Hi!
I got an A+ in INST 203, and this file has an example answer for every study question at the end of each
section. If you can answer all of these yourself, you should be good for the final.
How I’d use it:
• Try each question on your own first, then check it against the answer here.
• Notice how each answer names the author and gives a specific example. That’s what gets marks
on the closed-book final.
• Use the cheat sheet file alongside this one for the key terms, authors and dates.
One more thing: the assignments are marked really hard, especially citations, but the final is marked a
lot more fairly. So don’t get discouraged if your assignment grades aren’t great.
Good luck!
1
,INST 203: Example Answers to the Study Questions
One example answer for each study question, in course order. Try the question yourself first, then
compare.
Contents
INST 203: Example Answers to the Study Questions...................................................................................2
Unit 1: Identity........................................................................................................................................3
Section 1: Identity..............................................................................................................................3
Section 2: The Indian Act and Racial Categorization........................................................................17
Section 3: The Indian Act and Indian Women..................................................................................29
Section 4: Terminology and Identity................................................................................................47
Unit 2: First Nations Treaties................................................................................................................58
Section 1: Background to Treaties...................................................................................................58
Section 2: The Royal Proclamation of 1763 and Unnumbered Treaties...........................................69
Section 3: The Meaning of Treaties.................................................................................................77
Section 4: The Numbered Treaties, 1871–1923...............................................................................84
Section 5: First Nations Understanding of Treaty Terms.................................................................91
Unit 3: The Métis..................................................................................................................................98
Section 1: What’s in a Name? The Emergence of the Métis............................................................98
Section 2: First Nations Women and the Emergence of the Métis..................................................99
Section 3: The Political Emergence of the Métis............................................................................101
2
,Unit 1: Identity
Section 1: Identity
Q1. Explain briefly the origin and development of the term “Indian.”
Source: Course reading, Section 1 (Slobodin 1971); Dyck 1980 for the legal stage
The term “Indian” began as a navigational error and ended as a legal category owned by the federal
government. In 1492 Columbus was sailing for the East Indies. He landed in the Caribbean, believed he
had reached the Indies, and called the people he met Indians. The name was wrong on the first day. It
was never corrected.
The error mattered because of what it did to identity. Before contact there was no word that covered all
the peoples of this land. People identified themselves by community, by nation and by place. Slobodin
states this plainly.
“Five hundred years ago there were no American Indians, Canadian Indians, or in the British
term, Red Indians. There were members of the species Homo sapiens inhabiting the Western
Hemisphere in a number of populations, some quite fixed and sessile [sedentary], others fluid,
shifting, and semi-nomadic or truly nomadic.”
— Slobodin, “The Indians of Canada” today (1971), pp. 287–288
So “Indian” was the first pan-Indigenous label, and an outsider invented it. It flattened hundreds of
nations with separate languages, economies and governments into one box.
For roughly 270 years the word carried no legal force. That changed with the Royal Proclamation of
1763. The Crown recognized Indian nations as nations under its protection and ruled that their lands
could be surrendered only to the Crown. “Indian” was now a word inside British law.
The British North America Act of 1867 went further. Section 91(24) gave Parliament exclusive authority
over “Indians, and Lands reserved for the Indians.” Indians became a federal file rather than a treaty
partner.
The Indian Act of 1876 turned the word into a status Ottawa controlled. Dyck describes the machinery.
Band lists were drawn up at the treaties, listing everyone who took treaty. In 1951 those lists were
consolidated into one central registry. Descendants of the people on that register are the legally defined
Indian population of Canada. A woman who married a non-Indian lost her status and her children were
never registered. A non-Indian woman who married an Indian man gained it. From that point “Indian”
described a government file, not a people.
The last stage is reclamation. Because Ottawa dealt with one category, organizing as one category was
the only way to answer back. The National Indian Council formed in 1961 and the National Indian
Brotherhood in 1968. They defeated the 1969 White Paper, which proposed abolishing Indian status,
and Ottawa withdrew it in 1971. The Constitution Act, 1982 named three Aboriginal peoples — Indian,
Inuit and Métis — and the National Indian Brotherhood became the Assembly of First Nations.
Today “Indian” survives mainly as a legal term inside the Indian Act. First Nations and Indigenous are the
words people use for themselves. The development runs in one line: a mistake, then a nation under the
Crown, then a federal file, then a status the government could give and take, then a platform for
organizing, then a word set aside once people could name themselves.
3
,Q2. The Indigenous peoples of the United States and Canada have reluctantly accepted the term
Indian as a shared self-identification. Why?
Source: Course reading, Section 1 (Slobodin 1971)
They accepted it because colonization gave them a shared situation, and because both governments
dealt with them as one legal category. The word “reluctantly” is the key. They knew the label was a
European mistake and knew it was imposed. They used it anyway, on purpose, because it was the only
word that covered everyone the state treated the same way.
The first reason is that the conditions became almost identical. Indigenous peoples in Canada and the
United States ended up in nearly the same colonial relationship with their governments: land taken,
populations moved onto reserves or reservations, economies destroyed, children removed for
schooling. The social, economic and political conditions were close enough that the shared experience
was real, not invented. At its extreme end that shared experience included the deliberate destruction of
whole peoples.
“It was on what is now Canadian soil that occurred one of the recorded cases of literal and
total genocide: the extermination, during the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, of the Beothuk
Indians of Newfoundland.”
— Slobodin, “The Indians of Canada” today (1971), p. 288
The second reason is administrative. Ottawa ran one department, one statute and one policy for
everybody it called Indian. Washington did the same through its own bureau. Nobody in government
was dealing with the Cree or the Mi’kmaq or the Blackfoot as separate nations in day-to-day
administration. They were dealing with a category.
That creates a hard political problem. You have to answer at the level you are addressed. A single nation
raising a single grievance is easy to ignore. A national body speaking for everyone in the government’s
own category cannot be brushed aside as easily. So the category built to manage them became the
category they organized inside.
