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Originally Posted by Acajack
Just working within the framework we have.
Yes a different set of laws for different people based on ethnicity is odious.
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Indian Act is based on ancestry, not ethnicity. It isn't open to all indigenous people, just First Nations people who trace their lineage back along certain lines. That's why so many white people have status now, and many natives face significant hurdles getting it. It's not likely my mom will ever be able to actually get her status card, and that prevents me from getting one. I can prove I'm a certain percentage native through a DNA test but this is based on documented genealogy and we're missing too many documents. Now that my grandmother has passed away (she only got status in the late 1990s) we probably can't get it at all.
Not that I'm particularly upset about it, it's a bizarre system:
Quote:
Originally Posted by lio45
I am pretty damn certain that at some point in the future (on that distant day when a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian, which I think will inevitably come) people will look back at Canada and be astonished that this racial apartheid system lasted through the 20th century and into the 21st. It's incredibly anachronistic and I guess you have to be looking from the outside to see it. Similarly, it's possible South Africans in the early 1990s who grew up with their system found it normal too - "its just the way things are and have (from living memory) always been".
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Yes, it's something I've pointed out a lot. South Africa and the Nazis both got inspiration from how we treat native people, but somehow, we're the ones still doing this?
A chief in Manitoba back in the 1980s invited white supremacists from South Africa to his reserve and they made a big deal about how it was "exactly like apartheid". But most Canadians reacted to it with their usual "?!? No it isn't. You seem totally unhinged and disconnected from reality and we're pretty much going to stop paying any attention to you from now on."
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