A United Nations committee on Thursday called on Ottawa to “fully” address gender discrimination in its Indian Act, which continues to affect tens of thousands of descendants of Indigenous women.
Relations between the Canadian state and the First Nations are defined by the “Indian Act”, a text of 1876 which notably created hundreds of reserves in the country.
Prior to 1985, the Act “contained provisions that explicitly discriminate against Indigenous women that deprived them of their status if they married non-Indigenous men”, explained the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Indigenous Peoples. women (Cedaw), a body composed of independent experts.
However, you have to be considered Aboriginal to have the right to certain services and assistance, but also to have the possibility of living on Aboriginal territories, and the right to hunt and fish on traditional lands.
“Despite numerous legal challenges, Canada has only changed discriminatory provisions piecemeal rather than ending discrimination altogether,” Cedaw said.
“The whole problem stems from the failure to respect the fundamental right of indigenous peoples to self-identification,” said Corinne Dettmeijer, a member of the committee.
The Indian Act is severely criticized by some Aboriginal people who consider it outdated and racist, and want it abolished.
The discrimination suffered by Aboriginal people is at the heart of a great debate within Canadian society, particularly since the discovery, in May, of hundreds of graves on the site of a former boarding school reserved for Aboriginal people.
Since May, some 1,500 unmarked children’s graves have been found on the sites of these schools, and numerous searches are underway across the country – between 4,000 and 6,000 students are said to have disappeared, according to the authorities.
Between the end of the 19th century and the 1980s, some 150,000 Indigenous children were forcibly recruited into more than 130 residential schools across the country where they were cut off from their family, language and culture.
A national commission of inquiry in 2015 described this system as “cultural genocide”.