NAFPS Forum

QuoteMy thoughts on the Thomas King scandal
Posted on November 26, 2025 by Peggy Blair
Direct Link: https://peggyblair.wordpress.com/2025/11/26/my-thoughts-on-the-thomas-king-scandal/

....King writes in THE INCONVENIENT INDIAN about how the Cherokee Nation (there are actually three of them) has a set of fifteen very detailed historical rolls that establish Cherokee citizenship. He then criticizes the rolls as "self-serving and self-defeating" and incomplete. He is the only scholar I know of to do so.

....I think he should apologize to those Indigenous (and other) writers and scholars he displaced, and retract his erroneous statements about the validity of the Cherokee records.

QuoteMy thoughts on the Thomas King scandal
Posted on November 26, 2025 by Peggy Blair
Direct Link: https://peggyblair.wordpress.com/2025/11/26/my-thoughts-on-the-thomas-king-scandal/

I've been thinking about this business with Thomas King a lot. This was the week when he admitted he wasn't Cherokee at all.

First of all, I come from this as someone who is white and who has never pretended to be otherwise, although like King, I have a doctorate. His was in Indigenous studies. Both my LLM and LLD were in Indigenous law and legal history. But my engagement with First Nations started long before then. My father taught at non-residential Indian schools as a shop teacher. I spent my grade 10 as one of two white kids at a school in Masset, Queen Charlotte Islands, now known as Haida Gwaii. My classmates were people like Reggie Davidson and Jimmy Hart, who went on to become renowned carvers (Jimmy Hart is now the chief there).

As a lawyer I spent over 30 years working with First Nations on treaty cases, mostly around treaty fishing rights, always on the First Nation side, never for government. I was a policy advisor to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples and to the Indian Claims Commission among others. I spent six or seven years as a senior adjudicator in the Indian residential school claims process hearing claims of horrific sexual and physical abuse before I burned out.

I wrote a critically-acclaimed book about the Williams Treaty process in Canada called LAMENT FOR A FIRST NATION and published dozens of peer-reviewed articles in law and historical journals. I taught as a sessional law professor at Queens and Ottawa U's Faculties of Law, but I could never get a position as an associate professor. This is because, as the Dean of Common Law at the University of Ottawa told me, I was "a white woman who wanted to teach Indigenous law."

By contrast, King, presenting as Cherokee, secured a position in Indigenous Studies in 1980 at the University of Alberta, and in 1995 at the University of Guelph. I don't know if he would have been hired if he had not been widely believed to be Cherokee. In 1980, which was the same year I graduated from the U of A with my LLB, there weren't many Indigenous scholars around with doctorates so I have to think his "Indigeneity" played a role. (As an aside, Olive Dickason, who I knew very well, was the first Indigenous scholar to graduate with a PhD in Indigenous History in Canada and she got hers in 1977.)

While it is possible that King's career would have been as distinguished had he not presented as Cherokee, I think it's unlikely.  THE INCONVENIENT INDIAN, published in 2012, examines relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples based on King's so-called lived experiences as an Indigenous person; it wouldn't have been published if the truth had been known. He won the RBC Taylor prize for it in 2014.

King writes in THE INCONVENIENT INDIAN about how the Cherokee Nation (there are actually three of them) has a set of fifteen very detailed historical rolls that establish Cherokee citizenship. He then criticizes the rolls as "self-serving and self-defeating" and incomplete. He is the only scholar I know of to do so. I'm aware of at least one instance where he was cited as a scholar challenging the accuracy and completeness of the rolls. This was when the identity of a visual artist whose ancestors were not on them, but who claimed to be Cherokee, was questioned. He was quoted as writing:

"Among the Cherokee, you have Cherokees who are Cherokee by blood and who have an ancestor on the required rolls, and you have Cherokee who are Cherokees by blood but whose ancestors are not listed on the required rolls. The one group is 'authentic.' The other group is not. To my way of thinking, such a distinction is self-serving and self-defeating at the same time."

I find it interesting, then, that according to the Globe and Mail story, when TAAF, the group that had examined King's background and determined that he was not in fact Cherokee, presented him with this genealogical information via a Zoom call, he immediately and readily agreed that it was conclusive. He admits he is not Cherokee.

King says he has no plans to apologize. He says he will surrender his Aboriginal Achievement Award but claims that his other accolades were based strictly on his own merits and had nothing to do with his ethnicity. He says his claim was based on a misunderstanding and not wilful misrepresentation. The most charitable interpretation I can come up with for his behaviour, however, is one of wilful blindness.

About ten years ago, I read a post by a highly regarded Cherokee genealogist who said then that he had examined the rolls and concluded that King had no connection to the Cherokee Nation. As noted, King wrote in detail about the rolls in THE INCONVENIENT INDIAN. I assume from what he wrote there that he had consulted them and didn't find a family connection and decided they must be incomplete, based on his family's oral history.

The Cherokee do not rely on oral history, however, because it is all too often unreliable. They do not rely on DNA tests either because those tests are so frequently wrong. Every time I hear about someone getting a DNA test to establish their "blood line" as Indigenous, I think of the Toronto man who sent in a sample of his girlfriend's dog's DNA and got a result back that said the dog was Indigenous. (Cree scholar Kim Tallbear has written about the problems with DNA to establish Indigeneity for decades: it's simply not useful.)

