katherena vermette’s most recent novel, real ones, is about a subject that I find intriguing, people who falsely identify as Indigenous (or who falsely identify as any race really). This novel came out about a year after it was revealed that American musician Buffy Sainte-Marie’s fabricated claims of Indigenous ancestry. Where do white people get the audacity to pass themselves off as another race that has been marginalized by white people? (It’s a rhetorical question). As interesting as I found real ones to be, though, I must admit that I do not love how vermette wrote this story.

real ones is about two sisters, June and lyn, whose mother, Renee, a white Mennonite woman who passes herself off as an Indigenous artist, has been exposed as a “pretendian”. June and lyn are forced to grapple with the fallout of Renee’s exposure as a fraud. Just by being Renee’s children, their own identity as Michif (Metis) people through their father is questioned. They also feel guilty for not doing more to try to stop Renee when they first learned of her adoption of an Indigenous identity and her appropriation of their father’s experiences as an Indigenous person as her own stories.

real ones is not told in a straight forward narrative style like vermette’s previous novels. Sentences in real ones do not always have proper grammar or punctuation. Some parts of the novel are written as poetry, and I am not particularly fond of reading poetry. This led me to skim-reading real ones and not feeling fully engaged with what I was reading. That does not mean that I didn’t get anything out of this novel, though. I feel for June and lyn for having to navigate the minefield that is white society. They must appease concerns that they have also falsely identified as Indigenous. They must endure racists minimizing their pain with “who cares?” They must feel grateful for what little that white people have given back to them after stealing all of their land.

June and lyn also navigate their mother’s emotional volatility. Once a loving, albeit unstable, mother, Renee has become the victim in her relationship with her children. real ones does not show Renee’s perspective because this is not really Renee’s story. This story is about how June and lyn live with the hope that maybe Renee knows she is in the wrong, but with the knowledge that she will never admit she is wrong, and that she will never admit to the trauma she caused her children or her own trauma that caused her to appropriate from another culture and profit from it. If they want a relationship with their mother, they must accept that she will always be the victim, and she will never get the help she needs to become a person who make amends.

vermette has her reasons for writing real ones the way she did, and I feel bad for being critical of it. It has given me a lot to reflect upon; I only wish that I was able to appreciate the writing more.