Thomas King

Celebrated author Thomas King has revealed he has no Indigenous ancestry.

King was born and raised in California but has lived in Canada since moving to Alberta in 1980 to teach Indigenous studies at the University of Lethbridge.

His books have been bestsellers and award winners, and deal often in themes of Indigenous identity. His 2013 nonfiction title The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America won the RBC Taylor Prize and the B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-fiction. More recently, his 2020 novel Indians on Vacation won the 2021 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. His most recent novel, Aliens on the Moon, published in August this year. King is a member of the Order of Canada, and was promoted in 2020 to the Order’s highest rank of companion.

In a column in the Globe and Mail this week, King wrote that he got in touch with the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds, an organization based in North Carolina that says it works to uncover “ethnic frauds pretending to be American Indian people or ‘tribes’ when they are not.”

King, 82, wrote that he had been hearing rumours that he was not Indigenous for several years and decided this year to track down the source of the rumours. That led him to the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds, which connected him with a genealogist who had researched his ancestral history. King and his younger brother grew up with their mother and her family after their father left the family shortly after his brother was born. When the brothers noticed they looked different from their cousins, they were told that it was because their father was part Cherokee.

The genealogist found that there was no Cherokee anywhere in King’s paternal lineage, despite family claims to the contrary.

“At 82, I feel as though I’ve been ripped in half, a one-legged man in a two-legged story,” King wrote. “Not the Indian I had in mind. Not an Indian at all.” He called the discovery a shock.

The news has hit the arts community hard. Responding to it in the Winnipeg Free Press, columnist and author Niigaan Sinclair said it was an “understatement” to call it a shock.

“Every colleague, award jury, and publisher took King at his word that he was an Indigenous person. They, like he, believed his story — a story that was false in the end — just like the stories of Joseph Boyden and Buffy Sainte-Marie, other non-Indigenous celebrities who claimed Indigenous identity falsely,” Sinclair wrote. “Now, the rest of us real Indigenous people have a big, bloody mess to clean up.”

King has said he intends to return the National Aboriginal Achievement Award for arts and culture he was given in 2003.

The Globe reported on Wednesday that King had withdrawn his forthcoming novel, StarBright, the ninth DreadfulWater mystery title, slated for publication in May 2026, from publication.

HarperCollins Canada had previously told the newspaper they would be going ahead with the book’s publication. A representative from HarperCollins told Q&Q Wednesday that they had no further comment on the matter at this time.