Quote:
Originally Posted by chad66
I think there is a difference between the Metis people and Natives who are under the Indian Act. Two different peoples.
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One also has to consider that beginning in the 1870s, the Government of Canada had very specific plans and agendas regarding Aboriginal peoples.
The first and foremost agenda was to assimilate Aboriginal peoples into the dominant society (which was then mostly European) by removing any ties to previously signed treaty rights.
This was done by a number of methods. Very complex rules were created to remove status to treaty rights as well as purposely omitting entire families from census rolls kept by Indian Affairs.
Most Metis families were created not because they "different" but because the female of the family was a Native woman who had married out (iwo, married a non-status man). None of the children of that relationship were considered status and therefore a recipient of any treaty rights. I think you'll find that this was the most common method. When one looks through their family history, they usually find the native ancestors to be women. The Hudson Bay was notorious for encouraging their men to "country marry" the local Native women. When the Indian Act was created in 1876, the families of these unions were considered non-native under the status clause.
Other Metis families were created simply by the method of Indian Agents completing their census during prime hunting, fishing or trading times when families were absent from the area. There are numerous families where one brother was listed on the census and the other one left off because they were at a fort trading furs for goods. When the trading brother returned, his family was removed from the treaty area/reserve.
More Metis families were created when Indian Agents forcibly had treaty descendants sign their enfranchisement papers. These people were then removed from the reserve.
All these people who were of mixed blood, found themselves without access to their people, families and territory. They formed their own groups - which when you really think of it were no different than what any other ostracised group does - they create an ethnic/religious/cultural group. They were left alone by the GOC because as far as the GOC was concerned, these folks had no treaty rights and were no longer necessary to deal with.
For the Government of Canada at that time, those who found themselves outside of the treaty rights, meant that there were fewer treaty beneficiaries to deal with. The more Aboriginal peoples that no longer had claims to treaty rights, the less the Government had to pay out or consider in long term planning on those treaty rights. The idea was, if no Aboriginal people were technically left because of assimilation, then Canada would be released from any treaty obligations without, as the USA had done, breaking them. The method allowed for the dissolution of the treaty obligations without fear of lengthy court cases (the fact that the Indian Act forbade any Aboriginal group to hire a lawyer for land claims is another low point in Canadian legal history).
The provisions on the Indian Act also interfered with the matrilineal cultures of many First Nations, whereby children were born to the mother's clan and people, and gained their status in the tribe from her family. Often property and hereditary leadership passed through the maternal line. Break that line and the community is left with no hereditary leadership.
Consider that the Metis as we now know them, are the elephant in the room for the GOC. With the numerous pieces of legislation created just t limit or remove a treaty right and what we now recognize as a bad move on previous governments. The GOC while admitting that the enfranchisement of Aboriginal women because of who they married was a horrible mistake, they only went so far to fix it. If the spirit of the legislation of Bill C31 were truly meant to restore treaty rights to these women and their descendants, then it would not have created the imaginary line of 2 generation cut off to limit those claims of restoration. For most Metis families, the enfranchisement occurred at the creation of the first Indian Act in 1876.
The GOC in the early part of the 1920s wanted the predictions of the anthropologists to come true. These predictions which were based upon current legislation and assimilation agendas, estimated that there would be no Aboriginal peoples left that had treaty rights by 1960. The assimilation efforts were stepped up. But the anthros were wrong and with egg on their face, the GOC had to rethink their policies and treaty obligations. Have a read of Chretien's 1969 Red Paper to see what the GOC wanted to do.
My own grandchildren are paternal descendants of Suzanne Connolly (Miyo Nipiv - Cree) who was the mother of Lady Amelia Douglas. Suzanne married a HBC man as did Amelia. Amelia's husband went on to become Sir James Douglas of BC. Now, this particular family is so well documented that having those records makes it easy to show the lineal descendant. But as far as the Government of Canada is concerned (Indian Affairs) Suzanne's descendants are only ever going to be considered Metis and not Cree. Had Suzanne been a male, all of his descendants would have been considered Cree by the GOC.
What the court recognizes in the Powley case is that irrespective of what label the GOC puts of a person, the Metis still are descendants of those treaty rights. Drawing imaginary lines in the sand by the GOC to decide who is Aboriginal and who is not (see enfranchisement categories of the Indian Act from 1878 until 1985) does not remove from the person the actual connection to the treaty right holder.
Now one might want to try to argue that the Metis have their own culture in an effort to suggest that they aren't "really" Aboriginal and therefore making them much different from First Nations. I think that line of thought goes in hand with the perception that there is just one Aboriginal culture to be different from. However, if one does want to continue to think along those lines then perhaps one should include in their thoughts that the each and every FN has a distinction of their own and each community is quite different from each other. I would argue that the Metis aren't different people but rather have a variety of traditions and cultural references that distinguishes them from say a Dene, Abenaki or Salish etc community.