“My Ancestor Was Songhees. Why Don't I Have Status?”

 I've been thinking about Canada's new "Lost Canadian" citizenship rules, and something really bothers me.

Canada is changing its citizenship laws so that, in certain circumstances, people born outside Canada can claim Canadian citizenship through a Canadian parent or earlier Canadian connection.

But here's my family's story.

My great-great-grandmother was Songhees. She had a child with a Portuguese man. Under the laws imposed through the Indian Act, First Nations identity and legal status could be affected by rules around marriage and descent. Those rules were not the same for men and women.

Today, my family has no legal Indian status.

So when I hear about a "second-generation cut-off" being changed for Canadian citizenship, I have to ask:

What does that do for families like mine?

My Indigenous ancestry doesn't disappear because a government created a legal definition that my descendants eventually fell outside of.

And this is where I think we need to be very careful about looking backward. We know the laws now. We have documented the history. But we don't automatically know why our ancestors made the choices they made. Maybe my great-great-grandmother married for love. Maybe family circumstances played a role. Maybe the laws affected their decisions. We simply don't know.

What we do know is that those laws affected the generations that came after them.

So I'm left wondering:

Who gets to decide who belongs?

A government? A citizenship certificate? An ancestry test? A birth certificate? Or the people and nations whose relationships to this land existed long before Canada itself?

Because changing one citizenship rule doesn't necessarily repair every family that was separated from its own legal identity by another set of laws.

That's the conversation I think we need to have.

10 Reflective questions

1. Who gets to decide who belongs to a place — the government, birthplace, ancestry, or the people whose relationship with that land predates the state?

2. If a government can define who is legally recognized as Indigenous, what happens to the families who fall outside that definition?

3. What happens when the law changes, but the generations affected by the old law cannot simply be given their lost identity back?

4. Why can ancestry create a pathway to citizenship in some circumstances, while Indigenous ancestry does not necessarily create legal status?

5. What did our ancestors understand about the laws being imposed on them — and what are we assuming today when we interpret their choices?

6. Can a government-created category truly determine whether someone's connection to their ancestors and nation is real?

7. When we celebrate Canada's history as a country of immigrants, how often do we stop to ask what happened to the peoples who were already here?

8. If citizenship can be passed through generations, what should happen to families whose Indigenous legal identity was lost through generations of government policy?

9. What does “belonging” actually mean to a person whose ancestors lived here before Canada existed, but whose descendants no longer have legal status?

10. And perhaps the hardest question: if the laws created the problem, who has the responsibility to repair what those laws did to the generations that followed?

#Songhees #IndigenousRights #IndianAct #Citizenship #Status #Ancestry #WhoGetsToBelong #LostCanadians #CanadianHistory #Reconciliation