21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act: Helping Canadians Make Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples a Reality

by Bob Joseph

For more than a century, Indian Residential Schools separated over 150,000 Aboriginal children from their families and communities.

Most of the Indians of Quebec, British Columbia, and the Yukon are not parties to a treaty.

While self-government is not a quick fix for the deeply rooted social, health and economic issues that plague Indigenous communities, it is a step towards empowering communities to rebuild and heal from the intergenerational effects of residential schools.

Self-determination is the right to decide who your people are. Under the Indian Act there are many rules governing membership, and bands/First Nations are required to maintain a registry of community members based on those membership rules. Self-determination would allow for both status and non-status members to be part of a self-governing community, which would be driven by the communities’ own membership code.

In the short term, if Canadians can stay committed to reconciliation, personally review the 94 recommendations drawn up by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, and pursue the ones relevant to them, perhaps we could see the strengthening of the nation-to-nation relationship and create a better, more prosperous Canada that lives up to its fundamental ideology of recognition of human rights not just abroad but at home as well.

eliminate educational and employment gaps between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians.

education funding for First Nations children being educated on reserves and those First Nations children being educated off reserves.