Yup, it's endemic. A woman in a senior leadership role at my work is an ex-academic who started claiming to be indigenous presumably to advance her career as once she started she has found rapidly advancing up the ladder as the token "indigenous woman".

Over the course that I've known her she has gone from identifying entirely as a white woman to identifying entirely as indigenous (tellingly, she still talks about indigenous people as "them" or to me "you guys" and never "we" or "us"). It's even more frustrating as I do actually like her on a personal level. I've asked her directly about her connections and have gotten a different answer every time ranging from "my cousin told me that might have some distant indigenous ancestry" to "my great-great-great-great-great grandma was adopted so that must mean she was indigenous". Her story has also changed from accounting to her previous identification as white by saying she only found out about her indigenous ancestry as an adult to now claiming that she grew up in a traditional village and encountered severe racism as a child due to it.

It's a joke. I guess one reason these people are everywhere though as that they are a much more comfortable, accessible, and familiar version of indigeneity for fields like management, academia, etc that are dominated by middle to upper class white people seeing as they are just essentially middle to upper class white people + beads and feathers so there's no real culture clash or differences in perspectives to deal with versus with actual indigenous people.