LAUSR

This book raises important questions about race, nationalism, colonialism, politics, and the law, and how politicized personal identity is shaped, in the contemporary context, by (real or imagined) genealogical ties and genetic ancestry. The empirical focus is the ongoing, contemporary struggles over Indigenous self-determination in the province of Québec, Canada. Leroux offers an important, necessary and politically charged intervention, including a wealth of detailed evidence about race shifting from white to ‘Indigenous’, undertaken mainly by French-speaking Québécois men involved in hunting and fishing. Some of these race shifters, naively motivated by a vaguely rumored or instinctively felt familial sense of Indigenous belonging, scour genealogical records online or take scientifically dubious commercial DNA tests, in an attempt to ‘discover’ real or imagined Indigenous ancestry. In what is only an apparent paradox, some of these race shifters are self-avowed white supremacists, seeking to indigenize themselves literally, but also spuriously, through highly selective readings of genealogical records and, at times, frankly eugenicist arguments. If motivated by necessary moral and political solidarity with Indigenous peoples against the white usurpation of Indigenous identity – perversely facilitated by unscrupulous for-profit DNA companies – Leroux’s book ultimately raises more questions than it answers. After first critically situating and then engaging with the important work that Leroux undertakes, below, I consider important concerns raised by his research and then contextualize these within a broader literature that is sometimes alluded to but never fully engaged. These concerns include but are not limited to: