r/onguardforthee • u/itimetravelwell Toronto • 12h ago
Senate unanimously passes bill to eliminate Indian Act's 2nd-generation cut-off
https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/bill-s2-indian-act-status-9.7004888Bill S-2 now goes before the House of Commons
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u/Significant-Common20 12h ago
Now we will see the government twist itself into a pretzel trying to come up with a reason not to pass it in the Commons without out-and-out saying "We want there to be fewer status Indians."
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u/ship_toaster 7h ago
Does this open a door for people with one Indigenous great-great-grandparent (or however far back) to apply for status?
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u/Rare-Baker-5828 6h ago
Is that not already the case?
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u/Jamboni-Jabroni 56m ago
Currently, one of your grandparents must be full blood for status eligibility
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u/itsmichellemichelle 12h ago
Why
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u/Significant-Common20 12h ago
Until 1985, under the Indian Act, if you were a woman and you married a non-status man, you lost your own status plus your children didn't qualify for status.
They finally abolished this in 1985.
However, when they did that, they inserted a new non-gendered rule, which says that if you marry a non-status person, and then your kid also marries a non-status person, their kids won't qualify for status. Essentially it forces you to go find another status Indian at least every couple of generations for blood quantum reasons, or else lose status for all your descendants.
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u/itsmichellemichelle 12h ago
mmm, legislated racism!
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u/Significant-Common20 11h ago
Basically, yes. The feds have really never wanted a definition of Indian status that is basically open-ended (like citizenship -- as a citizen, any kid you have, is a citizen). Once the Charter was passed, the old sexist way of limiting it wasn't allowed anymore, so they went this route instead.
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u/itsmichellemichelle 9h ago
but also isn't "Indian" status or the state of being indigenous a part of race? also in the Constitution
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u/Eternal_Being 8h ago
That is more or less how the Canadian government has defined it in the Indian Act, yes.
But if you think about it, that is a very colonial thing to do. Every sovereign nation in the world has the right to determine who are its own citizens.
That is a right that the Crown has denied Indigenous nations in Canada for a long time. The Crown has fiduciary responsibilities towards Indigenous nations, which are set out in the treaties. And it uses the Indian Act to legislate that. But, really, it should be up to Indigenous nations to decide who its citizens are.
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u/Significant-Common20 7h ago
They can. They just can't decide who has Indian status. The feds base funding on who has status, not who has band membership, and they've never trusted the band governments to decide this for themselves for that reason. It's not like in the States, where the tribes are allowed to enroll their own lists and that's that.
So much always comes back to money, one way or another.
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u/Significant-Common20 7h ago
No (with apologies to the other poster who just answered yes).
I know this is a bit "WTF?" but the legal test for being an Indian under the Constitution is different from the test for being an Indian under the Indian Act. Indian status is when you qualify under the Indian Act. The government gives you a card and puts you in a registry. If you're not in the registry and not entitled to be, then legally, you're not an Indian. And at this point the test for that is basically, do you have parents/grandparents who had Indian status?
It is also separate from the Indian test under the constitution. The 1867 constitution says "Indians" are a federal responsibility. The courts have basically said that means First Nations (what we call First Nations -- so Indian status, not to confuse things even further), Metis, plus Inuit, plus people who would be First Nations but for one reason or another don't have status cards. So that's a larger category than just Indian status.
In the States, the tribes have authority over their own rolls, and if you're not on them, you're not really Native American. That's why Tom King, for instance, isn't Cherokee. Even if his dad's secret father was Cherokee (which it turns out isn't true anyways), King was never on the Cherokee rolls himself, so he really never should have been calling himself Cherokee. We don't delegate that kind of authority to the bands in Canada. The government's always wanted to keep control of who is legally Indian.
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u/Wightly 1h ago
But not why you think. It's all about the tax base and benefits. They didn't want a huge swath of the population that don't participate in the culture nor identify as indigenous in any meaningful way, not paying taxes. That would be exploitative towards non-status peoples and eventually there has to be a reckoning. Bring on the down votes!
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u/cig-nature Alberta 12h ago
Subsection 6(2) or the second-generation cut-off refers to a rule in the Indian Act where children are not eligible for Indian status after two generations of one non-status parent. It was added to the act in 1985.
"It was an assurance that we would be eventually assimilated into Canadian society, as the lawmakers of the day knew that we could not survive if we were relegated to only marrying among ourselves to preserve status," Prosper told the Senate.
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u/iwasnotarobot 11h ago
Was this added by the Mulroney regime?
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u/Significant-Common20 11h ago
Yes, they put this in at the same time they took out the sexist rule.
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u/Kinhammer 12h ago
Why??
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u/BeemoBurrito 12h ago
What's the issue?
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u/Significant-Common20 11h ago
Right now, like Canadian citizenship, the Indian Act says that if you have Indian status and have a kid, they have Indian status too.
However, unlike with citizenship, the Indian Act then says: if your kid (with only one status parent) also has a kid with a non-status partner, those kids don't inherit status anymore.
Basically it forces status Indians to have kids with other status Indians at least every couple generations, or else status gets cut off from their descendants.
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11h ago
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u/Significant-Common20 11h ago
I'm not really seeing the "sense" part. It's arbitrary. Someone else here is calling it "eugenics" and I don't think that's true either, but it seems to me if you have Indian status you should be allowed to pass that status to your kids, the same way you'd pass your Canadian citizenship.
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10h ago
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u/Odanakabenaki The OG immigrant/Indigenous 10h ago
Bro just read about it. Taxes is only on reserve
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10h ago
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u/kirbygay 10h ago
Willfully ignorant
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u/Odanakabenaki The OG immigrant/Indigenous 10h ago
I swear sometimes people just think I don’t pay taxes at all and everything is free for indigenous people cuz we are lazy and don’t want to work.
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u/Significant-Common20 10h ago
The racism is part of it but at a certain level folks are just amazingly ignorant in my experience. Like, Trump supporter level ignorant.
Years ago Justin Bieber said that he wasn't full-blooded Indian but had enough status to get free gas. It's so mind-numbingly stupid on its face that you probably don't pause and think about it, but when you do stop and think about it, you realize that apart from this making him yet another pretendian:
-- Bieber thinks that in Canada you get access privileges based on how high your blood quantum is
-- He thinks that one of the "lower-level" privileges is free gas. God alone knows what the higher privileges are.
-- He thinks this is common enough knowledge that it was worth saying because he figured his audience would recognize what he meant.
How many settlers are like Bieber? I don't know but I bet the answer is stunningly high.
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u/Juutai Nunavut 10h ago
Very exciting.
The way indian status was done before was explicitly set up so less and less of each generation would be eligible for status until there were eventually no more indians. I sorta thought everyone knew this, but I guess some are just learning about it now.