Post by Okwes on Aug 31, 2005 15:42:12 GMT -5
In other words, the Court affirmed that United States law was based on a fundamental rule of the "Law of Nations" - that it was permissible to virtually ignore the most basic rights of indigenous "heathens," and to claim that the "unoccupied lands" of America rightfully belonged to discovering Christian European nations. Of course, it's important to understand that, as Benjamin Munn Ziegler pointed out in The International Law of John Marshall, the term "unoccupied lands" referred to "the lands in America which, when discovered, were 'occupied by Indians' but 'unoccupied' by Christians." [Ziegler:46]
Ironically, the same year that the Johnson v. McIntosh decision was handed down, founding father James Madison wrote: "Religion is not in the purview of human government. Religion is essentially distinct from civil government, and exempt from its cognizance; a connection between them is injurious to both."
This type of legal history is the foundation for Churchill's devastating critique of U.S. government policies toward indigenous peoples in the United States. Struggle for the Land is a series of precise, factual case studies of, for example, the Iroquois efforts to reclaim their land in upstate New York (the entire city of Syracuse is on native land), and the Lakota refusal to accept any amount of money for the Black Hills. One of the most important facts in the book, though, is that Hitler used the United States treatment of Indians as a model for his genocide. Consequently in 1946, as the United States was preparing to sit in judgment on the Nazis at Nuremberg, the Indian Claims Commission Act was passed in order to provide a new veneer of legal rights to Indians, ostensibly giving them the right to sue for lost land if claims were based on "fraud, duress, unconscionable consideration, mutual or unilateral mistake," which, of course, they were.
In another section, Churchill describes the "radioactive colonization" of native land (i.e., the pursuit of mining rights for uranium (60 percent lies on native reservations), and oil and gas (20 percent on native reservations). Ninety percent of mining takes place on native land. In one concise chart, Churchill outlines 33 different corporations who have leases in areas in Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming. There are more than 5,000 in the Black Hills alone. Locally, the Hanford plutonium plant leaks toxins from storage tanks into the fishing grounds of the Columbia River Yakima, leading to illness, sickened, malformed and dead fish, and a host of other problems.
The funds from leases are kept in "trust" by the government, and, of course, the tribes see little of them. This Northern Plains Lady, Elouise Cobell, is bringing the issue to the light of day in court. This is an excerpt from an article in 2004 Blackfeet Reservation Development Fund, Inc.
"When I went to Washington on a hot, sultry June day in 1996 to file a lawsuit over the billions of dollars of trust funds that the government had lost, misplaced and otherwise grossly mismanaged for hundreds of thousands of American Indians, I had no idea I would still be in court seven years later.
Yet today, after three Cabinet secretaries have been held in contempt by a federal judge and after four lengthy trials and a successful defense on appeal of our claims on the merits, the federal government has failed to clean up the trust records. It cannot certify the accuracy of a single one of the estimated 500,000 current individual Indian trust accounts.
That's the sad bottom line on how the federal government has continued to treat the nation's first citizens.
All I and three other Indians are asking the government to do is account for the tens of millions of acres of land the government forced into trust and to account for and distribute -- to the proper trust beneficiaries -- the correct amount of funds it received and invested from the leases it arranged for timber sales and for oil, gas, minerals and grazing rights on Indian trust lands in the West.
I may not be a lawyer, but I was a small-town banker in Montana. I know that the most basic of duties of any trustee is to account for all trust assets, including the funds they hold for the beneficiaries.
Unfortunately, the commissioner of the Bureau of Public Debt, a senior Treasury Department official, testified in our case that the United States has used our trust funds to reduce the national debt.
But no one knows how much of our money was used to reduce the debt load of this country or how many years the U.S. government used our trust money for these and other important government purposes, such as building dams and major power projects in the West.
We hope an accounting will finally tell the true story of how the government has used Individual Indian Trust funds for more than 100 years. And, we also hope that we will learn what really happened to 40 million acres of Individual Indian Trust land that simply vanished, according to the testimony of the head of Interior's Office of Historical Accounting.
