The Montreal Gazette

I am a member of the Kahnawake community - or at least I think I still am - and I am very disturbed about the new membership code that flouts both the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and a recent decision by the Supreme Court of Canada (in an Ontario case about voting rights for off-reserve band members).

I will soon be stripped of my membership because of my marriage to a non-aboriginal. I am a status Indian under the Indian Act. Yet my own community wants to deny me my culture, heritage and the right to live in the community.

The membership code does not limit itself to non-aboriginals. It also denies the right of Mohawks like me to live on reserve.

At present, the community of Kahnawake does not control the official band-membership list; Ottawa does. What will happen is that the approximately 3,000 status Indians who are now on the list and are potentially affected by the new code will continue to be counted by the band council and Ottawa, but the band council will be striking them off its own records, depriving these individuals of essential medical, dental and even housing services.

But the band council will continue to receive funding, not only from the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development but from all other federal and provincial departments that provide funding for the entire membership.

All levels of government refuse to comment on these issues for reasons such as continuing self-government negotiations. Who will answer these questions while everyone is trying to dodge the bullet?

I have seen the code and it has not to this day been accepted by the community. Yet the band council has decided to enact it without approval from Ottawa and will enforce it technically without any legislative framework.

The band council has been unsuccessful on at least two occasions, in 1981 and again in 1984, in achieving community consensus on the code. For that reason alone, it has not called for a referendum by all band members, as called for in the Indian Act, to vote on it.

Do Chief Joe Norton and his council want to be remembered as just another group of ideologues spouting the idea of racial purity?

Canada's First Peoples like to blame the white man for all their problems. It's time we woke up and realized that the so-called white man is not our enemy, but that we ourselves are our own very worst enemies.

We will only decimate our fragile population base, lose our culture and, eventually, fade into history as just another footnote if we allow these single-minded people to continue to rule us.

Michael Lahache

Ottawa, Ont.