Being a member of a First Nation in Canada or a tribe in the U.S. isn't about which one you claim to belong to, it's about which nation or tribe claims you. The Cherokee have never accepted King's claims of kinship; as noted, one of their own genealogists expressly rebutted it.

Since the scandal erupted, I've seen people post things like, "I love his books anyway, so who cares?"

Well, I do. It's hurtful to the First Nations peoples who trusted him, who amplified his voice, and who took pride in the success of an Indigenous writer and scholar. He accepted awards that were intrinsically linked to his supposed cultural identity, not just his writing, and occupied positions that might have been filled by Indigenous scholars if not for his misrepresentation. His name has frequently appeared on lists of recommended books by Indigenous writers. He can't simply say that this was all about his writing, and has nothing to do with the identity he claimed.

Is it enough for him to say, "I believed what my mother told me"?

Perhaps up to a certain point, but not after he became an expert in the field. He knew what was required to verify if he was Cherokee or not. He should have done his homework and consulted the Cherokee rolls. If, as I suspect, he did, and discovered his father's ancestry wasn't on them, he should have admitted then that he might not be Cherokee instead of attacking the highly reliable records of the very nation he claimed to belong to.

There have been calls for accountability from King for over a decade. The fact that King is owning up now, and only after he was challenged by TAAF with irrefutable evidence, is the first step towards achieving that accountability, but there should be others. Among those, I think he should apologize to those Indigenous (and other) writers and scholars he displaced, and retract his erroneous statements about the validity of the Cherokee records.

QuoteEventually, after becoming part of Chasing Horse's group, the Circle, attending healing ceremonies and surviving cancer, Leone started to see him as a messianic figure.

"He could say, ask or do anything, and there was no wrong," Leone said.

And that was where it all went bad.

Quote"We think it was very important to ensure that each victim was represented separate and distinct in the sentence," said Chief Deputy District Attorney William Rowles and Deputy District Attorney Bianca Pucci. "We are very happy the judge agreed with the assessment as each victim survived their own trauma. The defendant should be held accountable for each victim separately. We want to thank Judge Peterson for her professionalism throughout the trial, particularly in the way she conducted herself in balancing the rights of a defendant and the privacy rights of sexual assault survivors."

The Clark County District Attorney's Office argued for a sentence that reflected the severity of those crimes and the years-long pattern of exploitation presented at trial.

"This outcome reflects the strength of the victims who came forward, the tireless work of law enforcement, and all others involved," said Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson. "My office remains committed to protecting the most vulnerable members of our community."

QuoteChasing Horse will serve his sentence in the Nevada Department of Corrections. Should he be released in the future, he will be required to register as a sex offender under Nevada law.

Outside of Nevada, Chasing Horse also faces warrants for alleged crimes in Montana and Canada.

QuoteHe is an enrolled member of the Echota Cherokee Tribe of Alabama and the Lenape Indian Tribe of Delaware.

Quotea) at least one ancestral line that was missed entirely

Quote from: Advanced Smite on March 27, 2026, 12:57:17 AMDisclaimer
All of this research was done using publicly available information. It is my opinion. There is a lack of clarity on some lines that could lead to a Native American ancestor. The purpose of this research was to verify KP's specific claims - not to find distant ancestry. Please forgive any typos - this was prepared quickly and I couldn't find spell check in the new forum format.

QuoteAs a Red River Métis and Sault Ste. Marie Ojibwe descendant, I am also interested in how present-day queer, trans, and Two-Spirit Indigenous people make connections with these ancestral legacies.

---

Source: University of Wisconsin - Madison
Direct Link: https://gws.wisc.edu/staff/pyle-kai/
Archive Link: https://archive.ph/CoHbQ

Quoteb) another line that clearly shows my ancestors as Halfbreeds which has been deemed unreliable for unclear reasons

Quote from: Advanced Smite on March 27, 2026, 12:57:17 AMIn my opinion, there are reasons to question KP's claims. At the same time, I want to be clear that it's possible KP may have distant Native American (NA) ancestry. An anomaly in the documentation is that KP's 3x great-grandfather and his siblings are marked as half breeds on their Wisconsin birth records. I will provide one potential theory below. I want to be transparent up front about that information but emphasize there are big issues with KP's claims. KP has made very specific claims to being Sault Ste Marie and Metis on social media that don't appear to hold up to scrutiny.

...

It's interesting that KP's 3x great-grandfather, Alexander LaPlante, and his siblings are listed as half breeds on their Wisconsin birth records when records from the previous generation don't seem to corroborate this. Alexander LaPlante's oldest sibling was born in 1835 while he was born in 1848. The 1836 Chippewa and Ottawa Treaty coincided with the birth of Alexander's older sister. $150,000 was negotiated by the tribes for their half breed family members. It was widely covered in the news and fraudulent applications were received. I checked the 1836 Half Breed Payment Roll (those accepted) and didn't find any of KP's ancestors. Some people have tried to link a "Catherine Brodwine" as Alexander's mother...but none of the demographic information matches. I can't definitively explain the birth record anomaly, but the timing is interesting. I'd love it if someone can provide a more definitive answer. The Litte Chute Historical Society has more information about this line: https://littlechutehistory.org/genealogy/getperson.php?personID=I423802&tree=lc

Quotec) some information which just does not match up with the info and documentation I have