Seven years later, Interior Secretary Gale Norton, the government's trustee-delegate for the nation's first citizens, has done nothing to provide us answers to this and other important trust accounting issues.
Why the delay? Why the deception? Why the disdain for the obligations Norton owes to hundreds of thousands of Individual Indian Trust beneficiaries, many of whom live in Washington state?
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and others have said it's because Indians lack political clout in the nation's capital. Any other interest group would have had this problem resolved immediately, McCain has said. There is no dispute about the evidence. Study after study has warned Congress that our trust funds were being horribly managed by the Department of Interior. Billions of dollars are missing.
In 1989, the Senate Special Committee on Investigations found that "fraud and corruption pervade" the Interior Department. The General Accounting Office warned both Republican and Democratic administrations for years that this is a very serious problem.
In 1994, Congress ordered Interior to account for the missing funds. Nothing happened.
So we Indians did what others similarly situated would have done. We turned to the courts for help to straighten out an obdurate and dishonest executive and an uninterested Congress.
Since we filed our suit, we have won several significant victories. In 1999, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth declared the government breached its trust responsibilities to us and ordered the interior secretary and the treasury secretary to provide us a complete accounting of all trust assets, including the revenues generated from our trust lands since the creation of the Individual Indian Trust in 1887. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia unanimously agreed with Lamberth and found that the interior secretary had engaged in "malfeasance" and has unduly delayed the accounting, causing irreparable harm to all of us.
The government's record as trustee for Indians is "a long and sorry story," Lamberth declared. "... It is fiscal and governmental irresponsibility in its purest form."
Tough words, to be sure -- but they are utterly meaningless unless Norton is compelled to do what she is required to do by law.
Continuing to rely on the good faith of the interior secretary is an exercise in futility. We can settle this case, but the government first must participate in settlement talks with integrity, something they have refused to do for the seven years this case has been litigated.
It must stop hiding behind disingenuous excuses, defending the indefensible and protecting incompetent and dishonest officials.
Any settlement must be fair and just to make Indians whole for monies that have been collected by the United States for 116 years.
It is, after all, our money. It is our property right." Elouise Cobell is making history.
Churchill explains step by step the attempted genocide of indigenous cultures. Just a few of the techniques were preemptive and deceptive leases: the General Allotment Act, which replaced collective ownership with individual ownership; the forced change in indigenous government to the Tribal Council (modeled like a corporate board); the 1956 Relocation Act, intended to force indigenous peoples to move to slums in cities, etc. In 1953, the United States attempted to unilaterally dissolve 109 indigenous nations in its borders. By 1990, more than half of all Indians were no longer on their land bases. But rather than completely obliterate native entities, the U.S. government decided to keep them alive and restructure their government into an entity which could be a signer to negotiations for mineral leases. "Native nations were cast as always being sovereign enough to legitimate Euro American mineral exploitation on their reservations," writes Churchill, "never sovereign enough to prevent it."
For the purpose of enriching the few, hypocrisy, lies, and lawbreaking have been the basis of United States' policies toward indigenous peoples from its founding years. So of course we are still doing it today. We are simply operating on a different continent.
Native Americans today are distributed unevenly throughout North America, a reflection more of events following European arrival than of aboriginal patterns. The 1990 U.S. Census reported the largest number of Native Americans in the states of Oklahoma, California, Arizona, and New Mexico. The census also indicated that slightly over half of Native Americans live in urban areas; cities with the largest Native American populations are New York, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Tulsa, Los Angeles, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Anchorage, and Albuquerque. Around one-fourth of American Indians in the United States live on 278 reservations (or pueblos or rancherias) or associated "tribal trust lands," according to the census. The largest of these is the Navajo Reservation, with 143,405 Native Americans and 5,046 non-Indians living there in 1990. Around 60 percent of the Native American population of Alaska lives in "Alaska Native Villages."
