Good day.
My name is Steven Bentley. I represent the Edmonton Stragglers, a historically removed band that was made up primarily of women and represents one of the earliest legislative removals using gender.
We have a story that's rooted in Bill S-3 legislation and has harbingers for Bill S-2. We appear before you today to speak to the origins of continuity and the present-day legal reality of the Edmonton Stragglers, an indigenous collective whose existence has been documented, administered and yet paradoxically denied.
The registrar is registering our people per section 11, band membership regulations, from our band list of the Edmonton Stragglers, but the registration is fraught with difficulty, both in obtaining the requisite information and in privacy concerns of the department, creating a bottleneck and impeding timely and complete registrations.
We ask Minister Alty, who has the discretion under the power of “may”, to direct Indigenous Services Canada, ISC, to engage with us to overcome these issues and move on to empower the rights of our ancestors' women, allowing their descendants to form a chief and council and thus to fully engage with the Crown.
We ask further that a dedicated registration expediter be appointed to address the ongoing delays in systemic inefficiencies in the Indian status registration process, a model similar to the expedited passport processing “90 days or it's free” agenda. It would introduce accountability and timeliness into a process that currently leaves applicants waiting years. Justice delayed, in this case, is justice denied.
We also submit that a second generation cut-off should not be rigidly applied to those being now registered under Bill S-3. A more equitable approach would be to allow third-generation registration for our members whose exclusion was rooted in historical discrimination.
This is not expansion. It's restoration, which is unique to our case and thus differentiates us from other instances of corrective measures of other peoples who were never on pay lists, whilst our people spanned over 100 years of enrolment. They have demonstrated treaty community connections dating back to the Two Row Wampum and the Selkirk Treaty of 1817 before reclassification by Canada, which allowed for processing under inferior legislation protected by the fourth clause of the 1850 Indian Act and other legislation.
The Edmonton Stragglers were not a transient or incidental grouping. We were a recognized band explicitly identified in the public record as a band of Indians who owned land in the Edmonton vicinity. Our members were enumerated, tracked and governed through the colonial administrative systems, including Hudson's Bay Company records, ecclesiastical records and early census instruments tied to imperial Crown obligations.
Despite this clear documentary foundation, the Crown later advanced a legal fiction that scrip extinguished our collective identity and rights. Scrip, in practice, did not function as a lawful extinguishment mechanism. It was inconsistently applied, often coercive and, critically, it targeted individuals, not the collective identity of a band. The notion that it erased a people is unsupported in law and fact.
Today, under the amendments of Bill S-3, we are witnessing a quiet but profound contradiction. The federal registrar is actively reconstructing the very ban list that Canada once treated as extinguished. Individuals are being registered precisely because their ancestors were last recognized on the Edmonton Stragglers list. This is not a revival. It's a confirmation of the continuity of our community, and that continuity carries legal consequences.
Under section 11 of the Indian Act, control over band membership flows from recognized band lists. What now exists is a growing population of entitled people—our families, whose lineage traces directly to this list—without the corresponding recognition of the band entity itself. This creates a structural inconsistency: a band list without a band.
The historical reason for this fragmentation is clear: sex-based discrimination embedded in the Indian Act. Our women lost status upon marriage; our children were excluded, and entire family lines were administratively severed. The result was not extinction but dispersal.
I will turn this over to my colleague—