Susanna Shankar was traveling solo around Spain this summer, when she was confronted by a fellow traveler who refused to believe she was Canadian.

Shankar was at her hotel when she got to talking with an elderly gentleman with a British accent. As travelers often do, he asked her where she was traveling from. But when she said she was from Vancouver, the conversation took an unexpected turn.

Immediately, the man eyed her with suspicion. He accused her of lying, to the horror of his daughter who urged him to stop giving Shankar the third-degree.

“He just didn’t believe me when I said I was traveling from Canada,” Shankar said. “So I was like, ‘Do you want to see my passport? How do you want to do this?’”

Shankar, 37, is a dual US-Canadian citizen, who runs websites about regenerative and sustainable tourism. Her father is Canadian, her mother American. She grew up in Alaska and lived in the US until the age of 28, lived in Germany for six years, and then moved to Vancouver where she has been living the last four years. For political reasons, Shankar says she identifies less as American and has taken to introducing herself as Canadian. But sometimes, her American West Coast accent can betray her.

“I do think his doubt did stem a little bit from a lot of Americans out there trying to pass themselves off as Canadians,” she added.

Shankar is referring to a decades-old practice known as “flag jacking,” in which some Americans pretend to be Canadian while traveling abroad to avoid anti-American sentiment. Flag-jacking Americans sew the maple leaf flag on their bags and lie about their nationality. It happened as far back as the 1960s and ‘70s during the unpopular Vietnam War, spiked again under George W.