Thank you very much for this invitation and for allowing me to present to you this morning.
The Feminist Alliance is a member of the Indian Act sex discrimination working group and calls on this committee and the Government of Canada to support Bill S-2 as amended by the Senate and pass it into law without further delay.
Today I want to talk to you about forced assimilation. Since its introduction, the goal of the Indian Act has been to erase first nations people and absorb them into the non-indigenous population. Settler governments have used many different strategies to control and erase first nations peoples in order to acquire their lands and resources through killing, scalping, starvation, residential schools, forced sterilization and sex discrimination in the status registration provisions of the Indian Act.
The devastating role that sex discrimination in the Indian Act has played in diminishing the size and strength of first nations communities is too often overlooked. By denying first nations women and their descendants Indian status, Canada has forced them into the non-indigenous population, reducing the pool of Indians to whom Canada owes a fiduciary duty. This has hurt the women, their descendants and their nations.
Let us be clear: Status is a legal invention of the Government of Canada. It defines which individuals the government recognizes as holders of indigenous rights and title and who is entitled to benefits and access to programs and services designed for first nations. Canada confers status; when Canada takes it away, it is a profound punishment.
Because the effects of pre-1985 sex discrimination are now entangled with the second generation cut-off, the 1985 cut-off and the two-parent rule, women and their descendants remain at a disadvantage with respect to status and transmission of status even in 2026, 150 years later. However, in 1985, when Canada began ever so slowly to discard bits of the sex discrimination, Canada did not stop its program of forced assimilation but broadened it. Canada introduced half status, or 6(2) status, for the first time and barred transmission of status to those with a parent and grandparent who married out, ensuring that it could continue to reduce the pool of Indians.
The Indian Act sex discrimination working group is grateful to Indigenous Services Canada for publishing the data on percentages of 6(2) status holders in every band in the country, as this permits everyone to see that the extinction of status Indians is the inevitable result of the second generation cut-off, as is the elimination of bands and reserves.
There is no question that the second generation cut-off violates article 8 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. That article guarantees indigenous people the right not to be forcibly assimilated. Canada officially endorsed the declaration, as Dawn said this morning, and passed legislation in June 2021 that commits Canada to ensuring that domestic laws mirror the rights set out in the declaration.
If this commitment is real, Canada must get rid of the second generation cut-off now. In addition to extinguishing first nations in the near future, the second generation cut-off harms first nations, individuals and families right now. First nations women know too well the harms caused by decades of exclusion, which fractures identity and breaks people and communities in social and psychological ways. The second generation cut-off is now visiting these same harms on young first nations women and men.