Good morning. In an exclusive interview, award-winning author Thomas King shares that he learned he is not Indigenous, as he long assumed himself to be. More on that below, plus new findings for brain cancer treatment. But first:

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A few years ago, on my 30th anniversary with The Globe and Mail, my editor at the time told the newspaper’s publisher at the time, Phillip Crawley, that I was known for never turning down a writing assignment. Crawley, an old newsman from Northumberland, England, who worked for Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black, wasn’t at all impressed.

“Where I come from,” he told me and the table full of Globe journalists, “turning down an assignment isn’t an option.”

I came from The Globe mailroom − my first job in “journalism,” in 1988. Like Crawley, it never occurred to me that turning down anything was an option.

This weekend I was assigned to write a breaking story on Thomas King. The award-winning Canadian-American author of A Short History of Indians in Canada, The Inconvenient Indian and Indians on Vacation had recently learned he was not an Indian himself, and he would be going public with that bombshell.

I didn’t want to write the story. King is a brilliant author and a respected figure. His whole life was hours away from being devastated.

The news was that King’s long-believed Cherokee heritage wasn’t real. A genealogist with the Tribal Alliance Against Fraud, based in North Carolina, had done the research. King’s grandfather, Elvin Hunt, who according to family lore was part Cherokee, was not.

The 82-year-old King is a Californian who moved to Canada in 1980. He spent almost his complete adult life in Indigenous affairs as an activist, administrator, university professor and a writer of fiction and non-fiction.

He would be going public with an op-ed to be published in The Globe. Once that happened, all hell and judgment would break loose. His career, life and legacy would never be the same. He knew that.

When King picked up the phone this weekend, I asked him how he was doing.

“Just north of suicide,” he said. Gallows humour.

It was a tough conversation, but King handled it with grace and professionalism. Although he maintains he never deceived anyone about his past, he had accepted what was to come: “I assume the devastation is going to be complete for me. I’m going to be wiped out. It makes me feel depressed.”

The repercussions of King’s non-Indigeneity have already begun to ripple beyond him. An opera production by Edmonton Opera and Against the Grain Theatre of Indians on Vacation, based on King’s novel of the same name, has been cancelled after members of Edmonton’s Indigenous community raised concerns.

“That hurts a great deal,” King said. “Not for me, but for the people who worked on the opera.”

In the prologue to his 2012 non-fiction book The Inconvenient Indian, King explained why he preferred fiction to non-fiction. “I dislike the way facts try to thrust themselves upon me,” he wrote. “Fictions are less unruly than histories.”

Case in point.

A decade after researchers with Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre used a novel technique known as “microbubble-enhanced ultrasound” to open the blood-brain barrier, the results of a new study published in The Lancet Oncology shows its sees success and an increase in survival time.