2. Women's Perspectives - Christian Aboriginal Infrastructure ...

I think it's a trick when they reinstate the people…they were promising too much of
everything, the housing and the land. But we don't have land. I don't have land. I got a
house, [but] it belongs to my husband….But whenever I go on the reserve I won't have
land. I have to go and chop a tree and look around and sit on that stump, see if there is
any room where I can live, put my house.
Samaria Reynolds
Indigenous Women's Collective
Winnipeg, Manitoba, 29 April 1992
The right to live on a reserve is an emotional as well as a political issue. For many Bill C-
31 registrants, the reserve is an important source of personal identity: it is part of their
traditional homeland, their community. The department of Indian affairs survey supports
this observation. It found that, of the 2,000 Bill C-31 registrants whose views were
canvassed, almost two-thirds reported that they applied for Indian status for reasons of
identity or because of the culture and sense of belonging that it implied. 78
Most people whose Indian status was restored through Bill C-31 (as opposed to those
who gained Indian status for the first time) were compelled in one way or another to
leave their home communities; hence the attempt in Bill C-31 to repair, at least partially,
the injustice done to them and their descendants. However, current reserve residents also
leave their home communities for a number of reasons — to pursue post-secondary
educational opportunities, for health care, to acquire marketable skills they cannot
acquire on the reserve. As we point out in our chapter on Aboriginal people in urban
areas (Chapter 7, later in this volume), Aboriginal women also leave their communities to
escape physical and sexual abuse. Others leave because they feel that their needs are not
being taken seriously and that they have no control over issues that directly affect them.
But many leave with the intention of coming back and with the expectation of having a
place to live when they return.
Reserve residency is not an absolute right for people with Indian status or even for those
who belong to a particular band, whether the membership list is maintained by the
department or by the band. In fact, subject to a number of ambiguously worded
limitations and guidelines, the authority to decide on-reserve residency matters rests with
the band council under subsection 81(1) of the Indian Act — a power provided in the
1985 amendments.
Unfortunately, the Indian Act, in most respects, is not very helpful in determining what
rights, if any, an adult member of a band has to live on a reserve. For example, one might
have assumed that, to protect the acquired membership rights of Bill C-31 registrants,
residency rights would be part of the acquired rights that bands would be obliged to take
into account in their by-laws. They are not, however. As a result, many Bill C-31
registrants who might otherwise wish to return to their reserve communities continue to
live off-reserve.
In addition, many women object to being affiliated automatically with the bands that
Indian affairs records show they were connected to in the past through their fathers or
46