The following was a letter to APTN News, which I copied to the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations, and my MP in Ottawa South.
This was an excellent article with important nuance that is not widely understood.
Where I would find (some) disagreement is on the subject of whether those band governments are representative. While the Bands and Councils are a creation of the Federal Government, most bands have moved to Self defined electoral processes and leadership structures, and are not using the Indian Act 2 year band council election method. In creating custom codes, I would argue these bands are creating representative structures which hold meaningful democratic status. And I would even extend that to say many of the bands choosing to remain in the Indian Act electoral process, or the First Nations Voting Act, do so with intent - though you could certainly point to particularly small communities as lacking the administrative capacity to do so.
I'd say that is exceptionally true of many of the BC Nations that are the topic of this debate, as they have had government systems created most recently and generally have created processes and institutions which are most distinct from the Indian Act.
Regarding the closing line
Could you imagine the German constitution granted a specific level of government jurisdiction over "Jews, and lands reserved for the Jews"?
I think the important differentiation is that, as you point out elsewhere, "Indian" is not an ethnic group as "Jews" are, but is rather a legal status that is self revocable. With that in mind, this is an extension of the opening to the constitution which grants Canada sovereignty over all subjects of the crown where those aspects have not been moved to Provincial Jurisdiction, and a recognition that those of status and such lands are not under Provincial Jurisdiction.
If I had said “responsible government” rather than “representative government”, would the distinction between what we normally think of as governments and democratically elected bureaucracies for foreign powers be more clear? I regularly have a hard time figuring out the right English worlds to use for concepts which really fall outside of the worldviews embedded within English.
I can make that as a correction if you think it would be better.
—-
"Indian" isn't a term to reference a single ethnic group, but a term that the Canadian Crowns have (ab)used to group together many ethnic groups/nationalities. That is a term the Dominion Government used to try to over-simplify something which was always more complex, under their assumption that the separate groups wouldn’t exist for long and would be folded into the Canadian body politic.
There are many different nationalities, and I don’t know how useful generalizations about bands vs nations are. How many bands were created that deliberately segregated peoples of the same nationality, or how many nationalities sometimes exist within single bands, make the “band” a poor measure for anything that isn’t tied to the assimilation policies of the Canadian Crown.
While Eugenics thinking that grew primarily within the Atlantic part of the Anglosphere (UK, Canada, USA) and spread elsewhere has suggested there is a biological basis for these "out groups", being Jewish and being Haudenosaunee are both things which *individuals* can ignore their identities and opt out of over generations.
Supersuccessionism, where Christians believed that Jews shouldn't still exist and should instead be Christian, shouldn’t be thought of as entirely different from the (also regularly violent) assimilation policies of the European Christian colonial Dominion of Canada institutions.
I'm aware that there are strong emotions relating to these ideas, especially given Canada's historical (and ongoing ) Christian Zionism which led to Canada's "None Is Too Many" during the Shoah. I don’t express this to try to generate or reference those emotions, but to try to encourage people to step back from their own individual identity and try to see things from different perspectives.
I think Responsible government is closer to what you are looking for. However, for discussion on consultation on projects occurring on treaty land, I would argue representative government is what is required to produce community input.
I agree with the cultural Genocidal intention of the Dominion of Canada's founding doctrine and general intention of; "Be British, Don't Be American, Keep the French in, get the Indians to go... somewhere". Perhaps out of the scope of this article, but I would argue that correcting this intent is the necessary aspect to reconciliation, and meaningfully including First Nations in the institutions they have been intentionally excluded from is the solution.
The difference between this and simple "assimilation" is that the Indian Act and governance was indented to force individuals to leave their Nations and participate in Canadian Society as an individual, whereas the goal of economic reconciliation that occurs alongside of strengthened self government is to bring communities into beneficial interaction with Canadian society.
That said, my point I think stands the section 27 isn't about an ethnic group as in the Jewish comparison, it is about governance of a legal framework.
