Settler Colonialism in Canada

What do you

know about

the Indian Act?

Indian Act

First past in 1876, "The Indian Act is a Canadian federal law that governs in matters pertaining to Indian status, bands, and Indian reserves. Throughout history it has been highly invasive and paternalistic, as it authorizes the Canadian federal government to regulate and administer in the affairs and day-to-day lives of registered Indians and reserve communities. This authority has ranged from overarching political control, such as imposing governing structures on Aboriginal communities in the form of band councils, to control over the rights of Indians to practice their culture and traditions. The Indian Act has also enabled the government to determine the land base of these groups in the form of reserves, and even to define who qualifies as Indian in the form of Indian status."

Source: http://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/home/government-policy/the-indian-act.html

Indian Act

"The roots of the Indian Act go back to the earlier days of colonial encounters

between Europeans and Indigenous peoples in the territory now known

as Canada. The competing colonial claims for territory and trade rights maintained

by both Britain and France in eastern North America for well over a

century eventually resulted in a protracted war between these powers waged all

over Native territory, with devastating results for the nations inevitably drawn

into the conflect. When Britain was proclaimed as victor over France in 1763, it

laid claim to much of eastern North America in a context where it lacked any

real ability to actually wrest the land from the Native nations who occupied it,

or to in any way control how the Nations of these regions would choose to act.

Because of this, Britain sought another way to consolidate its imperial position—

by structuring formal, constitutional relations with the Native nations on

the territories it claimed for itself. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 recognized

Aboriginal title to all lands not ceded and acknowledged a nation-to-nation

relationship with the Indigenous Nations." (Bonita Lawrence 2003:7)

Indian Act

"In 1850, one of the earliest actions of the newly unifed Province of Canada was to pass legislation that allowed for the creation of Indian reserves. This legislation, designed to reinforce the rights of settlers to the entire land base by restricting “Indians” to specic territories within it, for the first time defined, albeit extremely loosely, who should be considered to be an “Indian." (Lawrence 2003:7).

"Canada pushed [its] assumption of authority further in 1857, when it passed the Gradual Civilisation Act, which made provision for the conversion of reserve lands into alienated plots in the hands of men who would cease to be Indian upon enfranchisement. The colony was adopting a policy of paternalistic control and gradual removal of Native people from the path of white settlement, a policy greatly aided when the British Crown transferred control over “Indians” to its Canadian colony in 1860. The “nationto-nation” relationship was to all intents and purposed abandoned by Canada at that point." (Lawrence 2003:7)

Indian Act

"The Indian Act in Canada, in this respect, is much more than a body of laws that for over a century have controlled every aspect of Indian life. As a regulatory regime, the Indian Act provides ways of understanding Native identity, organizing a conceptual framework that has shaped contemporary Native life in ways that are now so familiar as to almost seem “natural".”

(Bonita Lawrence 2003:3)

Bonita Lawrence Article (2003)

Lawrence argues that it is impossible to fully understand the effects of the Indian Act on Native people in Canada without taking into account the bigger picture of how different colonial regimes have created different methods of classifying and regulating Native identity. (16).

In the United States, for example the notion, of indigeneity rested on the idea of 'blood': "In implementing the Dawes Act, the federal government began the process of dividing “fullbloods” from “mixed-bloods” through a policy of measuring an individual’s “blood quantum,” and setting standards regulating if and at what point mixed-bloods should be externalized from their nations. These definitions were crucial to the land acquisition project. [...] At the time, mixed-bloods were generally recognized as capable of handling their own affairs, while full-bloods were deemed legally incompetent. By 1906 and 1907, however (a mere twenty years later), the federal government had passed laws providing for the sale of lands of anybody with less than fiffty percent blood quantum. Mixed-bloods were thus rendered landless in their communities, as “weak links” in the tribal circle who could be singled out for additional land theft." (17).

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"In Canada, for the most part, the imposition of Indian status as a method of controlling Indianness has to a certain extent obscured the fact that the status system, while promoting gender domination, also controls, in a rough way, blood quantum. On the other hand, in the United States, Native identity has been regulated openly through a system of blood quantum. Comparing the “choices” offered by colonial regulation of Indianness—the highly patriarchal system of the Indian Act with its covert regulation of blood quantum, versus the apparently gender-neutral system of blood quantum that is overtly race-based—we see that one system generates high levels of sexism (along with racism), while the other generates high levels of racism (along with the increased fragmentation of Native identity which results when one’s heritage is divided into 128 or even 256 “parts” to differentiate between the “parts” that are Native and the “parts” that are not).

