DGW Law’s Christopher Devlin spoke with Doug Beazley for a Canadian Bar Association’ online magazine “National” article, ‘Decolonizing the Indian Act.’ The article’s thesis can be summed up as: “[n]o one loves the Indian Act, but no one quite seems to know what to do with it.”
“The Indian Act is rooted in a 19th-century view of the inherent superiority of Western civilization,” says Christopher Devlin, a treaty specialist with the DGW law corporation in Victoria and a member-at-large of the CBA’s Aboriginal Law Section. “That attitude infects the law from top to bottom.”
From the initial intention of the Indian Act as “a colonial law, imposed on what were seen as conquered peoples,” to Canadian Senator Lynn Beyak’s multiple controversial statements in 2017 about residential schools and Indian status vs Canadian citizenship, Beazley examines the changes – and attempted changes – over the years and the complex enmeshment that exists between Indigenous communities, Canada, the Provinces and Territories and the Indian Act.
Read the full article here.