The third reason is that it worked, and the record shows it. The National Indian Council formed in 1961,
the first national pan-Indigenous body in Canada. The National Indian Brotherhood followed in 1968. In
1969 the federal White Paper proposed ending Indian status altogether, and the organized national
response forced Ottawa to withdraw it in 1971. That outcome would not have been possible from
separate nations acting separately.
There is also an internal reason. Generations were told by schools, agents and the wider society that
they were Indians. The word was drilled in. Reclaiming it and attaching pride to it was easier than
starting from nothing, and it gave people something to hold in common with strangers from other
nations who had lived the same life.
The reluctance never disappeared, and the ending proves it. As soon as Indigenous peoples had enough
standing to name themselves, they replaced the word. The National Indian Brotherhood became the
Assembly of First Nations in 1982. “First Nations,” “Aboriginal” and now “Indigenous” took over.
“Indian” was a tool, useful for political action at a particular time, and it was set down when it was no
longer needed.
Q3. What accounts for the higher number of Indigenous women than men in urban centres?
Source: Frideres & Gadacz, Aboriginal Peoples in Canada, 9th ed., ch. 5
4
,Frideres and Gadacz give three reasons, and they stack on top of each other. The result is stated flatly in
the chapter: by 2010 more Aboriginal women than men were living in urban areas. None of the three
reasons is about women preferring city life. All three are about being pushed.
The first reason is the law. Before 1985 the Indian Act took status away from any Indian woman who
married a non-Indian man. Section 12(1)(b) applied to women only. An Indian man who married a non-
Indian woman kept his status, and his wife gained it. A woman who lost status also lost the right to live
on her reserve, and her children were never registered. She had to leave. Over decades that clause
moved a large number of women into towns and cities, and it moved almost no men. Bill C-31 in 1985
restored status to many of these women and their children, but restoring the paper did not restore a
house. Reserve housing was already scarce, and band membership rules and waiting lists meant most
reinstated women stayed where they already were, in the city.
The second reason is work and education. Aboriginal women, on average, have more formal education
than Aboriginal men. That should be an advantage, but the reserve economy does not reward it.
Reserve employment is limited, and what exists has historically been organized around men — resource
work, construction, band labour. Reserve social and political life is also patriarchal, so a woman with
training often has no position to move into at home. The jobs that match her education, in offices,
services, health care and schools, exist in urban centres. So she goes where the work is.
The third reason is family and safety. Women leave reserves because of overcrowded or unavailable
housing, because they are raising children alone, and because of family violence and abuse. A woman
who has to get herself and her children out of a dangerous house often has nowhere on the reserve to
go, since housing is allocated slowly and everyone knows everyone. The city offers distance, shelters,
income assistance and anonymity. Men in the same community face poverty and unemployment but are
far less likely to face this particular pressure to leave.
Put the three together and the pattern is clear. The law removed women and only women. The labour
market rewarded women’s education only off reserve. Housing shortage, single parenthood and
violence pushed more women out again. Each factor works in the same direction, so the imbalance
builds up over generations rather than evening out.
The point worth making in an exam answer is that this is a legal and structural outcome, not a
demographic accident. The Indian Act wrote a gender imbalance into the urban Aboriginal population,
and the housing and employment conditions on reserve have kept it there even after the discriminatory
clause was repealed.
Q4. Since World War II, Indigenous people have migrated to urban centres in ever-increasing
numbers. What factors prompt this migration?
Source: Frideres & Gadacz, Aboriginal Peoples in Canada, 9th ed., ch. 5
The scale of the change comes first, because the numbers are the evidence. At the start of the twentieth
century fewer than five percent of Aboriginal people in Canada lived in cities. By 1951 it was about
seven percent. By 2008 nearly two thirds were living off reserve. Between 1996 and 2006 the on-reserve
and rural share fell from 53 percent to 47 percent. In Manitoba the urban Aboriginal population rose by
more than 300 percent between 1966 and 1986. The Métis are the most urbanized group at 69.4
percent and the Inuit the least at 37.6 percent.
Frideres and Gadacz explain this with push factors and pull factors, and the honest answer uses both.
5
,The largest push is that the reserve could not support its own population. Reserve populations grew
quickly after the war while the land base stayed fixed and its resources stayed poor. Reserves were
located on land nobody else wanted, so there was little to build an economy on. Unemployment was
extremely high. Housing was overcrowded and substandard. Schools ended early or were poor. Health
services were thin. Wage work available to Aboriginal people, especially seasonal farm labour, declined
sharply as Canadian agriculture mechanized after 1945. The Indian Act itself pushed people out, since
women who married non-Indian men lost the right to live there at all.
The pulls are the mirror image. Canada shifted after the war from a rural agricultural economy to an
urban industrial one, so the jobs themselves moved into the cities. Cities also held the high schools,
colleges and training programs, the hospitals and specialist care, and the social services. Wages were
higher and the range of work was wider. There were also non-economic pulls: young people wanted out
of a small, closely watched, agent-administered community, and cities offered privacy and choice.
Two further factors accelerated everything. First, the removal of restrictions. The pass system faded, the
alcohol prohibition was lifted in the 1950s, and status Indians received the federal franchise in 1960.
Legal and administrative barriers to leaving weakened at exactly the moment the urban economy was
expanding. Second, chain migration. Once relatives and friends were established in a city, the cost and
risk of moving dropped sharply for everyone behind them. People go where they already know
someone, so migration concentrates in particular cities and particular neighbourhoods.
It is worth adding that this migration is not a one-way trip. Dyck notes that people move repeatedly
between reserve and town and between cities, and that reserves remain communities to return to when
a move to the city fails. Frideres and Gadacz report the same hypermobility in the urban population
itself.
So the answer is a combination: a collapsing rural economy and an unlivable reserve land base pushing
people out, an expanding urban industrial economy with schools, services and wages pulling them in,
legal restrictions lifting at the same time, and family networks making each successive move easier.
Q5. What factors tend to influence an Indigenous individual’s decision to migrate to an urban
centre?
Source: Frideres & Gadacz, Aboriginal Peoples in Canada, 9th ed., ch. 5
This question is not the same as the previous one, and the marker will be checking whether you noticed.