This was an excellent article with important nuance that is not widely understood.
Where I would find (some) disagreement is on the subject of whether those band governments are representative. While the Bands and Councils are a creation of the Federal Government, most bands have moved to Self defined electoral processes and leadership structures, and are not using the Indian Act 2 year band council election method. In creating custom codes, I would argue these bands are creating representative structures which hold meaningful democratic status. And I would even extend that to say many of the bands choosing to remain in the Indian Act electoral process, or the First Nations Voting Act, do so with intent - though you could certainly point to particularly small communities as lacking the administrative capacity to do so.
I'd say that is exceptionally true of many of the BC Nations that are the topic of this debate, as they have had government systems created most recently and generally have created processes and institutions which are most distinct from the Indian Act.
Regarding the closing line
Could you imagine the German constitution granted a specific level of government jurisdiction over "Jews, and lands reserved for the Jews"?
I think the important differentiation is that, as you point out elsewhere, "Indian" is not an ethnic group as "Jews" are, but is rather a legal status that is self revocable. With that in mind, this is an extension of the opening to the constitution which grants Canada sovereignty over all subjects of the crown where those aspects have not been moved to Provincial Jurisdiction, and a recognition that those of status and such lands are not under Provincial Jurisdiction.
Lastly, small quip, the Vatican is theocracy.
If I had said “responsible government” rather than “representative government”, would the distinction between what we normally think of as governments and democratically elected bureaucracies for foreign powers be more clear? I regularly have a hard time figuring out the right English worlds to use for concepts which really fall outside of the worldviews embedded within English.
I can make that as a correction if you think it would be better.
—-
"Indian" isn't a term to reference a single ethnic group, but a term that the Canadian Crowns have (ab)used to group together many ethnic groups/nationalities. That is a term the Dominion Government used to try to over-simplify something which was always more complex, under their assumption that the separate groups wouldn’t exist for long and would be folded into the Canadian body politic.
There are many different nationalities, and I don’t know how useful generalizations about bands vs nations are. How many bands were created that deliberately segregated peoples of the same nationality, or how many nationalities sometimes exist within single bands, make the “band” a poor measure for anything that isn’t tied to the assimilation policies of the Canadian Crown.
While Eugenics thinking that grew primarily within the Atlantic part of the Anglosphere (UK, Canada, USA) and spread elsewhere has suggested there is a biological basis for these "out groups", being Jewish and being Haudenosaunee are both things which *individuals* can ignore their identities and opt out of over generations.
Supersuccessionism, where Christians believed that Jews shouldn't still exist and should instead be Christian, shouldn’t be thought of as entirely different from the (also regularly violent) assimilation policies of the European Christian colonial Dominion of Canada institutions.
https://r.flora.ca/p/zionism
I'm aware that there are strong emotions relating to these ideas, especially given Canada's historical (and ongoing ) Christian Zionism which led to Canada's "None Is Too Many" during the Shoah. I don’t express this to try to generate or reference those emotions, but to try to encourage people to step back from their own individual identity and try to see things from different perspectives.
I think Responsible government is closer to what you are looking for. However, for discussion on consultation on projects occurring on treaty land, I would argue representative government is what is required to produce community input.
I agree with the cultural Genocidal intention of the Dominion of Canada's founding doctrine and general intention of; "Be British, Don't Be American, Keep the French in, get the Indians to go... somewhere". Perhaps out of the scope of this article, but I would argue that correcting this intent is the necessary aspect to reconciliation, and meaningfully including First Nations in the institutions they have been intentionally excluded from is the solution.
The difference between this and simple "assimilation" is that the Indian Act and governance was indented to force individuals to leave their Nations and participate in Canadian Society as an individual, whereas the goal of economic reconciliation that occurs alongside of strengthened self government is to bring communities into beneficial interaction with Canadian society.
That said, my point I think stands the section 27 isn't about an ethnic group as in the Jewish comparison, it is about governance of a legal framework.