The twentieth-century population increase for Native Americans reflected in successive U.S. Census figures was also due to changes in the U.S. Census Bureau's definition of Native American. Since 1960 the Census Bureau has relied on self-identification to ascertain a person's race. Much of the increase in the American Indian population?from 523,591 in 1960 to 792,730 in 1970 to 1.37 million in 1980 to 1.9 million (including Eskimos and Aleuts) in 1990?resulted from persons not identifying themselves as American Indian in an earlier census but identifying themselves as such in a later census. It has been estimated, for example, that as much as 60 percent of the apparent population growth of American Indians from 1970 to 1980 may be accounted for by such changing identifications! The political mobilization of American Indians in the 1960s and 1970s, along with other ethnic-pride movements, may have lifted some of the stigma attached to an American Indian racial identity. This would be especially true for persons of mixed ancestry who formerly had declined to disclose their American Indian background. Conversely, persons with minimal American Indian background may have identified as American Indian out of a desire to affirm a "romanticized" notion of being American Indian.
Today over three hundred American Indian tribes (excluding Alaskan villages) in the United States are legally recognized by the federal government and receive services from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. There are additionally some 125 to 150 groups seeking federal recognition, and dozens of others that might do so in the future. The Bureau of Indian Affairs has used a "blood quantum" definition?generally, one-fourth degree of American Indian "blood"?and/or tribal membership to recognize a person as an American Indian. However, each tribe has a particular set of requirements, typically including a blood quantum, for membership (enrollment) in the tribe. Requirements vary widely from tribe to tribe: a few tribes require at least a one-half Indian (or tribal) blood quantum; many others require a one-fourth blood quantum; still others, generally in California and Oklahoma, require a one-eighth, one-sixteenth, or one-thirty-second blood quantum; and some tribes have no minimum blood quantum requirement at all but require an explicitly documented tribal lineage.
Tribes located on reservations have generally required higher degrees of blood quantum for membership than those not located on reservations. This pattern of requiring low percentages of Indian "blood" for tribal membership and relying on federal authorities to certify membership may be seen as a reflection of demographic decline. As the number of American Indians was reduced and American Indians came into increased contact with whites, blacks, and others, American Indian peoples increasingly married non-Indians. As a result, American Indians have had to rely on formal certification from the federal government as proof of their "Indianness."
In the early 1980s the total membership of the three hundred recognized U.S. tribes was about 900,000. Therefore, many of the 1.37 million persons identifying themselves as American Indian in the 1980 census were not actually enrolled members of federally recognized tribes. In fact, only about two-thirds were. In the late 1980s the total tribal membership was around 1 million; hence, only about 53 percent of the 1.9 million people identifying themselves as American Indian in the 1990 census were actually enrolled. Such discrepancies have varied considerably from tribe to tribe. Most of the 158,633 Navajos enumerated in the 1980 census and the 219,198 enumerated in the 1990 census were enrolled in the Navajo Nation; however, only about one-third of the 232,000 Cherokees enumerated in the 1980 census and of the 308,132 enumerated in the 1990 census were actually enrolled in one of the three Cherokee tribes (the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians [of North Carolina], and the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians of Oklahoma). Thus the Navajo Nation is the American Indian tribe with the largest number of enrolled members, but more persons identifying themselves as Native American identified themselves as Cherokee in the 1980 and 1990 censuses than did persons of any other tribe. The two other largest groups in the 1990 census were the Chippewas, or Ojibwas, (103,826) and the Sioux (103,255).
Similarities and differences exist in Canada. Officially, to be an Indian in Canada, one must be registered under the Indian Act of Canada; a person with Indian ancestry may or may not be registered. Categories of Canadian Indians include "status" or registered Indians, persons registered under the act; and "non-status" or non-registered Indians, persons who either never registered or gave up their registration and became enfranchised. Status Indians may be further divided into treaty or non-treaty Indians, depending on whether their group ever entered into a treaty relationship with the Canadian government. Of the 575,000 American Indians in Canada in the mid-1980s, some 75,000 were non-registered and some 500,000 were registered.
