While many people may assume that when my court case ended and when the Gehl clauses were added to the Indian Act via Bill S-3 that my work on sex discrimination ceased. It did not.
 
For the last few years I have been working with a group of women inclusive of First Nations women leaders, organizations and allies, and Canada’s senior feminist experts on Indian Act sex discrimination. This group is observing, advocating, and stressing for the need for Canada to more quickly implement Bill S-3. They are also addressing other issues: the consequences of the discrimination, resolving the lingering differences between matrilineal and patrilineal lines of descendance, and the involuntary enfranchisement of women, and thus her children, when their husbands enfranchised.
 
Of course I am always sure to raise issues that continue to exist since Gehl v Canada (2017) and the subsequent addition of the Gehl clauses to the Indian Act. In my goal of ensuring community people have access to information that they need, I offer an edited component of a recent document the working group created that specifically addresses situations of unknown and unstated paternity.
 
It is incorrect to think that all children of unknown and unstated paternity will automatically become registered status Indians like the mother. Gehl v Canada did not solve all situations of unknown and unstated paternity. This is what the court and Canada does; they narrowly define legal remedies as tightly as possible as a measure to save money.
 
First, as a reminder, when a status registered mother cannot, or will not, identify the father of her child, her child is treated as if they only have one status parent. If the mother has 6(1) status, she can pass on 6(2) status to her child. However, if the mother has only 6(2) status, her child is not entitled to status and is hit with the second-generation cut-off rule.
 
Although the requirement that a mother provide the father’s name in order to demonstrate that he is a status person was modified through the Gehl case, evidentiary difficulties continue with Indigenous Services Canada’s unknown or unstated paternity rule. Today a mother is required to show, on a balance of probabilities, that the father is/was a status Indian in order for her child to have full status. If the mother is unable to meet the evidentiary requirement the child’s status is bumped down or the child may be denied status altogether.
 
It is easy to reason that the difficulties of proof fall harshly on women; this is especially so for young girls who become pregnant. There are, for example, cases of complete unknown paternity where a father is not known to the mother, child, and grandchild because the child was conceived through sexual violence such as rape, gang rape, rape while unconscious due to rape drugs, sexual slavery, prostitution, or situations of multiple partners.
 
Further, as many know, unstated paternity situations include unreported paternity, unrecognized paternity, unacknowledged paternity, or unestablished paternity, where a mother records the father’s name on the child’s birth registration form, yet he refuses to sign it because he needs to protect his standing in the community, and/or a marriage to another woman, and/or to avoid child support payments, and/or wishes to hide that he had sex (read rape) with a minor child. Unnamed paternity also happens when a woman or minor girl child cannot name the man due to issues of sexual abuse and incest.
 
What is more, and disturbingly, some birth documents have been changed, or tampered with, sometimes more than once, by hospital or government officials to obscure paternity in cases of adoption, unmarried mothers, or other situations (Gehl, 2017).
 
https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/fpcfr/2017-v12-n1-fpcfr06468/1082440ar/
 
And there is still more to discuss here. It is well understood that Indigenous people have a higher rate of disabilities, and further that Indigenous women and girls with disabilities are bigger targets of sexual abuse (Gehl, 2021). Some of these women and girls are unable to hear, see, or move to defend themselves and some become pregnant where the man (I opt not to call them fathers) are unable to be identified and thus named and placed on a child’s birth document.
 
https://www.lynngehl.com/indigenous-women-and-girls-with-disabilities-are-bigger-targets-of-sexual-violence.html
 
It is in these ways that the two-parent rule continues the male dominance of the registration system, because identifying the father requires his cooperation, which he can withhold without penalty. Finally on this topic, there is no indication that the files of persons who were denied status because of unstated or unknown paternity before the Bill S-3 changes were made are being reopened and reconsidered. As people can determine Canada has more work to do in meeting their reconciliation agenda.

I know knowledge producers, that we call “artists”, who intentionally incorporate imperfections into their work as a reminder of the teaching that Creator does not always make things that are perfect, and that we need to value difference and diversity. As a late learner of reading and writing many people critique my spelling, grammar, sentence structure, and punctuation issues – yet they claim to love the teaching inherent in what I call “quilted imperfections”.

