FIRST READING: Everyone hates the Indian Act. So why does it refuse to die? - National Post

Wab Kinew brandishes his Indian status card in front of reporters. Photo by Wab Kinew/XArticle contentFirst Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.

On Monday, following a summit between first ministers and First Nations leaders, Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew brandished his Indian status card in front of reporters, called it a “race-based form of identification” and appealed for the end of the law that made such a thing possible.

That would be the Indian Act. Passed into law 150 years ago, it sets out the basic legal frameworks under which First Nations exist in Canada: How band councils are elected, who qualifies as an “Indian,” and why reserve land can’t be sold or traded without Crown approval. Earlier iterations of the Act even barred Status Indians from voting in federal elections or possessing alcohol.

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Framers of the Indian Act at the time were open about its paternalistic goals, agreeing in House of Commons debates that Indians were “like children to a very great extent” who “required a great deal more protection than white men.”

Nowadays, it would be difficult to name a piece of Canadian federal legislation that is more disliked than the Indian Act.

As Kinew demonstrated, it’s widely reviled among the one million or so card-carrying Status Indians who are subject to it.

“The Indian Act marks one of the many direct attacks on our nations including efforts to silence our languages, eliminate our cultures and dispossess us of our lands,” Shawn Atleo, a former head of the Assembly of First Nations, wrote for the National Post in 2012.

The Yellowhead Institute, an Indigenous think tank, called it “colonization’s foundational legislation” in an April essay. “It attacked women and children, identity, and restricted freedom to move, trade, and even socialize,” it read.