In conclusion a recent article on Native American colonization by John C. Mohawk in Indian Country Today summarizes these issues best.
Most of the indigenous peoples of the Americas faced a very serious reality. In their country, the invaders outnumbered the indigenous, sometimes by hundreds to one. They were not going to go back home. In addition, their stated goal was the eradication of the indigenous nations as nations by eroding all of the elements that make a distinct people a people: their history, their languages, their laws and customs. It took quite a while and a lot of boarding schools, missionaries, and corrupt public officials but the process - being colonized - has had an impact. When an individual loses his or her memory, they cannot recognize other people, they become seriously disoriented, and they don't know right from wrong. Sometimes they hurt themselves. Something similar happens when a people become colonized. They can?t remember who they are because they are a people without a common history. It?s not that they don?t have a history, it?s just that they don?t know what it is and it?s not shared among them. Colonization is a kind of spiritual collapse of the nation. This is one result of a colonial education based on canonical "great books" texts. Indigenous peoples? histories and cultures are not in those texts, and the life of the nation is not there, either. Identity is important. The colonists were very successful "radicalizing" indigenous identities such that people talk about being 25 percent of this or 40 percent of that, but one does not belong to a nation based on one?s blood quantum. Belonging to an indigenous nation is a way of being in the world. Holding a membership card is not a way of being and money can?t buy it.
Colonization is the greatest health risk to indigenous peoples as individuals and communities. It produces the anomie - the absence of values and sense of group purpose and identity - that underlies the deadly automobile accidents triggered by alcohol abuse. It creates the conditions of inappropriate diet, which lead to an epidemic of degenerative diseases, and the moral anarchy that leads to child abuse and spousal abuse. Becoming colonized was the worst thing that could happen five centuries ago, and being colonized is the worst thing that can happen now.
De-colonization, on the other hand, means many different things to many different peoples. In principle, however, it means undoing the damage of colonization and involves elements such as living traditions and customs, language retention, and an insistence on the right to BE Lakota or Ganienkehaka or O?otam or Tipai or whatever nation it is that people have a right to be.
Sources: can be found at
www.americanindiansource.com/bloodquantum.html
Ironically, the same year that the Johnson v. McIntosh decision was handed down, founding father James Madison wrote: "Religion is not in the purview of human government. Religion is essentially distinct from civil government, and exempt from its cognizance; a connection between them is injurious to both."
This type of legal history is the foundation for Churchill's devastating critique of U.S. government policies toward indigenous peoples in the United States. Struggle for the Land is a series of precise, factual case studies of, for example, the Iroquois efforts to reclaim their land in upstate New York (the entire city of Syracuse is on native land), and the Lakota refusal to accept any amount of money for the Black Hills. One of the most important facts in the book, though, is that Hitler used the United States treatment of Indians as a model for his genocide. Consequently in 1946, as the United States was preparing to sit in judgment on the Nazis at Nuremberg, the Indian Claims Commission Act was passed in order to provide a new veneer of legal rights to Indians, ostensibly giving them the right to sue for lost land if claims were based on "fraud, duress, unconscionable consideration, mutual or unilateral mistake," which, of course, they were.
In another section, Churchill describes the "radioactive colonization" of native land (i.e., the pursuit of mining rights for uranium (60 percent lies on native reservations), and oil and gas (20 percent on native reservations). Ninety percent of mining takes place on native land. In one concise chart, Churchill outlines 33 different corporations who have leases in areas in Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming. There are more than 5,000 in the Black Hills alone. Locally, the Hanford plutonium plant leaks toxins from storage tanks into the fishing grounds of the Columbia River Yakima, leading to illness, sickened, malformed and dead fish, and a host of other problems.
The funds from leases are kept in "trust" by the government, and, of course, the tribes see little of them. This Northern Plains Lady, Elouise Cobell, is bringing the issue to the light of day in court. This is an excerpt from an article in 2004 Blackfeet Reservation Development Fund, Inc.
