Sunday, July 29, 2018

The Indian Act of 1876: Minors or White Men

The Indian Act, passed by Parliament in 1876, was mainly a consolidation of laws already enacted, many of them rooted in pre-Confederation statutes of the Province of Canada. But now Canada was poised to apply the legislative apparatus of control to Indians in all parts of the country. David Laird, the first minister of the interior, laid out the underlying rationale of individual emancipation and strict control of reserves: "Indians must be either treated as minors or white men."

--Peter H. Russell, Canada's Odyssey: A Country Based on Incomplete Conquests (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 190.


No comments:

Post a Comment