Court hears C-31 Indians not welcome on reserves

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Natives who regained their Indian status through a controversial amendment to the Indian act will not be welcomed back to their reserves, a federal court was told.

The influx of Bill C-31 Indians to their ancestral reserves will only create trouble and hostility in the communities, said Ermineskin Band member Wayne Roan.

Roan is one of three prominent Alberta Native leaders suing Ottawa over Bill

C-31. Roan, Sawridge Band Chief and Senator Walter Twinn and Tsuu Tina band member Bruce Starlight maintain the 1985 amendment to the Indian Act unfairly forces bands to accept new members.

The pre-Bill C-31 wording of the Act allowed Ottawa to deny Indian status to thousands of Native men and women who were enfranchised - stripped of their Indian status. It also denied status to Native women who married non-Natives, and subsequently denied status to their children.

Bill C-31 was designed to reinstate Natives without making bands financially worse off, but more than 150,000 people applied for status when the bill was passed. Approximately 90,000 people, many of them women, were awarded status and put on band lists the department of Indian Affairs. About 9,500 were from Alberta.

Roan and other plaintiffs, maintain, however, that only bands have the right to decide who gets on their membership lists. Prior to the 1985 amendment, women who married non-Natives or Natives outside their own bands lived with their parents if they returned to the reserve, Roan said.

"No one said anything when the people came back, but after 1985 these people were pointed at. It caused a lot of disturbance."

The influx of C-31s to the reserves could also mean the destruction of the Cree language and traditions.

"This is our last stand," Roan said. "We need it to preserve our culture."

Roan was under questioning on the stand his own lawyer during the second and third week of the trial. In that time, federal court Justice Frank Muldoon said he was concerned that Roan's comments about selective marriages were "racist and apartheid."

But Roan, whose great-grandfather was a French fur trader, later defended his comments, saying he did not intend to "put anyone down in any way."

The 11-week trial was extended one week in September. Proceedings are expected to move to Ottawa Nov. 15.