Question 4 asks what causes the overall movement. This one asks what makes one particular person
decide to go, and which city they choose. The answer is mostly about people, not economics.
The single most important factor is family and friends. Frideres and Gadacz are explicit about this.
People do not move to a labour market; they move to somebody’s couch. Someone already in the city
provides a place to sleep, information about which employers hire, help with forms and rent, and
company. This is chain migration, and it explains why urban Aboriginal populations cluster in particular
cities and neighbourhoods rather than spreading evenly. The chapter describes the result as a
“community of likeness” — people from the same home community clustering together, so the move is
into a familiar social world rather than into a strange one.
Economics decides the neighbourhood rather than the decision. Once someone arrives, income
determines where they can live, and low income puts most Aboriginal migrants into the poorest housing
in the inner city. That in turn shapes who their children go to school with and what services they can
reach.
6
,Individual characteristics matter next. The people most likely to move are young, single, and either
better educated or holding more marketable skills than average. Women, for the reasons in Question 3,
are more likely to move than men. Age matters because moving is expensive and risky, and because the
payoff period is longer for a young person.
Prior exposure to the city matters as well. Someone who went to school off reserve, worked seasonally
in town, or was hospitalized or in care in a city already knows how it works. The unknown is smaller, so
the decision is easier.
The push conditions in the home community still act at the individual level: no house of one’s own, no
job, a marriage breakdown, a conflict with the band administration, or the loss of status under the pre-
1985 Indian Act. Any of these can convert a general dissatisfaction into a specific decision to leave in a
particular month.
Two things in the chapter stop this from becoming a simple story of departure. The first is
hypermobility. Around 70 percent of urban Aboriginal residents moved at least once over a decade,
compared with just under 50 percent of non-Aboriginal residents. The decision to migrate is often a
decision to try, not to settle, and many people return. The second is that migration does not mean losing
identity. The Environics Institute’s 2010 urban Aboriginal study found most urban Aboriginal people
satisfied with city life and described themselves as living in two worlds at once, keeping ties to the home
community while functioning in the city.
So the decision comes down to who is already there, how old and how skilled the person is, what the
home community can no longer offer, and how familiar the city already feels.
Q6. Identify the main problems faced by service organizations trying to assist Indigenous people
establishing residence in urban areas.
Source: Frideres & Gadacz, Aboriginal Peoples in Canada, 9th ed., ch. 5, drawing on Reeves & Frideres
(1981)
Frideres and Gadacz answer this through a four-part model of urban service organizations taken from
Reeves and Frideres. Each type has a built-in flaw, and naming the four types is the fastest way to earn
marks on this question.
The first type is the public service organization. It delivers one service, it delivers it effectively, and it is
staffed by non-Aboriginal people operating on middle-class white values. Its problem is dependency.
Because it treats a symptom and never touches the cause, Aboriginal clients become, in the chapter’s
words, virtually permanent clients. The organization succeeds at its own task and fails the person.
The second type is the acculturating service organization. It offers several integrated services and
expects clients to change in order to receive them. Recruitment is selective and works through
sponsorship, so entry depends on being vouched for. Its problem is exclusion. Most Aboriginal
newcomers do not meet the minimum qualifications, so very few Aboriginal clients ever get in.
The third type is the accommodating service organization. It works from Aboriginal values, has mixed
staff, and is the type most Aboriginal migrants actually reach. Its problems are money and power.
Funding is short term and tied to enrolment numbers, so the organization spends its energy chasing
counts instead of helping people. Effectiveness is low. In practice many of these agencies do little more
than register, screen and refer, passing the client on to another agency that will do the same.
7
,The fourth type is the member organization: friendship centres, provincial associations, and similar
bodies run by Aboriginal people on Aboriginal values. These work against assimilation rather than for it,
which is what the migrants themselves usually want. Their weakness is structural. As the chapter puts it,
there is a virtual absence of employment suited to Aboriginal people as Aboriginal people, so the
organization can give a person belonging, advocacy and cultural continuity but cannot give them a living.
Cutting across all four types are problems the chapter returns to repeatedly. Funding is unstable and
comes with conditions set by the funder, not the community. Services are fragmented across federal,
provincial and municipal jurisdictions, so a client is bounced between agencies with no single body
responsible. That fragmentation has a legal root: federal responsibility is organized around status
Indians on reserve, so the moment a person moves to the city Ottawa and the province each point at
the other. Non-status and Métis migrants fall into the same gap from the opposite side.
Client mobility makes it worse. Because urban Aboriginal residents move so often, agencies lose contact
partway through a program and their success rates look poor, which then damages their next funding
application. Staff are frequently not Aboriginal, so trust is low and the values built into the intake
process are not the client’s own.
The overall problem is that the organizations are designed to move individuals into the existing city,
while the migrants need employment, housing and services that let them stay Aboriginal in it.
Q7. Describe the effect of the reserve system on the daily lives of registered Indian people. How
did this system help define Indian identity?
Source: Dyck, “Indian, Métis, Native” (1980)
Dyck describes the reserve as a total institution. It did not simply set aside land. It governed how a
registered Indian could move, trade, earn, drink, vote and choose leaders, and it did so for roughly a
century.
Start with the list of prohibitions under the Indian Act and the regulations made under it. Registered
Indians were denied the franchise. They could not leave the reserve without a pass from the Indian
agent stating where they were going, why, and for how long. They could not buy or sell stock, personal
possessions or any other commodity without the agent’s written permission. They were forbidden to
possess or consume alcohol. Punishments for breaking these rules were written into the Act itself.
After the Rebellion of 1885 the system settled into a form that lasted until the 1950s, with the agent at
its centre. He distributed rations and relief. He supervised the band’s economic activities. He decided
who was a suitable candidate for chief or councillor, which means he controlled the band’s politics. All
non-Indians needed his permission before entering the reserve. The RCMP policed the reserve and
Christian denominations ran the schools, but on reserve land both were subordinate to him. Dyck sums
the arrangement up with Hawthorn.
