Opinion: Native people still live under 'apartheid' in Canada

The Indian Act of 2014 still largely looks the same as it did in 1876, save from some adjustments made in the 60s and 80s. International organizations are appalled by the Act, and only recently were First Nations under the Act able to make human rights complaints to the Canadian Human Rights Commission. What started out in 1876 as an official apartheid movement, remains in the form of marginalization, ghettoization, and societal exclusion.

The Indian Act of 1876 was a solution to two pieces of previous legislation in 1857 and 1869 designed to assimilate indigenous people in this country. John A. Macdonald certainly was on the prowl for land, and the numbered treaties, signed under ultimate duress due to starvation, were messy and applied to diverse groups. The Indian Act was and is designed to sweep people under the rug in the hopes that would simply disappear or some how become "Canadian."

According to an annual report from the Department of the Interior in 1876, "Our Indian legislation generally rests on the principle, that the aborigines are to be kept in a condition of tutelage and treated as wards or children of the State.… the true interests of the aborigines and of the State alike require that every effort should be made to aid the Red man in lifting himself out of his condition of tutelage and dependence, and that is clearly our wisdom and our duty, through education and every other means, to prepare him for a higher civilization by encouraging him to assume the privileges and responsibilities of full citizenship."

We know where this system of education led. The amendments to the Act between 1876 and 1951 took away ceremonial, legal, mobility, and human rights away from those living on reserve. The Act treated women as second class, and it excluded numerous people who were not determined to be "Indian."