- Tribal Constitutionalism: States, Tribes and the Governance of Membership by Kirsty Gover, and: Beyond Blood: Rethinking Indigenous Identity by Pamela D Palmater
When my father was growing up in the north end of Winnipeg in the 1940s and 1950s, his Ojibway and Métis heritage were things to be hidden: he and his sisters told people that they were ‘French.’ My mother, on the other hand, grew up on her reserve in the Pas, Manitoba, and it was from there that she was sent to residential school at the age of five. To my mother, her Cree heritage was unshakeable, though the residential- school experience must surely have put these self-understandings to an awful test. My mother and father met and fell in love and had two children, of which I am the younger. Their union was in no way atypical, but it was not without consequence.
My father’s family history is partly Métis, partly from the Dog Creek reserve in Manitoba. He was not a status Indian because his great grandfather was said to have accepted land in exchange for his legal recognition as a treaty Indian. So when my parents married, he was a non-status Indian who told people he was French, and she was a Cree woman of the Opaskwayak nation with a status card issued by the government of Canada – the card was legal recognition of her place in a line of Cree persons who had signed onto Treaty #5, and it was a guarantee of her place in the generations of Cree people entitled to treaty rights. Soon after they married, my mother received a letter from the Department of Indian Affairs notifying her that she was no longer, legally, an Indian. Because she married my father, a non-status Indian and because, in those days, Indian status travelled only through patrilineal lines, the act of marrying my father was sufficient to strip my mother of her legal status as an Indian.
Twenty years later, in 1985, the Government of Canada amended the Indian Act with Bill C-31, the effect of which was to reinstate my mother, legally, as an Indian, and at the age of fourteen, I suddenly became a legal Indian. But my sister and I were not the same kind of Indian as my mother; we were 6(2) Indians, named after that section of the Indian Act that made us status Indians, and while we enjoyed all the rights and [End Page 511] benefits of status Indians like my mother, my sister and I cannot pass on our status as Indians to our children unless we have children with other status Indians (known informally as the two-generation rule, this section of the Act imports a blood quantum test). Love being what it is, I have two children, neither of whom is a status Indian because their mother is not a status Indian. With Bill C-3, the Parliament of Canada has again amended the Indian Act such that my children are now 6(2) Indians, so that they are in exactly the same place as I was in 1985.
My family history, our coming in and out of legal recognition as Indians, is sadly a relatively normal part of being Indigenous in Canada. Two books out in the last year consider the issues of Indian status, Indigeneity, tribal identity, and the social, political, legal framework around the construction of these terms. Kirsty Gover’s Tribal Constitutionalism: States Tribes and the Governance of Membership is the more academic of the two and it makes an important contribution to the literature, not least because Gover bases her account on a large, empirical study of tribal membership codes from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. Pamela D Palmater’s Beyond Blood: Rethinking Indigenous Identity is personal, vivid, and policy-oriented.
Gover begins, appropriately, with a deconstruction of the term ‘Indigeneity.’ What is it to be an Indigenous person? Is it ancestry that determines Indigeneity, or more...