Thank you for giving me the time to speak. I think I probably know more about the Indian Act than anybody else in the room. I'm not bragging, but I was the one who indexed it in the 1970s. Most people probably have a copy of the index that I did on the Indian Act.
I think the problem, the issue, of the piecemeal amendments to the Indian Act is that, going back to the 1969 white paper, and even before that, when people appeared in Ottawa in 1948 and 1949 about the Indian Act, the act put in place a regime that cannot be changed piecemeal. It's all interrelated, and somehow the government over the years created sections.
For instance, the reason they didn't want Indians trading, selling stuff off the reserve without their permission, was that it was impacting on the non-indigenous people who were farming around the reserves. They couldn't make as much money as the Indians. So they put sections like that in the Indian Act.
Making piecemeal changes to the Indian Act has a ripple effect. It also affects the constitutional of rights of people. Section 91 lists “Indians, and Lands reserved for the Indians”. When you remove sections of the Indian Act related to wills and estates, you are actually moving us from the section 91 jurisdiction into section 92 jurisdiction, which is in the province. So you're actually making a constitutional amendment.
I think this is a fairly significant amendment that you would do. I've talked a lot with people about this legislation at the first nation level, and 99.9% of the people I've talked to since last November about this legislation.... I've asked people in the communities, “How many people in this room have a will?” If we're lucky, one person, in a room of 200 or 300 people, will put their hand up. That's it.
This is not something that our people generally engage in—for spiritual reasons, for cultural reasons. They just know that certain things are done a certain way. Then, when you start imposing provincial restrictions, provincial criteria, on who's adopted, who's not adopted....
I have adopted brothers and sisters who are adults. People are adopted as adults in our customs. They get things at the time of passing. This is not recognized in a non-indigenous system.
I mean, I don't know what the purpose is, but in the communities there's a lot of concern about what the government is trying to do now—again—because that's how people perceive it. I think it would be a good idea to step back and really engage in what the chiefs have talked about: a respectful relationship. As the Supreme Court of Canada said numerous times, there has to be some kind of reconciliation between the two peoples. The question is how you achieve that reconciliation.
This is not a step in that direction. This is not stepping in the right direction. I think you need to step back and evaluate. The CBA made a number of comments from a non-indigenous legal point of view. From an indigenous legal point of view we have a lot of issues, because we have two conflicting legal systems coming into play here, the indigenous legal systems and the non-indigenous legal system.
There will be a lot of problems, and this is just the beginning of seeing what those could be. There really hasn't been a study, I believe. I don't know if anybody has talked to the provincial people who deal with these areas and asked them what they think of all this, or told them what kind of burden will be put on them, or asked them whether they know anything about what they will be dealing with.
The federal government is going to off-load onto the provinces something that is...and I would say that most of the time they don't have a clue about what they will be dealing with. It will cause a lot of problems internally and externally, within the nations and outside the nations, and in the provinces their wheels will start grinding to a halt, so to speak.
Even now the public administrators, when they have to deal with first nation issues, don't know what to do with us. Mainly it's a lack of understanding. Most law schools don't teach about the traditional legal systems of the first nations. They don't learn it, so they don't know what to do. Then they try to impose non-Indian values on us, which causes more problems.
I think there has to be a step back, or a study. I think a lot more questions need to be asked for the people who are....
You're going to off-load to the provinces. What do the provinces think of this? I don't know if they've been invited to participate in these meetings, but they probably should be, as to how they're going to deal with this when it administratively has to be devolved to them. That would be a good question to ask.
But there are some legal issues about devolving a constitutionally protected people onto the province without our consent. Free, prior, and informed consent is our right as treaty peoples, and that has not happened. This is not a consent consultation process that is going on here. This is...we're here and, you know, we're going to leave, and most of the time when I've appeared before the committee, what we've said about what needs to be changed has not been taken up, which is why we have raised the issue in Geneva on a number of occasions.
Thank you.