NVision Insight Group

The 1927 amendment did not come out of nowhere — it was Canada’s panicked response to one nation in particular: the Nisga’a of northwestern BC, who had been petitioning the Crown for recognition of their land since the 1880s. The Nisga’a formed a Land Committee in 1890 and sent delegations to Ottawa and to London. Canada legislated their lawyers away in 1927, and the Nisga’a kept going. In 1973, they took Canada to the Supreme Court in the Calder case, changing Canadian law forever and opening the door to modern treaty negotiation. On May 11, 2000, the Nisga’a Treaty came into effect, and the Nisga’a Nation is no longer governed by the Indian Act.

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In 1927, Parliament amended the Indian Act to make it illegal for First Nations to raise money or hire a lawyer to pursue a land claim against the Crown without the government’s permission. (If you know anything about historic treaties, you’ll see that the date is significant. This was after the last historic treaty was signed in 1923.) Permission was almost never granted, and even three or four people meeting to discuss land could be charged. Canada was simultaneously taking the land and making the legal path to challenge that taking a criminal offence. The amendment stayed in force until 1951.

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In the 1920s, Six Nations of the Grand River was governed by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s traditional hereditary council. Chief Deskaheh (Levi General) travelled to London and then to Geneva — holding a Haudenosaunee passport and speaking to crowds across Europe — to bring the Haudenosaunee case for sovereignty before the League of Nations. He nearly succeeded. Canada’s response: in October 1924, the RCMP raided the Council House, seized the wampum, declared the hereditary council dissolved, and imposed an elected band council under the Indian Act. Deskaheh died the next year, exiled from his own territory. A century later, Six Nations carries both systems — elected and hereditary — each with distinct roles and responsibilities.

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In May 2021, ground-penetrating radar identified what are believed to be 215 unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, followed by Cowessess, Marieval, and many others. Communities have located thousands of suspected burial sites across the country. Survivors had been telling these truths for decades, and Canada is finally listening. Behind every number is a child whose name a family still says aloud. The 1920 amendment to the Indian Act — making attendance compulsory — is one link in the chain of decisions that put those children there. Reconciliation begins with acknowledging that chain. It continues with naming the children, supporting community-led searches, and refusing to look away. (If you or someone you know needs support, the Indian Residential School Crisis Line is available 24/7 at 1-866-925-4419.)

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Residential schools had existed since the mid 1800s, but in 1920 Parliament amended the Indian Act to make attendance compulsory for every First Nations child between the ages of 7 and 15. Duncan Campbell Scott, Deputy Superintendent of Indian Affairs at the time, told a parliamentary committee: “I want to get rid of the Indian problem… Our object is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic.” That single amendment turned a violent policy into a legal obligation. RCMP officers were sent to take children, and parents who refused were jailed. Over the life of the system, more than 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Métis children were taken from their families. The 1920 amendment did not invent residential schools; it made them inescapable.

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Collaboration starts with connection. Our team brings Indigenous governments and organizations together to build trust, generate solutions, and advance shared goals.

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Starting in 1885, First Nations people on the Prairies needed a written pass from their Indian Agent just to leave their reserve — to visit a relative, go to town, sell produce, attend a funeral, or travel to see a child at residential school. What is striking is that the pass system was never actually law: it had no statutory basis in the Indian Act, and the federal government knew it was unenforceable. It enforced it anyway, for more than 60 years, until 1951.

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Here is something the Indian Act could not do: it could not kill the ceremonies. Even when the Potlatch and Sundance were criminalized, families found ways — holding ceremonies at night, in winter when Indian Agents stayed away, in remote camps, even disguised as Christmas dinners. Knowledge keepers passed songs and protocols to children in whispers. When the ban lifted in 1951, the ceremonies were waiting, bruised but alive. Today the U’mista Cultural Centre (U'mista Cultural Society) in Alert Bay, the Royal BC Museum’s repatriation program, the Dancers of Damelahamid and dozens of other community-led initiatives are bringing seized regalia home, and a new generation is learning the old songs out loud. The resilience of First Nations people is not a metaphor — it is the reason these cultures are still here.

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In 1884, the Indian Act made it a crime to host or attend a Potlatch. In 1895, the Sundance and Thirst Dance were added, and by 1914 even “costumed” dancing required official permission. The Potlatch is far more than a ceremony — for West Coast nations, it is the governance system, a legal system, the economy, and the archive all at once. To ban the Potlatch was to ban the institutions that held those societies together. People were arrested, and regalia and ceremonial objects were seized and shipped to museums in Ottawa, New York, and beyond. The ban lasted 67 years, until 1951, when it was quietly removed (not even repealed) from the Act. Some of those seized items have come home; many have not.

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For nearly a century, the most powerful person in many First Nations communities was not a leader or an Elder — it was the Indian Agent. Indian Agents were federal employees mandated by the Indian Act to enforce the law on reserve. They controlled what could be planted and sold, issued (or refused) the passes that let people leave the reserve, decided who received rations, held the records that determined status, and had the authority to overrule and depose elected councils. Many were unqualified, some were corrupt, and their judgement could break a family. The system began in the 1870s and was not fully wound down on reserves until the 1960s. Generations grew up under the daily, personal authority of a federal official whose only credential was the Indian Act.

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