On April 14, 2016, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the federal government now has constitutional responsibility for Métis and Non-Status Indians.
This was the culmination of The Kelowna Accord of November 2005 held under the leadership of prime minister Paul Martin. It involved an 18-month consultative process between the federal government, provincial and territorial governments, and five national aboriginal organizations. It pledged a 10-year plan, including a $5 billion commitment aimed at significantly improving health, education, housing and infrastructure, economic opportunities, accountability, and relationships between aboriginal communities and the federal government.
The issue of Non-Status Indians is not too difficult to work out. In many instances the decision of who would receive status under the Indian Act was determined in 1876 by the Indian Agents who took the census. All too often the registration of who would be classified as Indian was decided on the day that the agent visited the community. Those who were present were registered and came under the Indian Act. Those who were out of camp were not registered. This issue should have been sorted out decades ago,
The story of the Metis is different. Samuel de Champlain started it in the mid-1600s when he encouraged intermarriage between French settlers with Indians as an offspring of the fur trade. It had a cultural underpinning. The coureurs de bois and fur traders lived and travelled with Indians. They followed the Indian way of life. In Indian society a man lost caste if he performed what we call household duties, Indian women became an essential part of the fur traders' life. The children of these unions were the first Metis.
The definition of who was Metis expanded along with fur trade routes to include all persons of mixed white and Indian blood. The Metis are made up of two groups – the French along the St. Lawrence River and Upper Great Lakes and the English/ Scots of the Hudson Bay region in the western continent. Most Metis were of Ojibwa and Cree ancestry. The distinctive Metis culture arose in the Northwest where a way of life developed that was neither Indian nor European. The concept of a Metis nation arose not only from their Michif language but also from opposition to Lord Selkirk's colony on the Red River. This insurrection and the Northwest Rebellion were an attempt to survive as a group with a demand for corporate rather than individual rights.
The question now is whether the Metis are to be considered a group of aboriginal people distinct from Status and Non-Status Indians with a separate claim for constitutional rights and privileges. Are they to be given status as a nation in the same way the citizens of Quebec constitute a nation within Canada living under a common constitutional authority which makes up our confederation of provinces and territories? Or are they to be treated as a separate nation living within our geographical boundaries but for whom the ‘Rest of Canada' has a special and distinct responsibility – a sort of sovereignty association.
One wonders what Rene Levesque would have thought about this arrangement.
Alan Murdock is a St. Albert pediatrician. His column first ran in the April 23 St. Albert Gazette.
