On Sunday night, Montreal’s Hillel Concordia abruptly cancelled a Monday talk by political activist Ryan Bellerose, co-founder of Calgary United with Israel (CUWI).

It would have been a pro-Israel talk, which nowadays, Jews being so passionately divided on Israel, made certain Hillel constituents volubly unhappy. A pretext for disinviting him was found in what were deemed unacceptably crude satirical tweets posted by Bellerose about Hamas terrorists, unremarkable in their context, on an #AskHamas thread. Conceived to market Hamas propaganda, the thread ended up being buried in an avalanche of vicious and often hilarious anti-Hamas ridicule (e.g., “#AskHamas. Dying to know how to kill Jews, gays, women, kids…?” by Anne Bayefsky).

But Hillel’s bad faith (in my opinion, weighing their explanation against credible other sources) is not the story today. Rather, let me introduce you to the remarkable Ryan Bellerose.

Ryan Bellerose is a Métis from Northern Alberta. He grew up living rough on a “rez,” speaking “michif” until he was five years old. His father is Mervin Bellerose, who co-authored the Métis Settlements Act of 1989, passed by the Alberta legislature in 1990, which cemented Métis land rights. Ryan’s own people’s indigenous rights — and indeed all human rights — are therefore a passion he comes by honestly.

As a young adult, Bellerose founded Canadians for Accountability, a native advocacy group, then became an organizer and participant in Idle No More, until, as he put it in an extended interview, it was “infiltrated by Jew haters” from the anti-Zionist movement, which prompted his exit. For Ryan Bellerose is that most improbable of ducks, a Zionist aboriginal. How did that happen?

His father, determined Ryan should be well educated, not the norm in the hamlet of Paddle Prairie, Alta., gave him a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica for his fifth birthday. Ryan became hooked on history. The saga of Israel’s 1948 birth particularly captured his imagination as “the ultimate David and Goliath story.”

Noting his enthusiasm, Ryan’s father gave him a book about the 1976 raid on Entebbe, which motivated research into the entire Arab-Israel conflict. Ryan was horrified by the 1972 Munich Olympic Games massacre, where 11 Israeli athletes were murdered by Palestinian terrorists, and again shocked by the 1972 Lod Airport massacre, where 26 civilians awaiting flights (including 17 Christian pilgrims) were shot dead by Palestinian terrorists.

The more he learned, the more he identified with Israelis, coming to believe that Israelis and the Métis shared historical commonalities of constant betrayal, rejection, expulsion from their homeland, exile and ethnic cleansing. Like the Métis, the Jews settled in land that nobody but they had ever called a homeland. Instead of becoming insular and bitter at Arab hostility to their presence, they succeeded, Ryan believes, because they always looked forward, making education a priority. Ultimately, Ryan admires Israel, because “the achievement of self-determination in the creation of the nation state of Israel is something no other indigenous people has ever accomplished in the history of the world.”

There are numerous aboriginal Canadians who identify with Palestinians. Bellerose is persona non grata with them (“you’re not really an Indian,” they absurdly say to him), because he calls them out for intellectual dishonesty. Rejecting the left’s false narrative of Jewish “colonialism,” he affirms that the Jews, indigenous to Israel, were in fact colonized by the Arabs in the 7th century. Bellerose has written:

Last year Bellerose visited Israel for 20 days, fulfilling a dream he had harboured from childhood. This April, on a pilot trip called “Indigenous to Israel,” which he hopes will be the first of a series, Bellerose is leading a group of young Jews and aboriginal Canadians on a tour of Israel that will focus on Jewish ancestral ties to the land.

Bellerose has been nominated for a Hasby Award in the Best Young Defender of Israel category. He is speaking Wednesday at noon at the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research (isranet.org). I’ll be there, and hope many others who were disappointed by Hillel’s action will join me.