Indigenous people have been raising alarm bells over Amira and Nadya Gill’s claims of Inuit ancestry for years.
Instagram accounts like inuk.barbie and raceshifters have made detailed posts on the issue.
They first made headlines for their business Kanata Trade Co. which was created to give back to Indspire — a registered charity that invests in Indigenous education.
In 2021, the Toronto sisters were featured by the organization as donors and bursary recipients. This was also the first place they publicly listed themselves as having enrolment with Nunavut Tunngavik Inc.
Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. announced in a press release late last month that they were launching an investigation into the Gill’s “potential” enrolment fraud and mentioned that Karima Manji, Amira and Nadya’s mother, claimed she adopted the twins and identified an Inuk woman as their birth mother.
This story was first reported by Jeff Pelletier in Nunatsiaq News on March 30, 2023.
According to an email sent to the news outlet on March 29 by Amira, their “Inuk heritage comes through the Noah and Hughes families from Iqaluit, and that their mother lived with a man named Harry Hughes.”
The Noah family has since released a statement refuting the claims.
“We do not know the Gill sisters and had no knowledge that they existed … my mother is a vulnerable person who may have been exploited,” the statement reads.
“We are also asking for the RCMP to conduct an investigation into this situation … we hope that organizations who have granted Inuit-specific funding and employment opportunities to the Gill sisters will also look into this.”
The RCMP did not respond to Global News’ request for comment by the time of publication.
The sister’s brother, Liam Gill, also refutes the claims. In a Twitter post, he wrote “I wasn’t raised with any specific culture, don’t identify as Indigenous and don’t have a status card.” Adding, “They are not adopted. We have the same birth parents.”
Global News has been unable to reach Amira and Nadya for comment.
The “pretendian” problem has been gaining traction across North America in recent years. On Thursday, news broke that Vianne Timmons is no longer president and vice chancellor of Memorial University after questions over her claims to Mi’kmaq ancestry and “membership” to Bras d’Or First Nation.
The term “pretendian” is used to describe someone who claims to be Indigenous, but isn’t — Métis lawyer Jean Teillet prefers the term fraud.
“I’m not greatly fond of (the term pretendian) because pretend sounds harmless, right? Like kids pretend. And so it sounds like there’s no harm that comes out of this,” she said. “I prefer to call it fraud because the definition of fraud is intentional deception to obtain a material gain and that’s what we’re talking about here.”
Last year, Teillet published a report for the University of Saskatchewan exploring Indigenous identity fraud. She said news like this is just scratching the surface.
“The cases that have come to the attention of the media and have therefore become sort of nationally known are only the tip of the iceberg. There are thousands of people who are … claiming an Indigenous identity and I would say most of them, a lot of them are illegitimate,” Teillet said. “According to professor Darryl Leroux, we’re talking over 100,000 people.”
While there’s no way to know whether the RCMP will do an investigation, Teillet said there would have to be a lot of thought put into whether there’s actually a crime here.
“Following an investigation, they would have to then charge them and in order to charge there has to be a reasonable probability of securing a conviction, and then it would be a conviction for what?” she said.
“One has to ask, so what’s the damage? What’s the harm? What’s the crime with (Nunavut Tunngavik Inc.)? And then you have to go to the other institutions and ask whether they would be interested in laying some kind of claim or charge … so there’s a lot of steps involved in trying to move this into a criminal investigation.”
She said that if the RCMP were to charge someone it would certainly “set up a big gate,” but wouldn’t change anything else in the country.
“What needs to happen is that institutions need to set up verification processes essentially in order to stop this from happening,” she said. “And one of the first things that would stop it from happening is if they said off the top, we will check your credentials … that’s going to stop a lot of people because the reason they did this is because no one was checking.”
In an interview with Global News earlier this year, comedian and playwright Drew Hayden Taylor from Curve Lake First Nation said one of the main reasons people claim Indigenous identity is financial benefits; “(everything) from getting cheap gas or cheap cigarettes up to the higher levels of writing books, making films, getting important positions in academia, society, organizations, companies, etc.”
And the Gill sisters have benefitted. Amira received a scholarship from Hydro One in 2017. According to APTN she also won an RBC scholarship meant for Indigenous students and two Indspire bursaries in 2020 and 2021.
When it comes to Indigenous identity fraud, Teillet said there are two kinds of fraudsters. “One are the people who fabricate out of whole cloth that would be what’s alleged against these two Gill sisters,” she said.
“But then there are the ones who are what I call the embellishers, and those are the ones who take an ever so great Indian grandmama from the 1600s that they haven’t known about for 400 years and then suddenly stand up and say that they always knew they were Indigenous.”
“There are non-Indigenous people who are going to lie and cheat in order to gain access to these registries … we know how far (these fraudsters) are prepared to go and how long they’re prepared to keep up these lies.”
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