In keeping with that vision, polices that forced Aboriginal assimilation to non-Indigenous societal constructs and displaced Indigenous Peoples were put into place. These policies and their enforcing legislation and services structures created two paths in Canada:.
The essence of the policy of Aboriginal assimilation is that Indigenous Peoples in Canada have no rights unless they assimilate and become Canadian enfranchisement.
Canada apologized for and renounced this policy of Aboriginal assimilation on June 11, However, nothing really changed. This is because the policy of assimilation is deeply embedded into the fabric of Canada.
In practical terms, the policy of assimilation gave rise to other policies. These secondary policies, whether individually conceived or functional derivatives, dictated legislation, regulations, and services from which programs, or a lack thereof, were created. There were a large number of these assimilation tools. We will introduce a few.
Indigenous people are assimilated by:. Breach of Promise: Unfulfilled treaties that deny Indigenous rights. Exclusion: Creating legislation that excludes Indigenous rights. Legislation: Creating legislation against Indigenous rights and culture, the Indian Act. Cultural Destruction: Cultural genocide from residential schools and provincial child welfare agencies, the Indian Act , forced relocation and provincial education systems.
Attrition: Selective funding and infrastructure development to support non-Indigenous definitions of development and civilization.
Acquisition: Crown ownership versus inherent and international Indigenous rights to land and resource ownership. Legislation, regulation, services, and programs, or a lack thereof, created from these secondary assimilate-by policies were Embedded Forced Assimilation Barriers EFABs that prevented the advancement of inherent, international and constitutionally guaranteed Indigenous rights in Canada.
Some of them have been removed. These treaties cover vast areas of the Canadian landscape but were never incorporated into Canadian legislation and implemented. Rights and promises recognized in these treaties can only be upheld by an act of legislation. They remained unsanctioned executive actions of the Crown. As a result, Treaty rights and guarantees have been eroded and undermined by Canadian laws.
For almost all intents and purposes, these early treaties have been broken. This will require the Crown to take positive steps toward this end as well as to refrain from taking actions that will frustrate it. In , section 35 of the Constitution Act recognized and affirmed present and future Treaty rights in Canada. However, these rights are limited to the pencilled-in rights of the treaty. The larger issue of Indigenous sovereignty to land and resources not extinguished because early treaties were unfulfilled is still an unresolved issues.
Prior to the Dominion of Canada federation in , there existed a tripartite relationship in Canada between the British Empire, colonies and Indigenous Nations. This relationship was unilaterally changed by legislation in two steps: In , the Indian Lands Act transferred authority over Indigenous people and Indigenous lands from the British to the colonists. Second, the Constitution Act shuffled authority over Indigenous people and lands from colonists into the new federal government of the Dominion of Canada.
At that time, colonies became provinces under the new Dominion. The new tripartite relationship created in was between British, federal, and provincial governments. No mention of Indigenous nations, rights or treaties was included within the constitution of Canada. Indigenous Peoples were not recognized. Later, the Constitution Act in recognized and affirmed existing Aboriginal and Treaty rights in section In doing so, Aboriginal and Treaty rights needed to be incorporated into Canadian legislation, both federal and provincial.
This has not yet occurred. The current problem with the inclusion of Aboriginal rights into legislation is that Aboriginal rights are granted and defined by the Crown for Indigenous Peoples, not by Indigenous Peoples.
Indigenous rights are actually something referred to as Immemorial rights. The recognition of Aboriginal rights in section 35 is actually part of a the modern assimilation tool chest that excludes sovereign Indigenous Immemorial rights. The Indigenous rights that should be included into legislation are Immemorial rights.
It was consolidated from other legislation meant to force assimilation and displacement. To understand the intent of the Indian Act , one needs only look at the intent of legislation from which it was consolidated. This act provided a mechanism to annex Indigenous lands. Indigenous People were no longer in a mutual relationship with colonists.
Indigenous Nations no longer existed under the Crown and were not recognized in Canadian legislation. Indigenous rights and treaties were also not recognized.
This act undermined Indigenous culture and forced the assimilation of Indigenous government. The first Indian Act was passed in It created a legislated regulatory framework from laws that empowered displacement and assimilation. The Indian Act is still active legislation in Canada that affects a large number of Indigenous communities. The Indian Act has remained essentially unchanged to the day of writing, 13 although communities can opt out of certain sections if they have other federal government-approved regulatory systems in place.
In the words of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples ,. It can inform and recommend, however. In that role, we can call attention to the factors, attitudes and continuing assumptions that brought about the Indian Act and that continue to prevent progress in moving away from the restrictive Indian Act vision. Those factors are to be found in past assumptions and the shadows they have cast on present attitudes. They must be recognized for what they are and cast away as the useless legacy of destructive doctrines that are as inappropriate now as they were when first conceived.
The Aborigines Protection Board officially adopted this policy in From this time the Board substantially increased the already established practice of removing Aboriginal children with fair skin, referred to at the time as 'half-caste' or 'part Aboriginal', from their families.
Children were placed in institutions where they could be 'trained' to take their place in white society. Reece states that:. The economic and political realities were masked by a view of Aborigines as primitive, if not sub-human, a view which revealed fundamental ignorance of Aboriginal cultures.
