In response to a few villagers who indicated they would like to know more about how unregistered, off-reserve, and Metis peoples in Canada have asserted their reality over the last several decades, I offer the following paragraphs. Because it is a complex history, and I know people donšt often read more than a few pages at any given sitting, I will draft this information in installments. Whenever people have had enough just yell uncle, and Išll stop.

First Installment - Chickens and Eggs

I want to emphasize that I am not dealng only with Metis peoples, but with Indians who, for a variety of reasons never registered, were excluded from registration, had registration stripped from them, or were registered but denied residency on-reserve or membership in a particular Indian band. In Canada, by the way, people who are registered under the Indian Act are most often refered to as Status Indians. Until recently, those Indians who are not registered are refrred to non-status Indians. The politically correct term for those people these days is unregistered Indians. There is a third category labelled as Bill C31 Indians, but more about that later.

Like governments in the United States, Canadian governments have, since Confederation in 1867, assumed that Aboriginal peoples in Canada were, or soon would be, extinct. In fact, the original Canadian constititutioon (the British North America Act) contained only one 7-word reference to Indians which gave the Federal government the jurisdiction to legislate for =Indians and lands reserved for Indians=. Accordingly, government policy ever since has been dedicated to assimilating whatever Aboriginal populations managed to survive the ravages of colonial warfare, disease, racism, and other ethnocidal practices.

Without getting into a lot of incredibly complicated detail about the effect of these policies, suffice it to say that by 1969, up to three- quarters of the Canadian Indian population were no longer registered and no longer lived on reserve. Others, who identified themselves as Metis had no official recognition outside of a few settlement lands in Alberta and Metis farms in Saskatchewan. The government, in what is now referred to as THE White Paper, felt it was time to publicly propose that all distinctions between Aboriginal and non- Aboriginal Canadians be eliminated. The paper proposed to do away with the Indian Act, with Indian registration, and co-incidently, with Aboriginal and Treaty rights. The Justice Minister of the day, Jean Cretien, (who is Prime Minister today) was virtually overwhelmed by the negative backlash from the Aboriginal community to his proposal.

The basic premise of the White Paper, that Aboriginal and Treaty rights were a colonial anachronism with no relevance in a modern world, was shattered by a split decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in the Calder case in 1973. Half of the judges found that Aboriginal rights did, indeed, still exist and that it might be possible for modern day Aboriginal people to make claims based on those rights. The government scambled to cover its obviously exposed legal butt.

In the late 60's the government, under heavy pressure from Status Indian groups, agreed to fund an Aboriginal representative organization to address Indian issues and propose solutions to government. It was at this point that the National Indian Brotherhood (NIB) was formed. Unfortunately, it was also at this point that this largely Status Indian organization asked representatives of unregistered Indians and Metis to leave their meetings. They did agree, however, to support separate government funding for organizations to represent unregistered Indian and Metis. The government, however, refused to fund two separate organizations, one for unregistered Indians and another for Metis. It became obvious that these groups were going to have to find a way to work together in a single organization if they wanted government funding.