“The (Indian Affairs) Branch was a quasi-colonial government dealing with almost the entire
life of a culturally different people who were systematically deprived of opportunities to
influence government, a people who were isolated on special pockets of land and who were
subject to different laws.”
— Hawthorn (1966), p. 368, quoted in Dyck (1980)
This system defined Indian identity because it was almost universal and because it was exclusive. Dyck
notes that prior to 1970 there were relatively few Indians in Saskatchewan who had not spent most of
their lives inside some version of the reserve experience. When a legal status determines where you
8
,sleep, what you may sell, whether you may travel and who may lead you, that status stops being
paperwork and becomes the main fact of your life.
Two consequences follow. First, legal and administrative status became a central feature of social
identity and the major component of the boundary between registered Indians and non-Indians. The
boundary was not drawn by culture or appearance but by law, enforced daily by an agent. Second, the
reserve produced genuine social and cultural change, which Dyck says is not accurately described as
mere acculturation. Others have called the result neo-Indian cultures. Something new was formed inside
the system.
The same boundary separated registered Indians from Métis and non-status people, who never lived
under the agent, the pass or the register. Dyck quotes Maria Campbell to show that the separation was
felt on both sides.
“There was never much love lost between Indians and Halfbreeds. They were completely
different from us . . .”
— Maria Campbell, Halfbreed (1973), p. 26, quoted in Dyck (1980)
Dyck concedes that reserve administration was arbitrary. His point is that arbitrariness does not undo
the result. However the system was operated, over time it leaves indelible marks, and those marks are
what registered Indian identity is built on.
Q8. How do treaty rights affect the identity of Indigenous people in Saskatchewan?
Source: Dyck, “Indian, Métis, Native” (1980)
In Saskatchewan treaty rights are not treated as a set of benefits. They are treated as the thing that
makes a person an Indian, and Dyck shows this through sixty years of political behaviour.
Since the 1920s successive district and provincial Indian organizations have fought, against heavy odds,
to keep and protect their peoples’ treaty rights. Dyck states the reason directly.
“treaty rights are seen by Indians in Saskatchewan as an essential basis of their continued
survival as Indians”
— Dyck, “Indian, Métis, Native” (1980), p. 40
Read that sentence carefully. Survival as Indians, not survival as people. If the treaty relationship ends,
the distinct legal existence ends with it, and what remains is a poor minority with no special claim on
Canada.
The clearest evidence is that people were prepared to refuse benefits in order to protect the
relationship. When the prohibition on alcohol was lifted in the 1950s, and when Saskatchewan Indians
received the federal and provincial franchise in 1960, serious fears were expressed that accepting these
liberal measures might jeopardize treaty rights. The same suspicion met the Indian Act amendments
that allowed a limited degree of band self-government. As a result, Saskatchewan bands were
exceedingly hesitant to take on local administration. Ordinary citizenship rights looked like a trap,
because accepting them might be read as agreeing to become ordinary citizens.
The 1965 provincial conference makes the same point. The Saskatchewan government assembled Indian
and Métis people in Regina to hear plans drawn up to help “Native” people. The premier and his cabinet
were surprised when Indian delegates told them that registered Indians were a federal responsibility
and would therefore have to stay out of provincial programs if they wanted to keep their treaty rights.
9
,The delegates turned down provincial help. That is only rational if the relationship with Ottawa is
understood as the basis of who they are.
The 1969 White Paper produced the strongest reaction. It proposed ending Indian status, winding up
the special relationship and treating Indians as ordinary citizens. In the eyes of Indians in Saskatchewan
and elsewhere, implementing it would have amounted to cultural genocide, because the proposals
threatened treaty rights, reserve lands and special legal status together. Dyck records the Saskatchewan
response as immediate, articulate and uncompromising.
Treaty rights also mark an internal boundary. Not everyone of aboriginal ancestry has them. Only those
whose ancestors took treaty, and their descendants on the register, do. That line separates status from
non-status and Métis neighbours as sharply as it separates Indians from settlers.
Dyck’s conclusion for this question is that being a registered Indian in Saskatchewan has meant far more
than being poor and non-white, which is what “Native” means to many Canadians. It has meant a treaty,
a register, an agent and a reserve. Treaty rights are the surviving proof of that history, so defending
them is defending an identity, not negotiating a subsidy.
Q9. What arguments are advanced by those who contend that present legal identifications are
arbitrary and should be ended in favour of an all-inclusive Indigenous identity?
Source: Dyck, “Indian, Métis, Native” (1980)
Dyck sets out four arguments used by social scientists to justify collapsing registered Indians, non-status
people, Métis and Inuit into one category called “Native,” plus a fifth argument about need. He treats
them as a package, because together they form what he calls the premise of Nativeness.
The first argument is that everyone lives the same way. Whatever the law says, Métis, non-status and
registered Indian people are all poor, all excluded, all facing the same housing, the same policing and the
same job market. A.K. Davis is cited for this position. If the lived conditions are identical, the legal labels
look like empty bureaucracy.
The second argument is about the future. A majority of registered Indians will soon be urban dwellers,
so reserve-based legal distinctions are on their way out anyway. Dosman and Nagler are cited here. The
reasoning is that once people are in the city, status stops shaping their lives, so the category will die of
its own accord and should not be preserved artificially.
The third argument is about how the wider society actually behaves. Frideres puts it most bluntly.
“the distinction . . . cannot be made visually”
— Frideres (1974), p. 5, quoted in Dyck (1980)
If a landlord, police officer or employer cannot tell a Métis person from a status Indian, then
discrimination falls on everyone alike and the legal line is irrelevant to what matters. Dyck notes this
reasoning led Dosman to explain the position of both registered Indians and Métis in Saskatoon through
reserve administration alone. A practical version exists too: researchers relying on government statistics
are often forced into the broad category “Native” because the records do not distinguish. Schmeiser had
to do this because prison classification officers could not tell Indian from Métis inmates.
The fourth argument is political. The distinctions exist because they serve the government.
