- Beyond Blood: Rethinking Indigenous Identity by Pamela D. Palmater
Canada has always discriminated in its policies towards First Nations in order to reduce the number of “status Indians” for which it accepts responsibility under the constitution. Active gender discrimination against a First Nations woman who “married out’ – that is, married a non-Indian male – was part of federal legislation by 1869, and was incorporated into the 1876 Indian Act. That legislation added a number of other negative provisions over time. In the 20th century, the Department of Indian Affairs used its power to decide who was a registered or status Indian to extend its discrimination even more widely. The underlying purpose of all these measures, as Beyond Blood points out, has been “cost reduction.” (47) The explanation is simple: the fewer Indians there are, the fewer people who are eligible for programs designed for First Nations, and the lower the federal government’s costs.
The discriminatory provisions of the Indian Act dealing with Indian status are particularly important for the author of Beyond Blood. Pamela Palmater, an academic at Ryerson University, has suffered the effects of Canada’s economy-driven [End Page 264] regime. Although she identifies as a member of the Eel River Bar First Nation of Mi’kmaq in northern New Brunswick, she is not recognized as a status Indian by Ottawa and has been prevented from participating fully in the political processes and economic benefits of her community. She eloquently explains how she was motivated by her experience to seek higher education in order to understand and combat the policies that she found so damaging. Along the way to a doctorate in law she discovered that one of the pernicious effects of discriminatory government policies has been that First Nations internalized the invidious practices of the Indian Affairs department. The result has been division and discord in many First Nations.
Beyond Blood explains in considerable detail the problems that lurk in the federal legislation concerning recognition of status. It points out that resistance to the gender discrimination in the Indian Act by First Nations women and the implementation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Charter) in 1982–85 forced Parliament to address the problem. Unfortunately, Bill C-31, the measure Ottawa adopted to solve the problem of legislated discrimination, both perpetuated and exacerbated it. The measure’s bizarre and Byzantine rules continued to discriminate in favour of males by granting them and their offspring a better brand of status than that for which women who had lost status and now applied for it to be restored could qualify. Moreover, another provision of Bill C-31 known as the second-generation cutoff effectively strips offspring of status. “Marrying out’ still has its costs thanks to policies refined when Bill C-31 was passed. Finally, C-31 introduced a novelty in federal Indian policy: the distinction between Indian status and band membership. Ottawa administers the former, but the latter is in the hands of individual First Nations.
Beyond Blood is at its most effective when explaining how persistent and pernicious discrimination on status has been since passage of the measure that was supposed to solve the problem in 1985. It explains carefully how Bill C-31 has operated in practice, using in particular the work of demographer Stewart Clatworthy to demonstrate that the long-term fate of Bill C-31 Indians, as those with restored status are usually known, is precarious. Its second chapter does an excellent job of reviewing the jurisprudence dealing with status and related aspects of Indian policy over the last quarter century. The fourth chapter is a chilling dissection of the membership codes that individual bands use to determine if people with restored Indian status qualify for band membership. For example, the Eel River Bar First Nation rules on qualifying for band membership amount to “the formula for its own extinction within a few generations.” (155) About one-fifth of the Eel River Bar band has restored Indian status under Bill C-31, and it has an out-marriage rate over fifty per cent. The...