Europeans were, Stanner has said:. That blindness … profoundly affected European conduct toward the Aborigines. It reinforced two opposed views — that they were a survival into modern times of a protoid form of humanity incapable of civilization, and that they were decadents from a once-higher life and culture.
It fed the psychological disposition to hate and despise those whom the powerful have injured … It allowed European moral standards to atrophy by tacitly exempting from canons of right, law, and justice acts of dispossession, neglect, and violence at Aboriginal expense.
Colonial Attitudes Harden. Thus with the expansion of settlement and continuing clashes on the frontiers, attitudes hardened. Depredations and punitive expeditions continued well into this century, especially in northern regions.
The reduction in the Aboriginal population, and a growing consciousness of the general mistreatment of Aboriginal people, combined with the need for more effective regulation of labour in pastoral areas to bring about changes in policy. The House of Commo ns Select Committee on Aborigines, which had reported in , had recommended that there should be missionaries for Aboriginal people, protectors for their defence and special codes of law to protect them. Protectors were appointed, mostly by executive order, in New South Wales, South Australia and Western Australia at about this time; they were supposed to protect Aborigines from abuses and to provide the remnant populations around towns with some rations, blankets and medicine.
The right to marry was limited, as were other civil rights. However the Commonwealth had been consistently wary of upsetting State sensitivities as well as committing itself to extra funding. This position changed after A federal Office of Aboriginal Affairs was established and made grants to the States for Aboriginal welfare programs.
Although these were significant changes, they continued to operate through the established structures and organizations of Aboriginal policy, rather than in any way directly challenging them Altman and Sanders page The election of the Whitlam Labor Government in on a policy platform of Aboriginal self-determination provided the means for Indigenous groups to receive funding to challenge the very high rates of removal of Indigenous children.
Aboriginal legal services began representing Indigenous children and families in removal applications, which led to an immediate decline in the number of Indigenous children being removed. In a paper delivered at the First Australian Conference on Adoption directed the attention of social workers to the large numbers of Indigenous children who were being placed by non-Indigenous welfare workers with non-Indigenous families. The paper drew on the experience of Indigenous services with children who had been removed and placed away from the Indigenous community.
This practice was inconsistent with the policy of self-determination and harmful to the Indigenous children concerned. For the Aboriginal child growing up in a racist society, what is most needed is a supportive environment where a child can identify as an Aboriginal and get emotional support from other blacks. The supportive environment that blacks provide cannot be assessed by whites and is not quantifiable or laid down in terms of neat identifiable criteria.
Aboriginal people maintain that they are uniquely qualified to provide assistance in the care of children. They have experienced racism, conflicts in identity between black and white and have an understanding of Aboriginal life-styles Sommerlad pages and The activism of Indigenous organisations and the growing awareness of welfare workers of the ways in which government social welfare practice discriminated against Indigenous people forced a reappraisal of removal and placement practice during the s.
Similar services now exist in all States and the Northern Territory. These Indigenous services formulated the Aboriginal Child Placement Principle discussed in Chapters 21 and 22 and lobbied for it to be adopted by State and Territory welfare departments as a mandatory requirement. It is not possible to state with any precision how many children were forcibly removed, even if that enquiry is confined to those removed officially.
Many records have not survived. Others fail to record the children's Aboriginality. Researchers have assisted the task by counting numbers of children in particular placements or in record series over particular periods. For example, historian Peter Read used official records to number Indigenous children removed in New South Wales between and at 5,, warning as he did so that some of the record series were incomplete pages South Australian researchers Christobel Mattingley and Ken Hampton found records relating to over children entering Colebrook Home in the 54 years to page Another method is to survey adults and ask whether they were removed in childhood.
One-quarter of the elderly people and one in seven of the middle-aged people reported having been removed in childhood evidence One in every three reported having been separated from their families in childhood for five or more years cited by Hunter on page Dr Jane McKendrick's findings are almost identical.
Separation here includes hospitalisation and juvenile detention in addition to removal. It may also include living with family members other than parents for a period National Aboriginal Health Strategy Working Party page More recent surveys are likely to understate the extent of removal because many of those removed during the early periods of the practice are now deceased.
Such surveys cannot capture the experiences of those people whose Aboriginality is now unknown even to themselves. Nationally we can conclude with confidence that between one in three and one in ten Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families and communities in the period from approximately until In certain regions and in certain periods the figure was undoubtedly much greater than one in ten. In that time not one Indigenous family has escaped the effects of forcible removal confirmed by representatives of the Queensland and WA Governments in evidence to the Inquiry.
Most families have been affected, in one or more generations, by the forcible removal of one or more children. Warning: The following link may contain images of deceased Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander persons. Click here for photo of. Brother Luis Arrufat and students, St. Courtesy Battye Library P. Chapter 2 National Overview Colonisation Protection and segregation of Indigenous people in the nineteenth century Merging and absorption Merging becomes assimilation Removal of Indigenous children under child welfare legislation Self-management and self-determination Estimating the numbers removed In this Part we outline the laws, practices and policies of forcible removal of Indigenous children in each State and Territory.
Colonisation Indigenous children have been forcibly separated from their families and communities since the very first days of the European occupation of Australia.
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