in the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies and the Department of English Language and Literatures. His most recent book is the fully revised and expanded twentieth-anniversary edition of Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History, Citizenship and Sovereignty Edition (2026).