DIAND funds Bill C-31 supporters

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The fight in Alberta over a controversial Native status law just got a lot easier for the Native Council of Canada.

The council received more than $186,000 from the department of Indian Affairs last week to finance its involvement in Senator Walter Twinn's challenge of Bill C-31, council spokesman Richard Long said.

"I am delighted," he said. "We've been involved with this matter for seven years."

Newly appointed Minister of Indian Affairs Pauline Browes agreed to supply the funds to help defeat Twinn's challenge, Long said.

"We've been fighting Walter Twinn, who has money coming out of his ears," he said. "Now, the little guys get a shot at the big guys."

The 22-week trial, scheduled to begin Sept. 20, will run for five weeks in Edmonton. Following a three-week recess, the proceedings will reconvene in Ottawa for an additional three weeks.

In 1986, Twinn and five other chiefs in Alberta, including Wayne Roan of the Ermineskin and Bruce Starlight of the Sarcee bands, challenged Ottawa's involvement in deciding band memberships.

Three of the chiefs have since dropped out of the suit, but Twinn still maintains that only bands - not the government - can grant Indians status.

"The law reinstated people to status and band membership, and that is where the problem is," Long said. Band membership is a matter for bands, and we can support that. But until April 17, 1985, there were thousands and thousands of Indian women and their children who had lost their band membership; through no fault of their own."

The NCC is only a third party in the law suit, he added. The council has set up a 1-800 telephone number that Natives can call to be screened as witnesses for the trial.

"We are only there for the 9,000 witnesses who can't be there," Long said. "We intend to bring as many people forward as we can. If this lawsuit goes in favour of the plaintiff, it will shut off the rights of those people. It will perpetuate what the white Parliament did to take away that right in the first place."

In 1951, the Canadian government amended the Indian Act to deny Indian status to Native women marrying non-Indians.

The purpose of the amendment was to assimilate Indians into the "larger community," Long said. Native men marrying non-Native women did not, however, lose their status.

It's an unfair law from that perspective, he said. But it's not just an Indian women's issue.

"There are plenty of male children of these women who are affected, too."

In 1967, the Supreme Court of Canada decided the amendment was wrong but could only order Parliament to correct it, Long said. Several Native lobby groups followed up the Supreme Court's decision and pressured Ottawa into changing the Act during the 1970s.

In 1985, then-Minister of Indian Affairs, John Crosbie prepared Bill C-31 to correct the 1951 amendment.

"He was prepared to say 'from now on, Indian bands will design their own membership'," he said.

Ottawa has granted status to more than 90,000 people across Canada since passing the bill into law in April, 1985. About 9,500 of them are in Alberta.