Another faker caught

The NY Post reports:

She’s Sitting Bulls-t.

A Canadian medical researcher who rose to become the nation’s top voice on indigenous health has been ousted from her government job and her university professorship — after suspicious colleagues investigated her increasingly fanciful claims of Native American heritage and learned she was a fraud.

Carrie Bourassa, a public health expert who served as scientific director of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research’s Institute of Indigenous Peoples’ Health, was suspended on Nov. 1, five days after the state-owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation published a lengthy expose on her background.

Far from being a member of the Métis nation, as she had long claimed, a laborious trace of Bourassa’s family tree revealed that her supposedly indigenous ancestors were in fact immigrant farmers who hailed from Russia, Poland, and Czechoslovakia.

“It makes you feel a bit sick,” said Janet Smylie, a Métis professor at the University of Toronto who worked with Bourassa on a book about indigenous parenting.

“To have an impostor who is speaking on behalf of Métis and indigenous people to the country about literally what it means to be Métis … that’s very disturbing and upsetting and harmful.”

Colleagues began to doubt Bourassa’s story as she began to add claims of Anishinaabe and Tlingit heritage to her tale — and took to dressing in stereotypically indigenous fashion.

It started to unravel in 2019, when she appeared in full tribal regalia — draped in an electric blue shawl, with a feather in her partially braided hair — to give a TEDx Talk at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon.

“My name is Morning Star Bear,” she said tearfully as the crowd cheered.

I suspect this is just going to become more common over time.