Like many Indigenous people my life has been pretty miserable moving through the poverty, the neglect, the trauma ... . As a scavenging child my focus was on survival in terms of the physical and in terms of my safety. Thus, you can be sure many critical periods of learning passed by me. Today I have a PhD yet it seems that some people want me to now go back to grammar school because they have issues with my grammar and punctuation. The truth is I have no desire to learn to perfect the colonizer’s language anymore than I have. My next big project after Gehl v Canada is completing a manuscript on Canada’s Algonquin genocide. People really need to learn how to link teachings with lived reality, or as academics say link theory and practice.

I love Indigenous knowledge; it teaches me so much.

A 16th Century Algonquin Ancestor

People who have 1 Algonquin ancestor from the 1600s are 4 centuries or 400 years away from this ancestor. Considering that in each 100 years there are 4 generations of lineage, a person of today is approximately a 16th generation descendant of the said Algonquin ancestor. Furthermore there were 4oo years of intermarriage with other socio-cultural-ethnic-linguist peoples. This points to the reality that although you claim to be Algonquin, you are not. This is reasonable.

The Deep Love of the Brown Brothers

Thomas Brown and Robert Brown were best friends. They did everything together such as play, sing, dance, feast, and hunt. They were so close as brothers that they were married on the same day on July 1, 1779. Thomas Brown married a lovely Irish woman named Beth who became Beth Brown, and Robert Brown married a lovely Algonquin woman named Akik who became Akik Brown. Both marriages resulted in many children both boys and girls. These two families lived in the same town where every subsequent generation also had their own families who carried the Brown surname and many of them continued to live in the same town. The larger family network of cousins remained close and intact where through family folklore and stories the descendants of Thomas and Beth and the decedents of Robert and Akik all claimed that they had an Algonquin ancestor. Yet, only the descendants of Akik Brown were genuine descendants of an Algonquin woman named Brown. This conflation is un-reasonable.

The Creation of Identity Gaps and Traps

All cultures contain a dense tapestry of rituals, dance, language, and foods that sustain them physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Sadly, with the emergence of state nationalism, where nation states destroy the cultural features and inherent deep meaning people need as they move through the world, a gap is created. In its place, state nationalism offers a thin veneer of culture such as a song and a flag. It is precisely because of this gap in deep cultural meaning and identity that too many settler peoples fall into the trap of usurping Algonquin identity.

Performance as an Indigenous Way of Knowing

Performance is a traditional Anishinaabeg way of coming to know and embodying knowledge. Performance is not solely defined as an explicit and consciously constructed story for a stage play. Not at all. Everything we do daily is a performance where the inherent activities and practices of the performance shape who we are and how we think. It is through the repetitive process of performing activities and practices that moves knowledge into our bodies which thus becomes embodied. This embodied knowledge then seeps into our subconscious, seeps into our hearts, and seeps into our dreams where through this embodiment we further become who we think we are. Today there are many settler people who, due to an identity gap created through state nationalism, have mistakenly stepped into administrative and leadership activities and practices of being Algonquin, where consequently they now think and feel and dream that they are genuinely Algonquin when they are not. The power of performance and embodied knowledge in these situations has become the trap many settler people are entangled in so much so that reason fails them.

​A Meandering Story: Truth, Evidence, and the Lack of Evidence
 
Prior to contact the Anishinaabeg had a traditional practice of learning about people, who they were, and their integrity. Essentially we told each other stories about who we were. We told people our names, who are family members and relatives were, and we told them our clan. This practice provided us with the beginning of what could be or would be a trustworthy relationship. We had this ancient tradition because it spoke to the integrity of the person. In the modern context we now want to know what kind of education and training a person has, what they do for employment, and how they have lived their lives. This is reasonable.
 
The Anishinaabeg tradition has always respected the greatest gift that Creator bestowed humans: our minds and our very ability to reason. Reasoning ability was respected and nurtured in our methods of parenting, teaching, and training. What I mean by this is parents and teachers value that individuals needed to develop their own ability to reason from within their being so much so that our methods of teaching are never didactic. Rather we always left room for the person to think through issues on their own. Respecting and nurturing an individual’s ability to reason was our way.
 
European Enlightenment brought forward the idea and methodology of positivism, that truth is rooted in evidence such as scientific positivism where knowledge and truth is rooted in atoms and molecules, historical positivism where knowledge and truth is rooted in artifacts and archival documents, and legal positivism where knowledge and truth is rooted in evidence.
 
