The
news that the government is bringing in legislation to abolish all sexism from
the Indian Act is good in more ways than one.
The second way it is good is that this measure has been forced on the
government by the stubborn insistence of the Senate, a body usually dismissed
as having no useful function.
On this occasion, led by two
indigenous Senators, Lillian Dyck, of Saskatchewan, the offspring of Cree and
Chinese parents, and Murray Sinclair, an Ojibwa from Manitoba, both of them
with distinguished records of public service in the indigenous as well as the
general interest, the Senate rejected the government’s first version of a bill
designed to correct some anomalies in the Indian Act, then rejected a second
attempt on the grounds that it still contained some unacceptable provisions,
before finally, after long consideration, the government caved before the upper
chamber, and has promised a corrected
version of its proposals, which even now, the Senate has delayed from passing
because they want to be sure the government has done what it has promised.
If all this works out as promised,
some of the most ridiculous provisions of Canadian law ever perpetrated will
have been corrected. I remember the
first time I learned of these unconscionable provisions of Indian law, which
happened a few days after I first met Indian people in 1968.
I had been assigned to go to a remote
village in North-western Ontario, a village accessible only by railway, where a
group of native people were reported to be living in appalling conditions. En
route I was directed to a native woman in Thunder Bay, Mrs Paul McRae, who had
married a non-Indian school principal. Although from a well-known Indian family,
one of her brothers the chief of a large local reserve, and a sister one of
Canada’s foremost aboriginal artists, she told me she no longer was recognized
by the government as an Indian, because of her marriage to a white man. I could scarcely believe my ears, but she
assured me it was true.
She generously handed me on to Chief
Willie John, chief of the Lake Helen reserve, at the foot of Lake Nipigon, the
lake that lies directly north of Lake Superior.
That was one of the luckiest accidents that ever happened to me, because
Willie was a wonderful little man with whom I spent the next week or so as we
travelled north to Geraldton, where we caught the train across the wilderness
of north-western Ontario to Armstrong, the small town in question. When I went to pick him up, Willie introduced me to his wife, whom he had married while in the army. She was a
full status Indian, he said, because though a Yorkshirewoman born and bred, she had married a status
Indian. Once again my jaw dropped at
this insanity. But it was only the beginning of
similar shocks I received in the next thirty years or so as I
familiarized myself with the legislative record of what Canada’s settlers from
Europe, who had arrived equipped with a formidable arsenal of ignorance and
arrogance, had imposed on the original
inhabitants. It was a vast assembly of laws designed to destroy the way of life
of these people, of whose reality the settlers had only the vaguest idea, and
even that dramatically out of focus. Indeed, it was a programme designed to
wipe the Indians, so-called, off the face of the earth, a full-scale attack of
genocidal proportions, that, fortunately, never really succeeded.
That week I spent with Willie John,
who was a man of vast experience, successively a soldier, a tugboat captain, a
heavy-equipment operator, a social agitator on behalf of returned aboriginal
servicemen who arrived home after fighting for freedom to find they still
couldn’t vote and had to sit in their own section of the cinemas, and were forbidden to do this, that and the other
because they were treated as children in the care of their big-brother
government, introduced me to a Canada I could scarely have imagined existed.
Before I returned to Montreal I met
Mrs McRae’s brother who was a major chief, and we engaged in a vigorous
discussion as he attempted to defend the sanctions taken against his sisters
because they had married white men. Brain-washed, the poor fellow, as so many
of the Indian leaders I met in succeeding years appeared to be, ready to defend
any foolish government law in order not to disturb their own small centres of
power.,
When I returned I wrote a piece
saying the people Willie had introduced me to as he, an operative of the
Company of Young Canadians, listened to
their problems and undertook to represent them to the relevant authorities,
were living lives that reminded me of nothing so much as the characters in Gorki’s Lower Depths, and I felt sure that some
day they would throw up their own artists to describe their condition to Canadians
who for the most part had no idea what had been done to these people in their
name.
It is hardly the place to go into a
catalogue of the terrible laws passed to control Indians. I have already done
that in a book I wrote in 1993, which sold some 300 copies, and was almost
completely ignored by the media, most of which carefully abstained from
reviewing it. Suffice to say that if
Lillian Dyck and Murray Sinclair had lived at an earlier time, neither of them
would have been legally entitled to claim Indian ancestry, because they each have
a passle of university degrees, and at one time, the moment an Indian received
a University degree, he or she was
automatically stripped of his Indian identity
and declared to be a white man or woman.
In the chapter in my book outlining
“the wonderful world of the Indian Act”, I have listed the more oppressive of
these legislative acts taken against Indians in categories that give a sense of
how all-embracing were the oppressive controls: land; community government; restrictions on
movement, assembly and speech (at one time a pass was needed for an Indian to
leave a reserve); production (Indians were encouraged to become farmers, and
then forbidden from selling their produce);
liquor; health; enfranchisement; inheritance; ceremonies rituals and
amusements; and education. In each of these categories at one time or another
repressive laws were passed.
The now well-known scandal of the
residential schools in which from the age of six students were abused sexually
and physically, often died and were buried without notifying the parents,
flogged for speaking the only language they knew, their native tongue, and all
administered by various religions (which have since apologized for the very existence
of their schools), all in the name of the national objective “to detach the
children from the barbarous lives of their parents” --- a prescription actually
written down at the time, which is in itself surely one of the most barbaric
objectives ever established by this or any government, is merely the apotheosis of this vast architecture of genocidal
legislation designed to wipe the Indians from the face of Canada.
Throughout this entire story the
government of Canada has played an equivocal, weasly role, illustrated by the
latest wheeze discovered by the Dyke-Sinclair team: that in their revised
programme designed to abolish sexism from the Indian Act, they have prescribed
that children born of male Indians before 1951 who were denied Indian status
should be retrospectively given status, but that should not apply to children
born of female Indians who before 1951 had lost their status by marriage.
Still at it, eh? Nuff sed!
Fascinating insights and revelations there, Boyce.
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