The Indian Act: What is it and why do some people want it gone?

This is a status card that says your friend Wab Kinew is an Indian within the meaning of the Indian Act. That's Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew at a historic meeting between First Nations leaders and First Ministers last month. In a move that some say took attention away from other discussions in Ottawa, He suggested it's time to abolish the Indian Act. I'm not sure if that lines up with your vision of Canada, that we still have a race-based form of identification in this country, but this is a reality. So why do some people, like the Premier, want to abolish the Indian Act? To get to that, we have to know what it is first. It's legislation first established 150 years ago in 1876. It's been amended a number of times since then but that doesn't change its long history dictating how First Nations people live. Bob Joseph wrote the book 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act. In this piece he lays out what was imposed on people from residential schools to reserves to the band council system to restricting language and culture. The Indian Act would give Canada a coordinated approach to this policy of assimilation. While Premier Kinew's comments sparked a conversation, the idea of moving past the Indian Act isn't new. That sentiment has been shared for decades. In 1969, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and Minister of Indian Affairs Jean Chrétien tabled the Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy, also known as the 1969 White Paper. I think that this policy is the right one, it's in the right direction. But we have to explain that policy to the people who are interested in and mostly the Indian people of Canada and the provincial government. The document, among other things, proposed to get rid of the Indian Act, eliminate Indian legal status, dissolve the Department of Indian Affairs and end all existing treaties between First Nations and Canada. First Nations leaders rejected it and created a red paper. Their own document emphasizing the importance of treaties and the distinct rights of First Nations. So how could it work now? We can still have the treaties, we can still have the constitutional rights that have been articulated under Section 35 and recognized, but we don't need the Indian Act to do those things. It's completely separate. You can have self-determination and you can have strong Indigenous nationhood, while at the same time not having the paternalism and the barriers that come with the Indian Act. Bob Joseph supports moving forward, but the word he uses is dismantle. Modern reconciliation is not about amending the Indian Act, but replacing it with Indigenous self-government. Nobody in Ottawa gets to tell us who our people are. Here's how we're going to govern ourselves and the self-reliance piece. Here's how we'd like to do it. Participate in the political and economic mainstream of this country. Professor Frank Deer says getting rid of the Indian Act raises important questions. One's going to consider abolishing the Indian Act. than what might replace it in order to protect for those things that reflect treaty relationships. Um, and. And maybe that's a part of the larger conversation that's frankly fundamental to this in my eyes, is that the legislation is what it is, the Premier's opinion on it is to abolish it, implied in that is its replacement, but. First Nations people at the community level, across communities, across the territories need to have a conversation about what nationhood means to them. What's clear, there isn't one opinion. In Manitoba or across the country. On one side, some First Nations are saying, yes, let's move forward with that. And then on the other hand, you have First Nations saying, no, that's not what we want. So we need to make sure that everybody's on the same page and there needs to be a process where all of our people are engaged. We've always said that the Indian Act was discriminatory. It was racist and that we need to get rid of it. Prime Minister Mark Carney says he's open to a modern relationship. Moving past what the act is today. Alana Cole, CBC News, Winnipeg.