"When I went to Washington on a hot, sultry June day in 1996 to file a lawsuit over the billions of dollars of trust funds that the government had lost, misplaced and otherwise grossly mismanaged for hundreds of thousands of American Indians, I had no idea I would still be in court seven years later.
Yet today, after three Cabinet secretaries have been held in contempt by a federal judge and after four lengthy trials and a successful defense on appeal of our claims on the merits, the federal government has failed to clean up the trust records. It cannot certify the accuracy of a single one of the estimated 500,000 current individual Indian trust accounts.
That's the sad bottom line on how the federal government has continued to treat the nation's first citizens.
All I and three other Indians are asking the government to do is account for the tens of millions of acres of land the government forced into trust and to account for and distribute -- to the proper trust beneficiaries -- the correct amount of funds it received and invested from the leases it arranged for timber sales and for oil, gas, minerals and grazing rights on Indian trust lands in the West.
I may not be a lawyer, but I was a small-town banker in Montana. I know that the most basic of duties of any trustee is to account for all trust assets, including the funds they hold for the beneficiaries.
Unfortunately, the commissioner of the Bureau of Public Debt, a senior Treasury Department official, testified in our case that the United States has used our trust funds to reduce the national debt.
But no one knows how much of our money was used to reduce the debt load of this country or how many years the U.S. government used our trust money for these and other important government purposes, such as building dams and major power projects in the West.
We hope an accounting will finally tell the true story of how the government has used Individual Indian Trust funds for more than 100 years. And, we also hope that we will learn what really happened to 40 million acres of Individual Indian Trust land that simply vanished, according to the testimony of the head of Interior's Office of Historical Accounting.
Seven years later, Interior Secretary Gale Norton, the government's trustee-delegate for the nation's first citizens, has done nothing to provide us answers to this and other important trust accounting issues.
Why the delay? Why the deception? Why the disdain for the obligations Norton owes to hundreds of thousands of Individual Indian Trust beneficiaries, many of whom live in Washington state?
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and others have said it's because Indians lack political clout in the nation's capital. Any other interest group would have had this problem resolved immediately, McCain has said. There is no dispute about the evidence. Study after study has warned Congress that our trust funds were being horribly managed by the Department of Interior. Billions of dollars are missing.
In 1989, the Senate Special Committee on Investigations found that "fraud and corruption pervade" the Interior Department. The General Accounting Office warned both Republican and Democratic administrations for years that this is a very serious problem.
In 1994, Congress ordered Interior to account for the missing funds. Nothing happened.
So we Indians did what others similarly situated would have done. We turned to the courts for help to straighten out an obdurate and dishonest executive and an uninterested Congress.
Since we filed our suit, we have won several significant victories. In 1999, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth declared the government breached its trust responsibilities to us and ordered the interior secretary and the treasury secretary to provide us a complete accounting of all trust assets, including the revenues generated from our trust lands since the creation of the Individual Indian Trust in 1887. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia unanimously agreed with Lamberth and found that the interior secretary had engaged in "malfeasance" and has unduly delayed the accounting, causing irreparable harm to all of us.
The government's record as trustee for Indians is "a long and sorry story," Lamberth declared. "... It is fiscal and governmental irresponsibility in its purest form."
Tough words, to be sure -- but they are utterly meaningless unless Norton is compelled to do what she is required to do by law.
Continuing to rely on the good faith of the interior secretary is an exercise in futility. We can settle this case, but the government first must participate in settlement talks with integrity, something they have refused to do for the seven years this case has been litigated.
It must stop hiding behind disingenuous excuses, defending the indefensible and protecting incompetent and dishonest officials.
Any settlement must be fair and just to make Indians whole for monies that have been collected by the United States for 116 years.
It is, after all, our money. It is our property right." Elouise Cobell is making history.