“those in power are aware that making such nominal distinctions between Canadian natives
has a ‘divide and conquer’ effect”
10
I got an A+ in INST 203, and this file has an example answer for every study question at the end of each
section. If you can answer all of these yourself, you should be good for the final.
How I’d use it:
• Try each question on your own first, then check it against the answer here.
• Notice how each answer names the author and gives a specific example. That’s what gets marks
on the closed-book final.
• Use the cheat sheet file alongside this one for the key terms, authors and dates.
One more thing: the assignments are marked really hard, especially citations, but the final is marked a
lot more fairly. So don’t get discouraged if your assignment grades aren’t great.
Good luck!
1
,INST 203: Example Answers to the Study Questions
One example answer for each study question, in course order. Try the question yourself first, then
compare.
Contents
INST 203: Example Answers to the Study Questions...................................................................................2
Unit 1: Identity........................................................................................................................................3
Section 1: Identity..............................................................................................................................3
Section 2: The Indian Act and Racial Categorization........................................................................17
Section 3: The Indian Act and Indian Women..................................................................................29
Section 4: Terminology and Identity................................................................................................47
Unit 2: First Nations Treaties................................................................................................................58
Section 1: Background to Treaties...................................................................................................58
Section 2: The Royal Proclamation of 1763 and Unnumbered Treaties...........................................69
Section 3: The Meaning of Treaties.................................................................................................77
Section 4: The Numbered Treaties, 1871–1923...............................................................................84
Section 5: First Nations Understanding of Treaty Terms.................................................................91
Unit 3: The Métis..................................................................................................................................98
Section 1: What’s in a Name? The Emergence of the Métis............................................................98
Section 2: First Nations Women and the Emergence of the Métis..................................................99
Section 3: The Political Emergence of the Métis............................................................................101
2
,Unit 1: Identity
Section 1: Identity
Q1. Explain briefly the origin and development of the term “Indian.”
Source: Course reading, Section 1 (Slobodin 1971); Dyck 1980 for the legal stage
The term “Indian” began as a navigational error and ended as a legal category owned by the federal
government. In 1492 Columbus was sailing for the East Indies. He landed in the Caribbean, believed he
had reached the Indies, and called the people he met Indians. The name was wrong on the first day. It
was never corrected.
The error mattered because of what it did to identity. Before contact there was no word that covered all
the peoples of this land. People identified themselves by community, by nation and by place. Slobodin
states this plainly.
“Five hundred years ago there were no American Indians, Canadian Indians, or in the British
term, Red Indians. There were members of the species Homo sapiens inhabiting the Western
Hemisphere in a number of populations, some quite fixed and sessile [sedentary], others fluid,
shifting, and semi-nomadic or truly nomadic.”
— Slobodin, “The Indians of Canada” today (1971), pp. 287–288
So “Indian” was the first pan-Indigenous label, and an outsider invented it. It flattened hundreds of
nations with separate languages, economies and governments into one box.
For roughly 270 years the word carried no legal force. That changed with the Royal Proclamation of
1763. The Crown recognized Indian nations as nations under its protection and ruled that their lands
could be surrendered only to the Crown. “Indian” was now a word inside British law.
The British North America Act of 1867 went further. Section 91(24) gave Parliament exclusive authority
over “Indians, and Lands reserved for the Indians.” Indians became a federal file rather than a treaty
partner.
The Indian Act of 1876 turned the word into a status Ottawa controlled. Dyck describes the machinery.
Band lists were drawn up at the treaties, listing everyone who took treaty. In 1951 those lists were
consolidated into one central registry. Descendants of the people on that register are the legally defined
Indian population of Canada. A woman who married a non-Indian lost her status and her children were
never registered. A non-Indian woman who married an Indian man gained it. From that point “Indian”
described a government file, not a people.
The last stage is reclamation. Because Ottawa dealt with one category, organizing as one category was
the only way to answer back. The National Indian Council formed in 1961 and the National Indian
Brotherhood in 1968. They defeated the 1969 White Paper, which proposed abolishing Indian status,
and Ottawa withdrew it in 1971. The Constitution Act, 1982 named three Aboriginal peoples — Indian,
Inuit and Métis — and the National Indian Brotherhood became the Assembly of First Nations.
Today “Indian” survives mainly as a legal term inside the Indian Act. First Nations and Indigenous are the
words people use for themselves. The development runs in one line: a mistake, then a nation under the
Crown, then a federal file, then a status the government could give and take, then a platform for
organizing, then a word set aside once people could name themselves.
3
,Q2. The Indigenous peoples of the United States and Canada have reluctantly accepted the term
Indian as a shared self-identification. Why?
Source: Course reading, Section 1 (Slobodin 1971)
They accepted it because colonization gave them a shared situation, and because both governments
dealt with them as one legal category. The word “reluctantly” is the key. They knew the label was a
European mistake and knew it was imposed. They used it anyway, on purpose, because it was the only
word that covered everyone the state treated the same way.
The first reason is that the conditions became almost identical. Indigenous peoples in Canada and the
United States ended up in nearly the same colonial relationship with their governments: land taken,
populations moved onto reserves or reservations, economies destroyed, children removed for
schooling. The social, economic and political conditions were close enough that the shared experience
was real, not invented. At its extreme end that shared experience included the deliberate destruction of
whole peoples.
“It was on what is now Canadian soil that occurred one of the recorded cases of literal and
total genocide: the extermination, during the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, of the Beothuk
Indians of Newfoundland.”
— Slobodin, “The Indians of Canada” today (1971), p. 288
The second reason is administrative. Ottawa ran one department, one statute and one policy for
everybody it called Indian. Washington did the same through its own bureau. Nobody in government
was dealing with the Cree or the Mi’kmaq or the Blackfoot as separate nations in day-to-day
administration. They were dealing with a category.
That creates a hard political problem. You have to answer at the level you are addressed. A single nation
raising a single grievance is easy to ignore. A national body speaking for everyone in the government’s
own category cannot be brushed aside as easily. So the category built to manage them became the
category they organized inside.
