Universities in many countries are grappling with how to verify Indigenous identity in hiring, admissions and funding decisions.

As the clamour grows louder over pretendians (non-Indigenous individuals falsely claiming Indigenous identity), the issue has been framed in terms of morality: fraud versus authenticity; inclusion versus gatekeeping; “witch hunts,” with their accusations of lateral violence versus “vampire hunts,” with their accusations of resource theft from those deemed truly deserving.

These framings are reasonable. But they overlook a crucial factor. In our increasingly data-driven society, identity is never just claimed or denied. It is enabled, mediated and legitimized by the technological and information systems of modern bureaucracies. This has major implications for how pretendianism policies reflect reconciliation.

To understand how Canadian institutions have mishandled pretendian policies – and how a more ethical approach might emerge – we must examine how universities structure information and how that information in turn structures identity.

Ethical verification frameworks are essential if universities hope to align their policies with the reconciliation principles they profess. That work begins by confronting the power that information holds in shaping these decisions.

It is also essential for universities to stop building Indigenous verification systems by themselves and start building them with Indigenous nations external to the institution.

Pretendianism has arguably existed for generations in Canada, but the last decade of reconciliation has created a new and peculiar supply-and-demand economy for it. Under pressure to act on reconciliation, universities have attempted to welcome Indigenous Peoples but have often done so without Indigenous partnerships.

To the extent that self-identification drives identity-making, claims rooted solely in individual desire predictably led to pretendians supplying what universities were seeking.

Many university administrators – often white and mostly well-meaning – have equated doing the right thing with saying yes to nearly all claims of Indigeneity. Saying yes was equated with inclusion while saying no was equated with racism. But the........

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