being white-passing and métis is not a contradiction. it’s a fight i’m in every day.
i don’t talk about this enough because i’m always afraid someone’s gonna try to fact-check my existence. that someone’s gonna look at me and decide, again, that i’m not enough. not native enough. not métis enough. not oppressed enough. not traumatized enough. not legit enough.
and i’m tired. i’m so fucking tired.
i’m métis. my dad is blackfoot and ojibwe. his dad—my pa—literally went to a residential school. he had our language beaten out of him. had culture stripped from him like it was dirt that needed cleaning. and guess what? he survived. and then he passed down whatever scraps colonialism didn’t steal to my dad, who passed it down to me. stories. pride. grief. resilience. memory.
and you know what the world says to that?
“oh. you don’t look native.”
i want to scream every time i hear that. like indigeneity is a costume i forgot to put on that morning. like you get to look at my skin, my face, my paleness, and just erase everything else. like the blood in my veins doesn’t matter because it doesn’t match your textbook idea of what native is “supposed” to look like.
as if colonization didn’t literally breed people like me into existence.
as if passing privilege means absence.
as if my culture disappears the second you decide it’s inconvenient.
white-passing isn’t some kind of golden ticket. it’s a complicated-ass identity crisis you never get a break from. it means i don’t get followed around stores, but i do get erased. it means i don’t get some forms of direct violence, but i get silence.
silence when i speak about my people.
silence when i try to grieve what was taken from us.
silence when i say, “my pa was in a residential school,” and someone replies with “oh… but you’re basically white, right?”
no. i’m not basically anything. i’m métis.
and yes, my mum’s french. colonizer blood, settler ancestry. that shit lives in my family tree like rot and roots at the same time. and i don’t ignore it. i can’t. it’s part of me, and it makes things more complicated than i ever asked for. it means i’m constantly reconciling the fact that i carry both the colonized and the colonizer inside me. it’s guilt. it’s shame. it’s discomfort. and it’s mine to live with.
and yet people act like that’s the part that makes me more “valid.”
like proximity to whiteness is some kind of credibility.
like i should be grateful.
i’m not fucking grateful. i’m angry.
i’m angry that i have to “prove” anything.
i’m angry that my culture is something i have to perform in order for people to believe it’s real.
i’m angry that i have to talk about residential schools—literal generational trauma—as some kind of evidence that i belong.
why do i need trauma receipts for you to listen?
why do i have to list blood quantum and history and geography like this is a test?
you wanna talk about passing privilege? fine. it’s real. i’ll say it myself. i know i can walk into places and not be immediately marked as “other.” that’s safety i didn’t earn, and i don’t deny it. but it doesn’t mean i’m not indigenous. it doesn’t mean my ancestors didn’t bleed. it doesn’t mean my culture is a costume i’m borrowing.
i’m not borrowing anything. this is mine. this grief, this pride, this confusion, this rage—it’s all mine.
my identity isn’t a checklist. it’s a constant push and pull between what i feel, what i know, and what the world tries to take from me.
sometimes i feel like i’m stuck in the middle. not native enough for some people, not white enough for others. and i get it—métis identity has always been complicated. we’ve always existed in the margins, the in-betweens, the places where people refuse to look. and still—we exist.
we survive.
so yeah, i’m white-passing.
and i’m métis.
and i’m pissed off.
and i’m proud.
and i’m still here.
don’t tell me i don’t look native.
you don’t know what native looks like.
you only know what colonialism wants you to see.