The third reason is that it worked, and the record shows it. The National Indian Council formed in 1961,
the first national pan-Indigenous body in Canada. The National Indian Brotherhood followed in 1968. In
1969 the federal White Paper proposed ending Indian status altogether, and the organized national
response forced Ottawa to withdraw it in 1971. That outcome would not have been possible from
separate nations acting separately.
There is also an internal reason. Generations were told by schools, agents and the wider society that
they were Indians. The word was drilled in. Reclaiming it and attaching pride to it was easier than
starting from nothing, and it gave people something to hold in common with strangers from other
nations who had lived the same life.
The reluctance never disappeared, and the ending proves it. As soon as Indigenous peoples had enough
standing to name themselves, they replaced the word. The National Indian Brotherhood became the
Assembly of First Nations in 1982. “First Nations,” “Aboriginal” and now “Indigenous” took over.
“Indian” was a tool, useful for political action at a particular time, and it was set down when it was no
longer needed.
Q3. What accounts for the higher number of Indigenous women than men in urban centres?
Source: Frideres & Gadacz, Aboriginal Peoples in Canada, 9th ed., ch. 5
4
,Frideres and Gadacz give three reasons, and they stack on top of each other. The result is stated flatly in
the chapter: by 2010 more Aboriginal women than men were living in urban areas. None of the three
reasons is about women preferring city life. All three are about being pushed.
The first reason is the law. Before 1985 the Indian Act took status away from any Indian woman who
married a non-Indian man. Section 12(1)(b) applied to women only. An Indian man who married a non-
Indian woman kept his status, and his wife gained it. A woman who lost status also lost the right to live
on her reserve, and her children were never registered. She had to leave. Over decades that clause
moved a large number of women into towns and cities, and it moved almost no men. Bill C-31 in 1985
restored status to many of these women and their children, but restoring the paper did not restore a
house. Reserve housing was already scarce, and band membership rules and waiting lists meant most
reinstated women stayed where they already were, in the city.
The second reason is work and education. Aboriginal women, on average, have more formal education
than Aboriginal men. That should be an advantage, but the reserve economy does not reward it.
Reserve employment is limited, and what exists has historically been organized around men — resource
work, construction, band labour. Reserve social and political life is also patriarchal, so a woman with
training often has no position to move into at home. The jobs that match her education, in offices,
services, health care and schools, exist in urban centres. So she goes where the work is.
The third reason is family and safety. Women leave reserves because of overcrowded or unavailable
housing, because they are raising children alone, and because of family violence and abuse. A woman
who has to get herself and her children out of a dangerous house often has nowhere on the reserve to
go, since housing is allocated slowly and everyone knows everyone. The city offers distance, shelters,
income assistance and anonymity. Men in the same community face poverty and unemployment but are
far less likely to face this particular pressure to leave.
Put the three together and the pattern is clear. The law removed women and only women. The labour
market rewarded women’s education only off reserve. Housing shortage, single parenthood and
violence pushed more women out again. Each factor works in the same direction, so the imbalance
builds up over generations rather than evening out.
The point worth making in an exam answer is that this is a legal and structural outcome, not a
demographic accident. The Indian Act wrote a gender imbalance into the urban Aboriginal population,
and the housing and employment conditions on reserve have kept it there even after the discriminatory
clause was repealed.
Q4. Since World War II, Indigenous people have migrated to urban centres in ever-increasing
numbers. What factors prompt this migration?
Source: Frideres & Gadacz, Aboriginal Peoples in Canada, 9th ed., ch. 5
The scale of the change comes first, because the numbers are the evidence. At the start of the twentieth
century fewer than five percent of Aboriginal people in Canada lived in cities. By 1951 it was about
seven percent. By 2008 nearly two thirds were living off reserve. Between 1996 and 2006 the on-reserve
and rural share fell from 53 percent to 47 percent. In Manitoba the urban Aboriginal population rose by
more than 300 percent between 1966 and 1986. The Métis are the most urbanized group at 69.4
percent and the Inuit the least at 37.6 percent.
Frideres and Gadacz explain this with push factors and pull factors, and the honest answer uses both.
5
,The largest push is that the reserve could not support its own population. Reserve populations grew
quickly after the war while the land base stayed fixed and its resources stayed poor. Reserves were
located on land nobody else wanted, so there was little to build an economy on. Unemployment was
extremely high. Housing was overcrowded and substandard. Schools ended early or were poor. Health
services were thin. Wage work available to Aboriginal people, especially seasonal farm labour, declined
sharply as Canadian agriculture mechanized after 1945. The Indian Act itself pushed people out, since
women who married non-Indian men lost the right to live there at all.
The pulls are the mirror image. Canada shifted after the war from a rural agricultural economy to an
urban industrial one, so the jobs themselves moved into the cities. Cities also held the high schools,
colleges and training programs, the hospitals and specialist care, and the social services. Wages were
higher and the range of work was wider. There were also non-economic pulls: young people wanted out
of a small, closely watched, agent-administered community, and cities offered privacy and choice.
Two further factors accelerated everything. First, the removal of restrictions. The pass system faded, the
alcohol prohibition was lifted in the 1950s, and status Indians received the federal franchise in 1960.
Legal and administrative barriers to leaving weakened at exactly the moment the urban economy was
expanding. Second, chain migration. Once relatives and friends were established in a city, the cost and
risk of moving dropped sharply for everyone behind them. People go where they already know
someone, so migration concentrates in particular cities and particular neighbourhoods.
It is worth adding that this migration is not a one-way trip. Dyck notes that people move repeatedly
between reserve and town and between cities, and that reserves remain communities to return to when
a move to the city fails. Frideres and Gadacz report the same hypermobility in the urban population
itself.
So the answer is a combination: a collapsing rural economy and an unlivable reserve land base pushing
people out, an expanding urban industrial economy with schools, services and wages pulling them in,
legal restrictions lifting at the same time, and family networks making each successive move easier.
Q5. What factors tend to influence an Indigenous individual’s decision to migrate to an urban
centre?
Source: Frideres & Gadacz, Aboriginal Peoples in Canada, 9th ed., ch. 5
This question is not the same as the previous one, and the marker will be checking whether you noticed.
