Amendments and Bill C-31
There have been over twenty major changes made to the original Act. The original Indian Act does two things affecting all Aboriginal peoples in Canada.
- It says how reserves and bands can operate.
- The act sets out rules for governing Indian reserves, defines how bands can be created and spells out the powers of "band councils". Bands do not have to have reserve lands to operate under the act.
- It defines who is and who is not recognised as an "Indian". The act defined a number of types of Indian people who were denied recognition as "registered" or "status" Indians and who were therefore denied membership in bands.
Read more about this topic: Indian Act
Famous quotes containing the words amendments and/or bill:
“Both of us felt more anxiety about the South—about the colored people especially—than about anything else sinister in the result. My hope of a sound currency will somehow be realized; civil service reform will be delayed; but the great injury is in the South. There the Amendments will be nullified, disorder will continue, prosperity to both whites and colored people will be pushed off for years.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“Meantime the education of the general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)