In terms of legal positivism, when there is an absence of evidence judges use their training and minds and reason in their process of making a determination. This is what happened in Gehl v Canada. There was a lack of evidence and the judge reasoned through the community and family context of my father’s existence to determine he was and I was, like his mother, an Indian. This speaks to the need for critical thinking, and appreciation that the lack of evidence must be reasoned through.
 
There is more to consider with the idea that truth is rooted in tangible evidence. Evidence, like truth, is shaped by assumptions about the world such as patriarchy and colonization and thus power where people with more power foremost become the producers of what is evidence. This means that critical thinking is required when considering what is evidence and what is not evidence. For example, people with power can and will create or manufacture evidence according to their own selfish needs. What is more, people with power can and will destroy evidence, and disturbingly some will even work hard to ensure that as they do corrupt things there is no evidence to be found. This speaks to the need for critical thinking, and appreciation that the presence of evidence and the lack of evidence must be reasoned through.
 
As I say this no one should interpret me as saying that judges rooted in colonial law are able to determine truth. Clearly their assumptions are an issue. Most judges cannot come to a genuine and moral truth because Canada’s legal history emerges from the racist and genocidal Doctrine of Discovery. Again power mediates evidence, the lack of evidence, and truth.
 
All this said, no one should interpret that I am suggesting that in the absence of evidence we just accept the person as Indigenous. Not at all because after all the very absence of evidence can itself be manufactured. What is more, when this so-called absence of evidence exists within a broader context where there is the creation of fraudulent archival documents doubt is reasonable. Again, Creator gave us the ability to reason, and Canada’s court system also relies on the ability to reason.
 
The issue with the excuse that a person lacks evidence of who they are as an Indigenous person is limited. Canada began conducting census-taking as early as the year 1666 and it was as early as the year 1765 when Canada began recording if a family was Indigenous. Also, it was in 1871 when Canada began to take census every ten years. Another source is the Jesuit Relations beginning in 1631 through 1673.
 
If you cannot prove you are Algonquin, you should not be enrolled in the land claims process. You should not be shaping the process in a leadership role and you should not be afforded the right or responsibility to vote on the final agreement. Rather, harness your integrity and walk away. When the time comes and the agreement is final you can then submit a community application and that community can rely on their own criteria set to determine if you are to be accepted as a member.
 
This is easy to reason. Creator bestowed you with this skill within your being.

​© Lynn Gehl, Ph.D. is an Algonquin Anishinaabe-Ikwe from the Ottawa River Valley. She is a member of Pikwàkanàgan First Nation She is a published author of Claiming Anishinaabe: Decolonizing the Human Spirit and The Truth that Wampum Tells: My Debwewin on the Algonquin Land Claims Process.  Her most recent book is titled Gehl v Canada: Challenging Sex Discrimination in the Indian Act. You can reach her and see more of her work at www.lynngehl.com. Bare with me as I troubleshoot a new tool disseminating my blogs.

Check out this interview with Steve Paikin of the Agenda. I am receiving loads of good responses . . .

So great! I received my box of Gehl v Canada today.

From the back cover: "A follow-up to Claiming Anishinaabe, Gehl v Canada is the story of Lynn Gehl’s lifelong journey of survival against the nation-state’s constant genocidal assault against her existence. While Canada set up its colonial powers—including the Supreme Court, House of Commons, Senate Chamber, and the Residences of the Prime Minister and Governor General—on her traditional Algonquin territory, usurping the riches and resources of the land, she was pushed to the margins, exiled to a life of poverty in Toronto’s inner-city. With only beads in her pocket, Gehl spent her entire life fighting back, and now shares an insider analysis of Indian Act litigation, the narrow remedies the court imposes, and of obfuscating parliamentary discourse, as well as an important critique of the methodology of legal positivism. Drawing on social identity and Indigenous theories, the author presents Disenfranchised Spirit Theory, revealing insights into the identity struggles facing Indigenous Peoples to this day."
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To order click this link: https://uofrpress.ca/Books/G/Gehl-v-Canada

© Lynn Gehl, Ph.D. is an Algonquin Anishinaabe-kwe from the Ottawa River Valley. ​