Churchill explains step by step the attempted genocide of indigenous cultures. Just a few of the techniques were preemptive and deceptive leases: the General Allotment Act, which replaced collective ownership with individual ownership; the forced change in indigenous government to the Tribal Council (modeled like a corporate board); the 1956 Relocation Act, intended to force indigenous peoples to move to slums in cities, etc. In 1953, the United States attempted to unilaterally dissolve 109 indigenous nations in its borders. By 1990, more than half of all Indians were no longer on their land bases. But rather than completely obliterate native entities, the U.S. government decided to keep them alive and restructure their government into an entity which could be a signer to negotiations for mineral leases. "Native nations were cast as always being sovereign enough to legitimate Euro American mineral exploitation on their reservations," writes Churchill, "never sovereign enough to prevent it."
For the purpose of enriching the few, hypocrisy, lies, and lawbreaking have been the basis of United States' policies toward indigenous peoples from its founding years. So of course we are still doing it today. We are simply operating on a different continent.
Native Americans today are distributed unevenly throughout North America, a reflection more of events following European arrival than of aboriginal patterns. The 1990 U.S. Census reported the largest number of Native Americans in the states of Oklahoma, California, Arizona, and New Mexico. The census also indicated that slightly over half of Native Americans live in urban areas; cities with the largest Native American populations are New York, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Tulsa, Los Angeles, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Anchorage, and Albuquerque. Around one-fourth of American Indians in the United States live on 278 reservations (or pueblos or rancherias) or associated "tribal trust lands," according to the census. The largest of these is the Navajo Reservation, with 143,405 Native Americans and 5,046 non-Indians living there in 1990. Around 60 percent of the Native American population of Alaska lives in "Alaska Native Villages."
The twentieth-century population increase for Native Americans reflected in successive U.S. Census figures was also due to changes in the U.S. Census Bureau's definition of Native American. Since 1960 the Census Bureau has relied on self-identification to ascertain a person's race. Much of the increase in the American Indian population?from 523,591 in 1960 to 792,730 in 1970 to 1.37 million in 1980 to 1.9 million (including Eskimos and Aleuts) in 1990?resulted from persons not identifying themselves as American Indian in an earlier census but identifying themselves as such in a later census. It has been estimated, for example, that as much as 60 percent of the apparent population growth of American Indians from 1970 to 1980 may be accounted for by such changing identifications! The political mobilization of American Indians in the 1960s and 1970s, along with other ethnic-pride movements, may have lifted some of the stigma attached to an American Indian racial identity. This would be especially true for persons of mixed ancestry who formerly had declined to disclose their American Indian background. Conversely, persons with minimal American Indian background may have identified as American Indian out of a desire to affirm a "romanticized" notion of being American Indian.
Today over three hundred American Indian tribes (excluding Alaskan villages) in the United States are legally recognized by the federal government and receive services from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. There are additionally some 125 to 150 groups seeking federal recognition, and dozens of others that might do so in the future. The Bureau of Indian Affairs has used a "blood quantum" definition?generally, one-fourth degree of American Indian "blood"?and/or tribal membership to recognize a person as an American Indian. However, each tribe has a particular set of requirements, typically including a blood quantum, for membership (enrollment) in the tribe. Requirements vary widely from tribe to tribe: a few tribes require at least a one-half Indian (or tribal) blood quantum; many others require a one-fourth blood quantum; still others, generally in California and Oklahoma, require a one-eighth, one-sixteenth, or one-thirty-second blood quantum; and some tribes have no minimum blood quantum requirement at all but require an explicitly documented tribal lineage.
Tribes located on reservations have generally required higher degrees of blood quantum for membership than those not located on reservations. This pattern of requiring low percentages of Indian "blood" for tribal membership and relying on federal authorities to certify membership may be seen as a reflection of demographic decline. As the number of American Indians was reduced and American Indians came into increased contact with whites, blacks, and others, American Indian peoples increasingly married non-Indians. As a result, American Indians have had to rely on formal certification from the federal government as proof of their "Indianness."
