Talk:Michelle Latimer

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*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20120122081904/http://blog.bcdb.com/animated-shorts-nominated-genie-award-2730 to http://blog.bcdb.com/animated-shorts-nominated-genie-award-2730/
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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Should there be a section in this biography discussing the questions about the legitimacy of her identity as someone with Metis / Kitigan Zibi heritage?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:8084:2:BD00:78D9:67E9:4C85:A973 (talk) 11:44, 18 December 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: I've added a bit of information about this to the "early life" section. However, as a neutral encyclopedia Wikipedia has to be very careful in how we write about such matters: for example, the current dispute does not necessarily prove in and of itself that she's been deliberately misrepresenting herself as having indigenous ancestry, as it is possible that (a) she was genuinely misinformed and just trusted a thing that her parents or grandparents actually told her rather than making anything up herself, and/or (b) she actually does have indigenous ancestry and was just wrong about where her ancestors came from. We simply don't know what's actually the case as of right now — all we know for sure is that her claim to having roots in one specific indigenous community was questioned, so it's not Wikipedia's place to speculate about anything more than that. For instance, it's absolutely not our role or our place to accuse her of deliberately inventing non-existent indigenous heritage for personal gain, as she's been accused of on Twitter. (As if being indigenous were some sort of magical path to fame and fortune in the first place?) Our role is to simply stick to the known facts, not to presume anything that cannot yet be proven or supported by reliable sources. Bearcat (talk) 17:47, 19 December 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  User:Bearcat wrote "As if being indigenous were some sort of magical path to fame and fortune in the first place?"  That's a good point, but in Ms Latimer's case, she specifically leveraged her unsubstantiated claim of indigenous identity to collect a large number of grants and awards intended specifically for indigenous artists, so there is a significant element of personal gain (and, if the allegations prove true, moral theft from the genuine indigenous artists who did not win those grants or awards). David (talk) 18:59, 28 December 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  But again, what we don't know, is whether she personally invented a claim of indigenous ancestry in order to gain from indigenous-focused grants, or whether she simply trusted something that her parents and grandparents told her and never actually knew that it was false because she never had any particular reason to doubt it. There's a huge moral and ethical difference, and that's what I'm talking about: we need to simply and neutrally state the facts, and be careful not to editorialize about whether she deliberately lied or simply made a mistake because other people had lied to her. Bearcat (talk) 17:03, 8 January 2021 (UTC)

text: I'm not suggesting we should "make excuses" for her, but it's equally inappropriate to simply assume the worst. The thing we know for sure is that there's a gap between how she presented her heritage in the past and the actual truth — but we simply do not know whether she invented that claim herself, or simply believed what she had been told by her family without actually knowing that she had to investigate it further. That's what I'm talking about: there are two parallel lines here, bounding both sides of what's verifiable, and we have to be careful not to step across either of those lines in either direction. Bearcat (talk) 23:55, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

text: Since when has there ever been a rule that anybody has to do their own personal genealogical research to independently reverify whether they're really the ethnicity their family told them they were before they're allowed to say that they're that ethnicity? Again, all I've ever said there's a big difference between "claimed to be indigenous because she made up false shit herself for personal advantage" and "claimed to be indigenous because she believed what her parents and grandparents had told her about their family history and genuinely didn't know that she was lied to" — both of which are real possibilities here, so we can't accuse her of the former in our editorial voice as long as the latter is still inside the range of possibilities. Bearcat (talk) 15:34, 15 October 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Indigenous claims