ANALYSIS: Can white authors write Indigenous stories? – TVO

Dec 16, 2025

Forget pretendians. It’s time to talk about a different community in Canadian letters: white authors with Indigenous stories to tell

The Canadian artistic community has been much a-flutter recently with the revelation that Thomas King, author of such books as Green Grass Running Water and The Inconvenient Indian, is not actually Cherokee. It was not a case of being an “Honest Injun”; he had been misled by tales his mother and father told him implying a false ancestry.

But there is another completely different branch of the Canadian writers community that is also in dire straits. Wordsmiths in ominous need of help. Authors being ignored, novelists being abandoned, scribes being denied the right to peddle their talented wares. I am speaking of those writers whose parents did tell them they were born of settlers and colonizers, who have in the past (and also in the present), created stories featuring Indigenous characters. Their stories burst with all the usual character and metaphor but, when they harassed their agents with dreams of success, found that today’s Canadian society is uninterested in such constructions. You see, these were white writers with Indigenous stories. In today’s world, it’s just not kosher. Some in the publishing and Indigenous community would consider it heresy.

Read More: https://www.tvo.org/article/analysis-can-white-authors-write-indigenous-stories