CANADIAN INDIANS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21470, 19 April 1933, Page 14

CANADIAN INDIANS

ADMITTED TO FRANCHISE GOVERNMENT'S PROPOSALS [from our own correspondent] VANCOUVER, March 16 After more than 300 years in association with the white man the Canadian Indian is to get the franchise and be admitted to the full responsibility of citizenship. Hitherto he has been a ward of the Government of Canada, wihoso solicitude for his welfare is exceeded only by New Zealand in her treatment of the Maori race. The Indian pays no taxes. He cannot bo sued in a civil court. Ho is quite content to retain that status, but the Great White Father considers he is now sufficiently modern to take his place beside the pale-face. He has entered the professions, graduated lrom the universities, carried on business, farmed his land with a success that entitles him to go further and take a hand in guiding the destiny of his country at the ballot-box. As a citizen lie is law-abiding to a degree. Peace and harmony pervade his . intercourse with the white man. The Hudson's Bay Company has traded with him for 273 years without a quarrel. His morals are unimpeachable. The Government proposes to set up a board, composed of a Judge, a Federal official and a representative of the Indian race, to adjudicate on the qualification of individual Indians for citizenship. The proposal was vigorously opposed by the Liberal Party, on the ground that wholesale enfranchisement might be made on the eye of a general election. The Prime Minister, Mr. Bennett, contended that an Indian, given the franchise against his will, was- not likely to vote for the Government that made him assume his obligations. The practice of exploiting the Indians for exhibition purposes and to ■provide stunts for tourists is forbidden under the new law. No longer will the "tenderfoot" or tourist be thrilled by the heathenish dance, the piercing warwhoop, the feather-bedecked redskins shuffling in sinuous movement around the totem pole. The law bans practices or the appearance of Indians in aboriginal costume in any "exhibition, stampede or pageant" outside their reserves without the consent of the Indian agent. Liberals charged the Government with attempting to standardise the Indian. One speaker, betraying his nationality in a rumbling Doric, said he came of n race that had preserved its aboriginal costume for hundreds of years, in spite of the maladroit efforts of the lowly Sassenach to un-kilt the Scot. The Government was adamant. There were only mild protests from the Indians, who preferred the regime of the past to a future besot by worries of debt and taxation to which the paleface is prone. Hence the Indian is to* be gently but firmly initiated into the realm of citizenship.