Demographic Status
No status Indians could be left in Canada within 200 years if current laws defining who qualifies are not changed, according to a Winnipeg demographer.
Currently, federal legislation eliminates the treaty status of some children if one parent is a certain type of registered Indian and the other is not.
That means fewer and fewer children will qualify for status, Winnipeg demographer Stewart Clatworthy told CBC News.
"If nothing changes and intermarriage rates stay the same, and the rules of the act stay the same, and you string it out long enough, you could essentially create a situation where there would be no one born who would qualify," Clatworthy said Thursday.
Within six generations — roughly 180 years — Clatworthy's projections suggest no one born could qualify to register as a status Indian.
I won’t bother disputing the numbers, since I can think of several scenarios where this would wind up being the case. It would only take a slight imbalance to produce such a result over time, and I know from some relatives who do and don't qualify for status that the rules are rather less than intuitive when one considers their actual ancestry. (Side note: Are we still supposed to be calling them Indians? My sister always yells at me every time I use the term.)
Back when we treated our aboriginal populations in such a way that it was thought to be a good model for the South African apartheid regime, this sort of issue probably didn’t come up too often. But since we started allowing natives off their reservations and noticing that they’re, well, people, human nature has kicked in and the mingling has begun.
Change the definition slightly so that anyone descended from a status Indian remains a status Indian and the same demographic trends would likely find all Canadians becoming status Indians in roughly the same time frame. Intermarriage has that effect.
I doubt such a proposal would be very popular, and setting things up so that status natives die out hardly seems a fair way to go either. Its a thorny issue at the best of times, and I'm not going to try and offer some pat solution, because I've long been convinced that none exist.
I will say this though. I don't think that assigning people a distinct legal status based upon their ancestry is the kind of thing that we should be looking to try and perpetuate.
