Gender, Race, and Regulation of Native Identity in Canada and the United States PDF

Gender, Race and the Regulation of Native Identity in Canada and the United States: An Overview Bonita Lawrence – Summer Week 3 Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde Oregon http://www.grandronde.org/ikanum/index.html Let’s start with the Indian Act. According to Indigenous Foundation at the University...

Gender, Race and the Regulation of Native Identity in Canada and the United States: An Overview Bonita Lawrence – Summer Week 3 Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde Oregon http://www.grandronde.org/ikanum/index.html Let’s start with the Indian Act. According to Indigenous Foundation at the University of British Columbia, The Indian Act came to be developed over time through separate pieces of colonial legislation regarding Aboriginal peoples across Canada such as the Gradual Civilization Act of 1857 and the Gradual Enfranchisement Act of 1869. In 1876, these acts were consolidated as the Indian Act. "The great aim of our legislation has been to do away with the tribal system and assimilate the Indian people in all respects with the other inhabitants of the Dominion as speedily as they are fit to change.”- John A Macdonald, 1887 http://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/home/governmentpolicy/the-indian-act.html Bonita Lawrence explains that to be an Indian is defined by government standardization and regulation. So thoroughly have these definitions become entrenched in Indian culture that these regulatory systems have since been used by Indians to define themselves. “To treat the Indian Act merely as a set of policies to be repealed, or even as a genocidal scheme in which we can simply choose not to believe, belies how a classificatory system produces ways of thinking – a grammar – that embeds itself in every attempt to change it” (4). “Indeed to speak of Native identity at all in some ways reinforces the notion that the word “Indian” describes a natural category of existence. An yet it is equally clear that the label “Indian has been an external descriptor, meaningless to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas prior to colonization” (4). I looked online for a list of Canadian Tribes. This is what I found. Nanations.com/canada/british columbia “to be defined by race is synonymous with having our Nations dismembered” (5). http://ambassadors.net/archives/issue19/profile2.htm “described how being classified by the Canadian government as a status Indian under the Indian Act represented a violation of the rights of her Cree/Metis and Saulteaux cultures to define her as Nehiowe or Nahkawe, which removed her, in commonsense ways, from any sense of being part of the destiny of her own nations” (5). Northern Shuswap Tribal Council Okanagan Nation Alliance http://www.syilx.org/ “For over a century, the Indian Act has controlled Canadian Native identity by creating a legal category, that of the “status Indian”, which is the only category of Native person to whom a historic nation-to-nation relationship between Canada and the Indigenous peoples is recognized…until recently the only individuals who could consider themselves Indian were those who could prove they were related, through the male line, to individuals who were already status Indians” (6). “A crucial issue to understand here is that without Indian status, and the band membership that goes along with it, Native people are not allowed to live on any land part of an Indian reserve in Canada (unless it is leased to them as an outsider)” (6). “By 1985 there were twice as many nonstatus Indians and Metis as status Indians in Canada. In essence,… [this] legislation had rendered two-thirds of all Native people in Canada landless” (6). Nonstatusindian.blogspot.com New Card Design (04/17/2012) Has a hologram on the back now http://www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca In one way these designations were gendered, “Until 1985, the Indian Act removed the Indian status of all Native women who married individuals without Indian status, including nonstatus Canadian 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. Loss of status was only one of many statutes that lowered the power of Native women in their societies relative to men” (8). “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” (8). “The cultural implications of this social engineering process for Native people where the majority of 25,000 Indians who lost status and were forced to leave their communities between 1876 and 1985 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” (9). Bill C-31 1985.. Because the Indian Act stripped women and their descendents of their Indian status if they married a man without status or bore illegitimate children, and although a prior attempt had been made to challenge the discriminatory sections of the Indian Act in court “It was not until Sandra Lovelace, a Maliseet woman from Tobique, New Brunswick, took her case to the United Nations Human Rights Committee that Canada was forced to address this issue” (13). She won her case and in 1985 the government passed Bill C-31, “an Act to Ament the Indian Act” of its discriminatory sections (13). http://www.escr-net.org/docs/i/1307559 There was a lot of resistance to this bill. “With the passing of Bill C-31, a number of Canadian First Nations have adopted new membership codes based on blood quantum rather than ‘Indian’ status. The fact that these communities are essentially exchanging one regulatory regime for another point to the difficulties that Native people are having reconceptualizing Native identity in terms that do not reflect colonial categories” (20). Which brings me to a topic that interests me. Art of Resistance. As I read these stories and researched this paper, I wondered about the art that has been produced as a way to tell the story of oppression and re-claimed identity. These are a few images that told this particular story for me. “Until traditional models of governance have been reclaimed and actualized, Native communities will continue to be plagued with struggles over identity and entitlement barriers” (25). Bonita Lawrence (Mi’kmaw) is an Associate Professor at the School of Social Sciences at Atkinson , where she teaches Indigenous Studies. Her research and publications have focused primarily on urban, non-status and Metis identities, federally unrecognized Aboriginal communities, and Indigenous justice. http://people.laps.yorku.ca/people.nsf/researcher profile?readform&shortname=bonital