The American system has had the advantage that descent is not legally defined as patrilinial, as in Canada—which at least has enabled traditional matrilinial descent systems to be maintained in some American Indian communities."

(Lawrence 2003:20)

So, how was the Canadian colonial system of determining who was native or was not?

According to Bonita Lawrence (2003: 7-9)

In 1869, the Gradual Enfranchisement Act was passed, which stipulated that any Indian woman who married a white man would lose her Indian status and any right to band membership. It was this statute that for the first time created the concepts of "status Indian" and "nonstatus Indian." Prior to this, Canada had kept to a fairly general and nonrestrictive definition of who was an Indian (Miller 1989, 114). Such a loose definition, however, could not allow for the kind of control that could make a person born Native (and her offspring) legally white. In order to do this, "Indianness" had to be codified, to make it a category that could be granted or withheld, according to the needs of the settler society.

As a result, until 1985, the Indian Act removed the Indian status of all Native women who married individuals without Indian status (including nonstatus Canadian Indians and American Indians, as well as white men), and forced them to leave their communities. The same act gave Indian status to white women who married status Indians; this would remain part of the Indian Act until 1985. Loss of status was only one of many statutes that lowered the power of Native women in their societies relative to men. Because of the many ways in which Native women were rendered marginal in their communities, it was extremely difficult for them to challenge the tremendous disempowerment that loss of status represented.

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The cultural implications of this social engineering process for Native people, where the majority of the 25,000 Indians who lost status and were forced to leave their communities between 1876 and 1985 (Holmes 1987, 8) did so because of gender discrimination in the Indian Act, are extremely significant. Taking into account that for every woman who lost status and had to leave her community, all of her descendants also lost status and for the most part were permanently alienated from Native culture, the scale of cultural genocide caused by gender discrimination becomes massive. Indeed, when Bill C-31 was passed in 1985, there were only 350,000 status Indians left in Canada (Holmes 1987, 8). Because Bill C-31 allowed individuals who had lost status and their children to regain it, approximately 100,000 individuals had regained their status by 1995 (Switzer 1997, 2). But the damage caused, demographically and culturally, by the loss of status of so many Native women for a century prior to 1985, whose grandchildren and great-grandchildren are now no longer recognized—and in many cases no longer identify—as Indian, remain incalculable.

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The early days of many European colonial settlements in Canada have involved some form of negotiated alliances with local Indigenous communities, often cemented through marriage, and reliance on Native women for survival—which means that the boundaries between who should be considered "European" and who should be considered "Native" (and by what means) have not always been clear. 4 By the mid-nineteenth century, the presence of approximately fifty-three distinct Metis communities in the Great Lakes area alone, whose inhabitants blended Native and European ways of living in highly distinct ways (Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, Vol. 1, Sec. 6.2, 150), was making it difficult for Anglo settlers to maintain clear boundaries between the colonizers and the colonized. Social control was predicated on legally identifying who was "white," who was "Indian," and which children were legitimate progeny; citizens rather than subjugated "Natives" (Stoler 1991, 53). Clearly, if the mixed-race offspring of white men who married Native women were to inherit property, they had to be legally classified as white. Creating the legal category of "status Indian" enabled the settler society to create the fiction of a Native person who was by law no longer Native, whose offspring could be considered white. Because of the racist patriarchal framework governing white identities, European women who married Native men were considered to have stepped outside the social boundaries of whiteness. They became, officially, status Indians.

Democracy now report: "Cultural Genocide": Landmark Report Decries Canada’s Forced Schooling of Indigenous Children

Interview with Pamela Palmater, associate professor and chair of the Centre for Indigenous Governance at Ryerson University.

How does Pamela Palmater critique the concept of “cultural” genocide?

Why does she emphasize the concept of indigeneity (being Indian)?

How does Palmater identify the continuation of residential schools legacy today? (She argued that is it on going).

https://www.democracynow.org/2015/6/3/cultural_genocide_landmark_report_decries_canadas