How do being Indigenous in BC and having status correlate?

I thought I knew but until BCFP broke it down for me I realized how complicated it really was.

First we started off by getting in groups and making a small presentation so we could all teach each other about different various topics within this big theme. Before we dig any deeper let’s define a few key terms I will be using.

“Indian Status”

• This is a legal status in Canada that recognizes indigenous people under the Indian Act.
• It determines access to certain rights and benefits including healthcare, education, and land.
• It should be seen in a positive light but there are many downsides that come along with it, including how hard they are to obtain and the discrimination many indigenous people face when trying to receive benefits.

Pretendians

• This term is used when people falsely claim to be of indigenous descent, often used for personal gain or social status.
• Often used to describe non-indigenous people who take advantage of Indigenous identity
• People who falsely claim that they are Indigenous can cause real harm to Indigenous communities and their rights, meaning that this term is controversial.

Indigeneity

• This refers to the state of being indigenous, with distinct ties to a region.
• In British Columbia, this includes diverse First Nations, Métis, and Inuit groups.
• It involves the unique relationships Indigenous peoples have with their land, languages, and cultural practices.

After we defined these different terms in class, we dug deeper into the timeline of events and examples of each of these topics, here is a link to the timeline I created.

Within this BCFP project, we needed to keep in mind our driving question, “How might understanding the sensitivities around Indigeniety, help us understand B.C. First Peoples?”

So, a relevant topic was to talk about Buffy Sainte-Marie. For those of you who don’t know who she is, let’s break it down together.

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Buffy Sainte-Marie rose to fame in the 1960s and quickly became popular because of the music she produced and how she was “Indigenous.” She became a huge advocacy figure for Indigenous rights and social justice. She won many awards for her music and was considered the “first Indigenous person to win an Oscar” in 1983.

But now you may be wondering why I put Indigenous in quotations. Well, in 2023, there was an investigation led by CBC’s The Fifth Estate television program where she was exposed for not being of Indigenous descent. This means that her claims of being Indigenous were false, putting her under the pretendians category.

But her as a person is quite controversial… But why is that?

Well, even though claiming that she was indigenous was not correct and did damage, being such a famous figure did bring a lot of attention to Indigenous awareness, meaning that reactions to this are heavily mixed.

So to dive in more here is a mind map I did with 7 different topics, digging deeper into different topics that are commonly discussed.

As we know, Buffy Sainte-Marie could not apply for “Indian Status” since she was not of Indigenous decent, but people who are can.

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We were lucky enough to have someone come into class and talk about status with us and help answer some burning questions, here are a few that stood out to me.

How long does it take on average to obtain an “Indian Status” in Canada?

She said that it can be from 6 months to even two years, depending on the complexity, which is very common that you have to re-apply many times, making it a tedious process that requires a lot of time and patience.

What have been some experiences when owning a status card?

Of course, there are benefits, but sometimes they aren’t as great as you think. For instance, she talked about a personal experience with her mom when she had to go to the dentist as a young teen. She went because she had a cavity, instead of the dentist fixing her tooth, which could’ve easily been fixed, they saw she was an “Indian” because of her status card and pulled the tooth out instead. Making a new one for her instead of giving her the proper treatment she needed. Status cards aren’t as glamorous as they may seem, they come with many micro-aggressions, including but not limited to different stores with retail workers.

Here are some graphs from CBC that show different experiences with status cards and discrimination that really shocked me:

Learning about this really opened my eyes to different aspects of Indigenous people that I would have never thought about. This helped me understand more than just our history as Canadians but also the challenges indigenous people face today.

After we did a class talking circle discussion it helped me realize the importance of spreading awareness and how important it is to educate people, not only about our past but the issues that are present today.