What about my human rights?

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These days, there's a lot of talk going around in the city about people like us. The talk is that people like us are close minded and brainwashed by the Indian Act; we're racists; we're backwards and insensitive. We are "internally colonised." We're from Indian reserves and we don't trust outsiders. Worst of all, we don't like it when Indians marry whites.

What have we done to deserve such harshness from our unreserved and de-colonised Sisters and Brothers? Well, we believe that our people have the right to say who is and who is not one of us. We believe that we are just as human as any other nation of people on earth and that we have the right, like other groups of human beings, to determine our membership for ourselves. And we believe that being Indian is in the blood, so we promote membership policies based on lineage and all kinds of restrictions on individual choices that end up excluding some people who claim membership in our nations.

Those who are opposed to setting up any boundaries (membership policies are nothing more than negotiated cultural boundaries, after all) between our nations and others cry foul based on their notion of human rights. They believe that international standards of human rights make it wrong for us to deny any person's claimed membership in a community. The only right and moral way to determine membership, it is believed, is to allow people to freely identify with and hold on to membership in a group. But consider this question: can you just go to Germany, step off the plane and be recognised as German by "self-identifying"? For that matter, can a boatload of Chinese people come ashore in the Queen Charlotte Islands and claim Canadian citizenship without reference to the criteria and processes in Canadian law? Of course not; the ideas of being German and being Canadian mean too much to make it so easy.

It says something deeply troubling when being Indian means so little to some people that they would allow anyone to claim an Indian identity, no questions asked. Deep (and perhaps unrealised) prejudices seem plainly evident in this debate. How can anyone justify an opposition to the Mohawk or Squamish nation's right to set and enforce it's own rules on membership? It may be uncomfortable but it is true that to deny us that right is to, in effect, say that the Mohawk or Squamish nations don't mean as much as the German or Canadian nations. It is to say that any one person's idea of what it is to be a member means more than the whole tradition and consensus of the Mohawk or Squamish nations. It is putting our rights as Indian people at a lesser status than the rights of everyone else.

Regardless of the rules that flow from our collective decision-making on this question, we have the right of self-determination, which means that we have a national identity and no one can dictate to us who we are. Yet the Canadian government still tells us who we are through the Indian Act - and we don't do too much to stand up to them. Now individual Canadians with some small real or big imagined claim to being Indian are telling us who we are too. As members of Indian nations, are we wrong to stand up and say, "what about my human rights?'"

I believe we have a responsibility to defend our identity, in spite of the labels thrown at and stereotypes pinned on us. The reality is that we are standing up demanding respect for our nations out of love for our people and pride in the notion of our being. All those harsh words about us being insensitive, backwards and racist are simply not true - except maybe for the part about us not liking it when Indians marry whites: doesn't that really bug you?