CBC’s Misuse of Genealogy to Attack Indigenous Identity
By: Daniel Voshart
Tags: Genealogy, Pseudoscience, Cbc, Indigenous

CBC’s Misuse of Genealogy to Attack Indigenous Identity

Over the last two years, the government-funded Crown corporation CBC has ramped up enforcement of a narrowed definition of Indigenous with a clever use of non-Indigenous reporters, lateral violence and arguments founded in Eugenics.

TRIGGER WARNING. Topics include: mental health, systemic racism, sexism, antisemitism, genocide and white supremacy.

As someone who has documented cultural exchange programs with First Nation communities, trained as an expert witness, and who collaborates on international forensic identification projects, I made every effort to make the CBC aware of the hostile nature of recent articles regarding Indigenous identity. Over the past three months I’ve communicated my concerns to the CBC Ombudsman Jack Nagler who forwarded them to Editor in Chief of CBC News Brodie Fenlon and Managing Editor of CBC Manitoba Melanie Verhaeghe.

The most disturbing issue is that the genealogist Dominique Ritchot, who the CBC has presented as a ‘specialist’ or having ‘expertise’, has a 2010 blog post on identity that cites Nazi-era eugenics. This article was easily found by clicking the website listed on their Twitter or searching their name on Google. Ritchot shared a similar post on identity one year earlier to a genealogy forum.

Ritchot believes that their Indigenous “genetic baggage”¹ has been bred out of themselves and she provides free ‘research’ on the topic to people who will listen. Eugenics is the antithesis of humanism. It grants its proponents a pseudoscientific reason to subjugate people.

(Paragraph added April 13th) Indigenous women were disproportionally sterilized by the eugenics movement in Canada. The hierarchy of the Catholic Church, likely aware of the long history of mixing in New France, and promoting large families for political purposes, believed they could instead “breed the Indian out” of the population.

“BLOOD QUANTUM” by Marty Two Bulls, a Native American Political Cartoonist & Artist, Oglala Lakota. 2008.

(Canada uses 6(1) and 6(2) Indian Status instead of “Blood Quantum” but the results are nearly identical.)

Current Canadian Indian Status. Diagram by author.

DNA identification has evolved rapidly since it was discovered in the 80's. Yet in their blog, Ritchot bases her knowledge about modern genetic issues on the 1945 book L’HÉRÉDITÉ ET L’HOMME [EN: HEREDITY AND MAN]. It is a tomb of pseudoscience. The book is from the collection “France Forever” and describes how among “the first settlers of Quebec, deprived of medical care and exposed to the harsh climate, the infant mortality filter selected a robust breed. Modern progress, on the other hand, extends the average length of life by protecting unfit and crazed people once doomed to a brief existence.”² It states “Whites have an average IQ of 100, Native Americans 70, Negroes in the southern United States, 75”³ but that “A black elite” is perfectly capable of leading Blacks⁴. The book is against race-mixing; and advocates sterilization of the “unfit”. The book cites the extremist literature of Henschel the man who sought to renew the Aryan race through selective breeding. He spawned the anti-Semitic, anti-Slavic movement that predated, but was eventually absorbed into, the Nazi party. The phrase “Pure race”⁵ show up 26 times in the book’s Google Books preview.

In addition to citing proto-Nazis the book, quite literally, cites Nazi Germany’s Law for The Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring moralizing only a few elements insofar as they are “specifically condemned by the encyclical Casti connubii [Pope Pius XI](1930) and by the Holy Office (1931)”⁶. The book’s author advocates for prenuptial examination of women saying “Far from being an attack on freedom, it is an elementary act of justice: to hide serious anomalies is to deceive the spouse. Few people would happily marry someone with venereal disease or hereditary mental defects.”⁷