The core of the NAVA membership complaint is that there was a lack of understanding of the pre-war conditions that the Métis and non-status Indians had lived in. There were low levels of literacy and numeracy, and poor education.
More importantly, there was even a lack of interest and a lack of will to think about the needs of these veterans. There were no procedures established to deal with this group at all. In the document that NAVA submitted to the UN, they called this a flagrant discrimination against aboriginal veterans who were non-status Indians and Métis--when, by the way, there were more of them, sir, than status Indians.
That's the essence of the claim. There was no point in the process where people revealed their aboriginality, that they were non-status or Métis or anything like that. As Claude says, when the bullets are flying, nobody's asking you--