"My Girl"

Over the last five years, I have tried to use academic resources to add to my own lived understanding of Indian Act registration and the ways that it has crafted notions of who is a credible Indian in Canada.I have read, heard, and doled out a lot of wellplaced criticism about the Act's perversity, not to mention Canada's general self-affirmed claim to name and govern Indigenous peoples.The incessant hate-on toward this piece of legislation makes it seem as if, for many, it is the physical manifestation of colonialism in this country.To be clear, the Indian Act has never defined Indigenous identities in their vast and dynamic richness; rather, through the label "Indian, " it and the band membership codes that it has inspired have crafted a particular representation of Indigeneity based not only on a patriarchal model of ascription, but on a racialized veneration of the antiquity of so-called "Indian blood." These criteria have served to physically and symbolically separate many Indigenous people (and peoples), and disenfranchised women and their descendants in particular, from their respective reserves and ancestral lands and families.This is the common narrative that is told about Indian Act registration.While completely accurate, there is also more to this story.Despite the recent and successful political and activist efforts that have sought, and continue to seek, a rejection of the language of "Indian-ness, Aboriginality, and Indigeneity" to one that rightly recognizes our distinct peoplehoods, there still remains, for many, an emotional investment in Canadian legislative determinations of Indian status.In other words, being a Canadian Indian also referred to as being "Status, " or, inaccurately in the Prairie provinces, as being "treaty, " is important to many people.Among those in my own First Nation, at least, it is evident that the Indian Act's version of Indian-ness has, unfortunately, become more than an external state category.It has made its way into some processes of self-definition in the development of individual identities and community perceptions of authenticity.As a result, Indian registration has come to determine degrees of relatedness between community and family members dividing them legally and (at times) physically, while setting people on treacherous journeys of Indigenous existential crisis.All this stems from the Act's definitional framework (i.e., who or what is an Indian), without even getting into any of the guts of its heavy-handed administration of Indian and band life.Academic literature on the matter remains heavily jurisprudential, and distills law from the local and personal ways in which legal categories impact everyday life.As a result, I have found that the academic literature does not tend to reflect the ways in which people emotionally feel the impacts of the Indian Act categorization scheme and, more importantly, how they resist its rigid boundaries.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.