I have this childhood memory of standing before class started and having to sing God Save the Queen at Indian Day School while looking out the window at our impoverished First Nation community. I must have been in Grade 3 because we were in a small one-room school building which was known as the Little School.
I was old enough to recognize that the gulf of economic disparity between her world and ours was wider than the ocean that separated us. The BNA received Royal Assent in March of that year. Nine years later, in 1876, the Indian Act received Royal Assent and was enacted as the law of the land in the new world, which was the world of the Indigenous Nations. The ancient world, to us.
This is the new world that the Queen inherited. This is the world that I was born into. This was why I was to stand and sing to her each morning. Without the Indian Act, Indigenous Nations enjoyed clean drinking water, a home for every family, a good life on the land where we were able to sustain ourselves. We enjoyed trade with other nations. During the fur trade we were a part of the world economy as we traded with the early European explorers.
But the treaties are something we were involved in creating. The treaties contain our rights as a people. Through the Indian Act, assimilation, and residential schools, the Crown hoped that the treaties would be forgotten.