A leading researcher in Indigenous identity fraud is ordered to pay damages and legal fees to a SLANDER lawsuit filed by a University of Regina academic.
Plaintiff Michelle Coupal says Darryl Leroux defamed her when he publicly stated that she used a false Indigenous identity to become a reconciliation expert.
According to the decision, Coupal began identifying as Indigenous in 2010 based on the belief that she had an Algonquin ancestor from the early 1800s. She was initially accepted by the Algonquin Nation.
In 2018 she was appointed Canada Research Chair in Truth and Reconciliation and Indigenous Literatures.
In a 2023 purge, the Algonquin Nation removed Thomas Legarde from their list of ancestors, saying the man was French and misidentified as Algonquin. Coupal and more than a thousand others lost him as their link to the nation.
In his March 11 ruling, Judge DE Labach found that Coupal did not maliciously claim indigeneity – she believed it to be true.
According to a March 11, 2026 court ruling, Michelle Coupal began identifying as Algonquin in 2010. In 2023, the Algonquins of Ontario stated that the ancestor she relied on to make this claim was French.
University of Regina
Coupal declined to be interviewed. Her attorney, Paul Harasen, said in a statement, “Leroux was not found liable because of his statements that (Coupal) is not indigenous. He was found liable because he went so far and repeatedly stated that she committed fraud. Those are two very different things.”
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Leroux also declined to be interviewed. His lawyer, Yavar Hameed, said in a statement, “the court’s decision did not focus on the evidence of whether Coupal is an Indigenous person. Instead, it based its conclusions on whether the plaintiff subjectively felt that she was Métis, and then Algonquin, at various points in time in her academic career, based on things she understood or was told by the public identity, adding to her indifference.” Non-Indigenous people are important and Leroux plans to appeal the decision.”
Veldon Coburn is an Algonquin citizen of Pikwàkanagàn First Nation and a professor whose research focuses on Indigenous identity politics, Canadian-Indigenous relations and settler colonialism.
“There is a lot to be desired in terms of the court’s relationship with the understanding of indigenous peoples,” says Coburn, who made a statement for the defense and worked alongside Leroux.
In 2023, an Algonquin court removed several individuals who had been considered root ancestors after an investigation found they had been incorrectly identified as Algonquin. Among those removed was Thomas Legarde, a relative of Michelle Coupal who believed Algonquin had done it.
Tanakivin
“I wouldn’t invest a lot of political capital in this particular decision. A higher court can rule on his law.”
Michelle Good is a retired lawyer from the Red Pheasant Cree Nation who says non-Indigenous people working in Indigenous roles with no lived experience as an Indigenous person is harmful.
“Large numbers of people are trying to identify themselves as Indian groups to be able to participate in treaty discussions that are beneficial to them and them alone,” Good says.
“It threatens, in effect, to remove the basic meaning of indigeneity. It’s another form of assimilation.”
She says that appealing the decision is possible, but not easy.
“What you have to find is an error of law or an error of fact,” Good says.
She along with many senior researchers are currently working on a book called Pretendian Summary; The complex phenomenon of indigenous identity fraudset to release in 2027.
Leroux has testified as an expert on Indigenous identity fraud before the Standing Committee on Indigenous and Northern Affairs and has authored Twisted descent, exploring the phenomenon of white people’s racial transition to a self-defined indigenous identity.
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