Indian Act

His daughter, Alice, is my now late granny.

My mother and I are Northern Slavery Dene, or Satu, but my Indian Act imposed status card by the Canadian government says Yellow Knives Dene.

Through my father, I am a daughter of the Mayflower and a daughter of the American Revolution.

Having a Canadian Indian Act-imposed status card is a colonial construct by Canadian policies meant to divide Indigenous peoples' inherent rights.

Indigenous Two-Spirit or the Indigenous 2SLGBTQ community and Indigenous women are at the bottom of the Canadian socio-economic ladder because of imposed poverty, colonial trauma, racism, gendered violence and land theft.

I'm not a social worker nor an elder, nor do I speak on behalf of all Indigenous peoples.

You know, so proud that they have the right to a credit card, which is great for them.

But as I've talked about endlessly on this podcast, as well as in the reports that we've referred to, that is not something like intergenerational wealth is not something that...

Pressure was put on them to assimilate.

Reserve land, much like reservations, were created in the Indian Act of 1876 and by numerous treaties.

Residential schools, much like the residential schools in the United States, forced the students to repudiate their culture and practiced, unfortunately, various acts of abuse.

There was a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that was formed in 2008 in Canada to address what happened in those schools and try to make some amends.

So if you don't want to just hold your mouse there all the time, you can kind of pop over.

And it would say, actually Shawnee can be both First Nations and Métis, and that's actually a product of our colonial policies around the Indian Act and Métis.

Script or whatever else and it would it would give you as much context as you wanted Depending if you're using the chat bot or the writing tool the writing tool tends to be a bit more concise And then it would say here's how you could write this Shawnee Gwynn is First Nations and has identified as First Nations in Métis It's important that we respect how each indigenous person identifies if we need anything from her to verify her identity, please let me know or something like that, but I'm just talking out of the side of my mouth.

It probably is way better than what I just said.

If you don't have like proper Red River lineage, you're not a goddamn Métis.

Like that's ugliness is here, right? So I wanted to bring that up because up north, the Métis are just considered anyone of Dene descent because the Indian Act was so messed up that Métis was the used word of basically saying anyone of Dene descent that isn't status.

Right.

So when I talk a lot about, you know, the Inuit, the Métis and the Dene up north being really like together together.

Just wanted to point out our shitty relationship again with the police.

Fast forward to, oh, come on, come on, 79.

You know, with the passing of the Family Allowance Act in 1844, the federal government assumed responsibility for the well-being of its citizens and indian agents welfare teachers missionaries and rcmp officers gain new leverage among indigenous families and i just found that whole section very interesting how they basically tried to use money as a reason to not um you know force their kids to go to school and then they actually did find like the parents were reading uh Section 14 of the Family Allowance Act that basically said the Indian Act stated that families could offer their children equivalent training.

So that was the loophole they found to try to keep some of their children at home so and how much officials resented it made me happy it's just like resistance.

It was like we were held hostage in our own community.

What the Indian Act did was it imposed elected systems so that I guess they could understand how we were governing if it was reflective and modeled after the way they do it, like having a mayor and a city council or whatever.

So now we have an elected system in this community for about 100 years or so.

I remember in the 90s, my mom was working at the MCK, Mohawk Council of Kahnawake.

And I was like, big deal.

They're all a bunch of sellouts anyways.

And she just looked at me, and she was like, where did you get that attitude? And I said, well, you know, when you grow up here, obviously your peers, there's a lot of people who grew up traditional and they kind of don't like the elected system because they feel it's a perpetuation of the Indian Act and, you know, your arm of the federal government.

So I heard all these things.

We're going to Fort Carlton to explore the signing of Treaty 6 and what it still means today.

We'll examine the 150th anniversary of the Indian Act and the legacy it continues to shape.

We're heading 400 kilometres up to the first spacewalk by a Canadian astronaut and back down to Allegiant Hall in Winnipeg, a hundred years in the making.

We're bringing you seven new episodes this season.