I'm Never Going Back To My Old School
Memorial University is making news, for all the wrong reasons.
I suppose the impending arrest of Donald Trump is all we’ll be talking about this week, so I’m just going to leave this here:
I’ll believe he’s about to be indicted only when he is actually indicted, and I’ll believe he’ll be convicted only when he is actually convicted.
And, By God, the prosecutors better have an ironclad case against him. I don’t think Trump being indicted will help him politically, but being acquitted certainly will.
The MAGA cult will protest, as is their right. But if it devolves into another January 6, we can’t say we didn’t have adequate warning.
Whenever my fiercely proud but relatively isolated and sparsely populated home province makes international or even national news, I assume it’s for one of two reasons:
We hosted thousands of stranded airline passengers after the closure of American air space in the wake of a devastating terror attacks, forming lifelong bonds and friendships and proving what a hospitable people we are.1
One of us did or said something stupid.
My alma mater, Memorial University, has been having kind of a shitty month. First, university president Vianne Timmons was revealed to be the latest in a long line of white academics caught greatly exaggerating their claim to indigenous ancestry:
In the latest alleged “pretendian” incident to hit Canadian academia, the president of Newfoundland’s Memorial University has temporarily stepped aside after her claims of Mi’kmaw ancestry were publicly questioned.
Largely during a 12-year period when she served as president of the University of Regina, Vianne Timmons frequently cited Mi’kmaw ancestry in her CV and in official bios.
“Dr. Timmons is a member of the Bras d’Or Mi’kmaq First Nation in Nova Scotia,” reads the guide to a 2012 inclusion conference at which she appeared as a speaker. When Timmons spoke at the University of Northern British Columbia in 2017, an official event posting identified her as “a member of the Bras d’Or Mi’kmaq First Nation in Nova Scotia.”
The citation can also be found in official documents naming Timmons as a Saskatchewan representative to the Independent Advisory Board for Senate Appointments. “She is … a member of the Bras d’Or Mi’kmaq First Nation,” reads a 2018 briefing note provided to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
But the Bras d’Or Mi’kmaq First Nation is a recently formed group whose Indigenous status is unrecognized either by the federal government or by established Mi’kmaq nations.
What’s more, on March 8 an extensive feature by CBC’s Atlantic Investigative Unit probed more than 400 years of Timmons’ family history and failed to find any evidence of an Indigenous ancestor “less than 10 times removed.”
Stephen White, an expert in Acadian genealogy, told the broadcaster that Timmons’ most likely claim to Indigenous heritage was via her great-great-great grandmother, Marie Benoit, who was herself just one-sixteenth Mi’kmaq.
[…]
Perhaps most notably, Timmons was the 2019 recipient of a Indspire Award for Education, an award openly touted as “the highest honour the Indigenous community bestows upon its own people.”
This is the worst hit Memorial’s reputation has taken since 1995, when they inexplicably conferred a diploma upon controversial Substack writer Damian Penny.2
“The demand for racism exceeds supply” is a quote I’ve read on some right-wing websites whenever a hate-crime hoax or fake-ancestry scandal comes up. That’s going too far - just because some incidents are hoaxes certainly don’t mean most such incidents are hoaxes.
But in some circles, especially in academia, there’s definitely some cachet bestowed upon those who can show some identification with an historically oppressed group, and Timmons isn’t the first white person who’s discovered that. Some of them even get elected to the U.S. Senate.3
And then there’s this member of the University Board of Regents, who paid tribute to murdered police officers in her own unique manner:
The real outrage here, I guess, is not that two Edmonton cops (one originally from Nova Scotia) were killed in the line of duty, but that the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary used the doubleplusungood “thin blue line” symbol to illustrate its now-deleted Tweet.
Neil, of course, would never display such an offensive symbol loaded with historical baggage. Surely not.
In the unlikely event that the revolution arrives in Newfoundland, it’s gonna be awkward when the politburo discovers that Comrade Neil is a bourgeois small business owner.
A Communist who learned what she knows about politics from comic books? The jokes practically write themselves.
This is one of these situations where the little angel on my shoulder and the demon on the other should let have it out about how to respond.
The angel tells me that people like this only have power over me if I allow them to have power over me. She is just one person who has revealed herself to be terrible, but that pales in comparison to the many thousands of Canadians who have expressed sincere condolences over the tragic events in Edmonton.
Even among people who believe serious reforms to policing are needed, and even question the institution of policing itself, celebrating or sneering at the death of officers in the line of duty is a minority view. By drawing attention to this woman, I am only giving her attention and headspace she does not deserve.
And now for a response from the devil: let’s raid her store and just take everything we want. (I call dibs on the old Archie comics.) She doesn’t believe in private property anyway, so surely she’d understand. And if not, what’s she going to do, call the cops?
I’ll think it over and let you know.
When I was skiing in Maine I joked to Americans I met that they probably hadn’t heard of Newfoundland, but many of them had - because of Come From Away.
I can’t wait to see if they make a movie version, and if they film it on The Rock. Last time a major Hollywood production was mostly filmed in Newfoundland was the failed-Oscar-bait adaptation of The Shipping News, and I’ve heard some very interesting stories about Kevin Spacey’s interactions with the crew.
“You have to understand, it was the quickest and most efficient way to get rid of him.”
More recently, we’ve seen a few such controversies among right-wing politicians, most notably the purportedly Jewish and gay George Santos. Santos has admitted to lying about having Jewish ancestry, but if it turns out he’s not actually gay but made it up to get elected as a Republican, that will be…kind of a remarkable sign of progress, come to think of it.