Question 4 asks what causes the overall movement. This one asks what makes one particular person
decide to go, and which city they choose. The answer is mostly about people, not economics.
The single most important factor is family and friends. Frideres and Gadacz are explicit about this.
People do not move to a labour market; they move to somebody’s couch. Someone already in the city
provides a place to sleep, information about which employers hire, help with forms and rent, and
company. This is chain migration, and it explains why urban Aboriginal populations cluster in particular
cities and neighbourhoods rather than spreading evenly. The chapter describes the result as a
“community of likeness” — people from the same home community clustering together, so the move is
into a familiar social world rather than into a strange one.
Economics decides the neighbourhood rather than the decision. Once someone arrives, income
determines where they can live, and low income puts most Aboriginal migrants into the poorest housing
in the inner city. That in turn shapes who their children go to school with and what services they can
reach.
6
,Individual characteristics matter next. The people most likely to move are young, single, and either
better educated or holding more marketable skills than average. Women, for the reasons in Question 3,
are more likely to move than men. Age matters because moving is expensive and risky, and because the
payoff period is longer for a young person.
Prior exposure to the city matters as well. Someone who went to school off reserve, worked seasonally
in town, or was hospitalized or in care in a city already knows how it works. The unknown is smaller, so
the decision is easier.
The push conditions in the home community still act at the individual level: no house of one’s own, no
job, a marriage breakdown, a conflict with the band administration, or the loss of status under the pre-
1985 Indian Act. Any of these can convert a general dissatisfaction into a specific decision to leave in a
particular month.
Two things in the chapter stop this from becoming a simple story of departure. The first is
hypermobility. Around 70 percent of urban Aboriginal residents moved at least once over a decade,
compared with just under 50 percent of non-Aboriginal residents. The decision to migrate is often a
decision to try, not to settle, and many people return. The second is that migration does not mean losing
identity. The Environics Institute’s 2010 urban Aboriginal study found most urban Aboriginal people
satisfied with city life and described themselves as living in two worlds at once, keeping ties to the home
community while functioning in the city.
So the decision comes down to who is already there, how old and how skilled the person is, what the
home community can no longer offer, and how familiar the city already feels.
Q6. Identify the main problems faced by service organizations trying to assist Indigenous people
establishing residence in urban areas.
Source: Frideres & Gadacz, Aboriginal Peoples in Canada, 9th ed., ch. 5, drawing on Reeves & Frideres
(1981)
Frideres and Gadacz answer this through a four-part model of urban service organizations taken from
Reeves and Frideres. Each type has a built-in flaw, and naming the four types is the fastest way to earn
marks on this question.
The first type is the public service organization. It delivers one service, it delivers it effectively, and it is
staffed by non-Aboriginal people operating on middle-class white values. Its problem is dependency.
Because it treats a symptom and never touches the cause, Aboriginal clients become, in the chapter’s
words, virtually permanent clients. The organization succeeds at its own task and fails the person.
The second type is the acculturating service organization. It offers several integrated services and
expects clients to change in order to receive them. Recruitment is selective and works through
sponsorship, so entry depends on being vouched for. Its problem is exclusion. Most Aboriginal
newcomers do not meet the minimum qualifications, so very few Aboriginal clients ever get in.
The third type is the accommodating service organization. It works from Aboriginal values, has mixed
staff, and is the type most Aboriginal migrants actually reach. Its problems are money and power.
Funding is short term and tied to enrolment numbers, so the organization spends its energy chasing
counts instead of helping people. Effectiveness is low. In practice many of these agencies do little more
than register, screen and refer, passing the client on to another agency that will do the same.
7
,The fourth type is the member organization: friendship centres, provincial associations, and similar
bodies run by Aboriginal people on Aboriginal values. These work against assimilation rather than for it,
which is what the migrants themselves usually want. Their weakness is structural. As the chapter puts it,
there is a virtual absence of employment suited to Aboriginal people as Aboriginal people, so the
organization can give a person belonging, advocacy and cultural continuity but cannot give them a living.
Cutting across all four types are problems the chapter returns to repeatedly. Funding is unstable and
comes with conditions set by the funder, not the community. Services are fragmented across federal,
provincial and municipal jurisdictions, so a client is bounced between agencies with no single body
responsible. That fragmentation has a legal root: federal responsibility is organized around status
Indians on reserve, so the moment a person moves to the city Ottawa and the province each point at
the other. Non-status and Métis migrants fall into the same gap from the opposite side.
Client mobility makes it worse. Because urban Aboriginal residents move so often, agencies lose contact
partway through a program and their success rates look poor, which then damages their next funding
application. Staff are frequently not Aboriginal, so trust is low and the values built into the intake
process are not the client’s own.
The overall problem is that the organizations are designed to move individuals into the existing city,
while the migrants need employment, housing and services that let them stay Aboriginal in it.
Q7. Describe the effect of the reserve system on the daily lives of registered Indian people. How
did this system help define Indian identity?
Source: Dyck, “Indian, Métis, Native” (1980)
Dyck describes the reserve as a total institution. It did not simply set aside land. It governed how a
registered Indian could move, trade, earn, drink, vote and choose leaders, and it did so for roughly a
century.
Start with the list of prohibitions under the Indian Act and the regulations made under it. Registered
Indians were denied the franchise. They could not leave the reserve without a pass from the Indian
agent stating where they were going, why, and for how long. They could not buy or sell stock, personal
possessions or any other commodity without the agent’s written permission. They were forbidden to
possess or consume alcohol. Punishments for breaking these rules were written into the Act itself.
After the Rebellion of 1885 the system settled into a form that lasted until the 1950s, with the agent at
its centre. He distributed rations and relief. He supervised the band’s economic activities. He decided
who was a suitable candidate for chief or councillor, which means he controlled the band’s politics. All
non-Indians needed his permission before entering the reserve. The RCMP policed the reserve and
Christian denominations ran the schools, but on reserve land both were subordinate to him. Dyck sums
the arrangement up with Hawthorn.
