The Indian Act dictates who can be Indian and who is not Indian. One of the criteria was that if you were enfranchised as a Canadian, you were no longer Indian. There were different ways of enfranchisement. One was that if you enlisted in the armed forces, and another was if you were a woman and you married a non-status person, then you would not become Indian.
So that's where a lot of the focus is in court right now—on women and their descendants who lost their status because of marrying out. I believe that as we speak, there's a committee meeting right now on this topic.
Moreover, if you received an education you were enfranchised or assimilated as a Canadian. I haven't seen anybody who actually lost their status because they got a bachelor's degree or a mainstream education, so I don't know of any cases in which that actually happened, even though that was written into the Indian Act.
One thing that did impact people, though, is funding. If you were a first nations person and went to university, by the treaties you were supposed to be provided with financial support for education. That was challenged in the 1960s. In fact, my dad was one of the first people to challenge it when he went to the University of Saskatchewan, because the rationale was given that, for people of the time, the average education would be a grade 8, so he had already exceeded the expectations for an Indian. They were able to successfully challenge that.
Post-secondary funding is still unequal and still not up to par with what it should be. In fact, there hadn't been a change in the funding structure since 1992. That creates an unequal dynamic around access to education.