In the early 1980s the total membership of the three hundred recognized U.S. tribes was about 900,000. Therefore, many of the 1.37 million persons identifying themselves as American Indian in the 1980 census were not actually enrolled members of federally recognized tribes. In fact, only about two-thirds were. In the late 1980s the total tribal membership was around 1 million; hence, only about 53 percent of the 1.9 million people identifying themselves as American Indian in the 1990 census were actually enrolled. Such discrepancies have varied considerably from tribe to tribe. Most of the 158,633 Navajos enumerated in the 1980 census and the 219,198 enumerated in the 1990 census were enrolled in the Navajo Nation; however, only about one-third of the 232,000 Cherokees enumerated in the 1980 census and of the 308,132 enumerated in the 1990 census were actually enrolled in one of the three Cherokee tribes (the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians [of North Carolina], and the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians of Oklahoma). Thus the Navajo Nation is the American Indian tribe with the largest number of enrolled members, but more persons identifying themselves as Native American identified themselves as Cherokee in the 1980 and 1990 censuses than did persons of any other tribe. The two other largest groups in the 1990 census were the Chippewas, or Ojibwas, (103,826) and the Sioux (103,255).
Similarities and differences exist in Canada. Officially, to be an Indian in Canada, one must be registered under the Indian Act of Canada; a person with Indian ancestry may or may not be registered. Categories of Canadian Indians include "status" or registered Indians, persons registered under the act; and "non-status" or non-registered Indians, persons who either never registered or gave up their registration and became enfranchised. Status Indians may be further divided into treaty or non-treaty Indians, depending on whether their group ever entered into a treaty relationship with the Canadian government. Of the 575,000 American Indians in Canada in the mid-1980s, some 75,000 were non-registered and some 500,000 were registered.
In conclusion a recent article on Native American colonization by John C. Mohawk in Indian Country Today summarizes these issues best.
Most of the indigenous peoples of the Americas faced a very serious reality. In their country, the invaders outnumbered the indigenous, sometimes by hundreds to one. They were not going to go back home. In addition, their stated goal was the eradication of the indigenous nations as nations by eroding all of the elements that make a distinct people a people: their history, their languages, their laws and customs. It took quite a while and a lot of boarding schools, missionaries, and corrupt public officials but the process - being colonized - has had an impact. When an individual loses his or her memory, they cannot recognize other people, they become seriously disoriented, and they don't know right from wrong. Sometimes they hurt themselves. Something similar happens when a people become colonized. They can?t remember who they are because they are a people without a common history. It?s not that they don?t have a history, it?s just that they don?t know what it is and it?s not shared among them. Colonization is a kind of spiritual collapse of the nation. This is one result of a colonial education based on canonical "great books" texts. Indigenous peoples? histories and cultures are not in those texts, and the life of the nation is not there, either. Identity is important. The colonists were very successful "radicalizing" indigenous identities such that people talk about being 25 percent of this or 40 percent of that, but one does not belong to a nation based on one?s blood quantum. Belonging to an indigenous nation is a way of being in the world. Holding a membership card is not a way of being and money can?t buy it.
Colonization is the greatest health risk to indigenous peoples as individuals and communities. It produces the anomie - the absence of values and sense of group purpose and identity - that underlies the deadly automobile accidents triggered by alcohol abuse. It creates the conditions of inappropriate diet, which lead to an epidemic of degenerative diseases, and the moral anarchy that leads to child abuse and spousal abuse. Becoming colonized was the worst thing that could happen five centuries ago, and being colonized is the worst thing that can happen now.
De-colonization, on the other hand, means many different things to many different peoples. In principle, however, it means undoing the damage of colonization and involves elements such as living traditions and customs, language retention, and an insistence on the right to BE Lakota or Ganienkehaka or O?otam or Tipai or whatever nation it is that people have a right to be.
Sources: can be found at
www.americanindiansource.com/bloodquantum.html