“The (Indian Affairs) Branch was a quasi-colonial government dealing with almost the entire
life of a culturally different people who were systematically deprived of opportunities to
influence government, a people who were isolated on special pockets of land and who were
subject to different laws.”
— Hawthorn (1966), p. 368, quoted in Dyck (1980)
This system defined Indian identity because it was almost universal and because it was exclusive. Dyck
notes that prior to 1970 there were relatively few Indians in Saskatchewan who had not spent most of
their lives inside some version of the reserve experience. When a legal status determines where you
8
,sleep, what you may sell, whether you may travel and who may lead you, that status stops being
paperwork and becomes the main fact of your life.
Two consequences follow. First, legal and administrative status became a central feature of social
identity and the major component of the boundary between registered Indians and non-Indians. The
boundary was not drawn by culture or appearance but by law, enforced daily by an agent. Second, the
reserve produced genuine social and cultural change, which Dyck says is not accurately described as
mere acculturation. Others have called the result neo-Indian cultures. Something new was formed inside
the system.
The same boundary separated registered Indians from Métis and non-status people, who never lived
under the agent, the pass or the register. Dyck quotes Maria Campbell to show that the separation was
felt on both sides.
“There was never much love lost between Indians and Halfbreeds. They were completely
different from us . . .”
— Maria Campbell, Halfbreed (1973), p. 26, quoted in Dyck (1980)
Dyck concedes that reserve administration was arbitrary. His point is that arbitrariness does not undo
the result. However the system was operated, over time it leaves indelible marks, and those marks are
what registered Indian identity is built on.
Q8. How do treaty rights affect the identity of Indigenous people in Saskatchewan?
Source: Dyck, “Indian, Métis, Native” (1980)
In Saskatchewan treaty rights are not treated as a set of benefits. They are treated as the thing that
makes a person an Indian, and Dyck shows this through sixty years of political behaviour.
Since the 1920s successive district and provincial Indian organizations have fought, against heavy odds,
to keep and protect their peoples’ treaty rights. Dyck states the reason directly.
“treaty rights are seen by Indians in Saskatchewan as an essential basis of their continued
survival as Indians”
— Dyck, “Indian, Métis, Native” (1980), p. 40
Read that sentence carefully. Survival as Indians, not survival as people. If the treaty relationship ends,
the distinct legal existence ends with it, and what remains is a poor minority with no special claim on
Canada.
The clearest evidence is that people were prepared to refuse benefits in order to protect the
relationship. When the prohibition on alcohol was lifted in the 1950s, and when Saskatchewan Indians
received the federal and provincial franchise in 1960, serious fears were expressed that accepting these
liberal measures might jeopardize treaty rights. The same suspicion met the Indian Act amendments
that allowed a limited degree of band self-government. As a result, Saskatchewan bands were
exceedingly hesitant to take on local administration. Ordinary citizenship rights looked like a trap,
because accepting them might be read as agreeing to become ordinary citizens.
The 1965 provincial conference makes the same point. The Saskatchewan government assembled Indian
and Métis people in Regina to hear plans drawn up to help “Native” people. The premier and his cabinet
were surprised when Indian delegates told them that registered Indians were a federal responsibility
and would therefore have to stay out of provincial programs if they wanted to keep their treaty rights.
9
,The delegates turned down provincial help. That is only rational if the relationship with Ottawa is
understood as the basis of who they are.
The 1969 White Paper produced the strongest reaction. It proposed ending Indian status, winding up
the special relationship and treating Indians as ordinary citizens. In the eyes of Indians in Saskatchewan
and elsewhere, implementing it would have amounted to cultural genocide, because the proposals
threatened treaty rights, reserve lands and special legal status together. Dyck records the Saskatchewan
response as immediate, articulate and uncompromising.
Treaty rights also mark an internal boundary. Not everyone of aboriginal ancestry has them. Only those
whose ancestors took treaty, and their descendants on the register, do. That line separates status from
non-status and Métis neighbours as sharply as it separates Indians from settlers.
Dyck’s conclusion for this question is that being a registered Indian in Saskatchewan has meant far more
than being poor and non-white, which is what “Native” means to many Canadians. It has meant a treaty,
a register, an agent and a reserve. Treaty rights are the surviving proof of that history, so defending
them is defending an identity, not negotiating a subsidy.
Q9. What arguments are advanced by those who contend that present legal identifications are
arbitrary and should be ended in favour of an all-inclusive Indigenous identity?
Source: Dyck, “Indian, Métis, Native” (1980)
Dyck sets out four arguments used by social scientists to justify collapsing registered Indians, non-status
people, Métis and Inuit into one category called “Native,” plus a fifth argument about need. He treats
them as a package, because together they form what he calls the premise of Nativeness.
The first argument is that everyone lives the same way. Whatever the law says, Métis, non-status and
registered Indian people are all poor, all excluded, all facing the same housing, the same policing and the
same job market. A.K. Davis is cited for this position. If the lived conditions are identical, the legal labels
look like empty bureaucracy.
The second argument is about the future. A majority of registered Indians will soon be urban dwellers,
so reserve-based legal distinctions are on their way out anyway. Dosman and Nagler are cited here. The
reasoning is that once people are in the city, status stops shaping their lives, so the category will die of
its own accord and should not be preserved artificially.
The third argument is about how the wider society actually behaves. Frideres puts it most bluntly.
“the distinction . . . cannot be made visually”
— Frideres (1974), p. 5, quoted in Dyck (1980)
If a landlord, police officer or employer cannot tell a Métis person from a status Indian, then
discrimination falls on everyone alike and the legal line is irrelevant to what matters. Dyck notes this
reasoning led Dosman to explain the position of both registered Indians and Métis in Saskatoon through
reserve administration alone. A practical version exists too: researchers relying on government statistics
are often forced into the broad category “Native” because the records do not distinguish. Schmeiser had
to do this because prison classification officers could not tell Indian from Métis inmates.
The fourth argument is political. The distinctions exist because they serve the government.
“those in power are aware that making such nominal distinctions between Canadian natives
has a ‘divide and conquer’ effect”
10
