The unravelling story of Mary-Ellen Turpel-Lafond (ep 304)

This week: another one bites the dust? Who is the real Mary-Ellen Turpel-Lafond? A question very much on the minds of Indigenous people in Canada these days, still digesting the exhaustive and explosive CBC News investigation into her public and private life—not least, her repeated claims to being a treaty Indian as a daughter of a Cree man from a northern First Nation in Manitoba. A man the CBC could only verify as the B.C.-born settler son of settler parents of Euro-American ancestry.

Just some of the troubling discrepancies documented by an exposé that’s thrown virtually everything about Turpel-Lafond’s life story into question. A narrative that, ‘til now, presented her rapid rise to influence as a remarkable journey against the odds. One the CBC seems to show goes largely against the facts.

Joining host/producer Rick Harp to take a deep dive into what’s apparently only one of many such scandals of late, MI roundtable regulars Kim TallBear (professor in the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience and Society, and Candis Callison (Associate Professor in the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies and the Graduate School of Journalism at UBC).

// CREDITS: Our intro/extro theme is 'nesting' by birocratic.