A Distinct Status

The legal status of the Inuit of Northern Québec and Canada as a whole was not clear. Were they simply Canadian citizens or were they wards of the federal government like First Nations people? In 1939, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the federal government indeed had exclusive legislative jurisdiction for the Inuit. The Court held that the expression “Indians and lands reserved for the Indians” in the Canadian Constitution of 1876 included the Inuit. However, as of 1950, the Inuit would be explicitly excluded from the application of the Indian Act, which is why, unlike First Nations people living on reserve, the Inuit pay consumer and income tax. The federal government granted the Inuit the right to vote in 1950, whereas First Nations people had to wait another 10 years to receive the same right.

The status of the Inuit of Northern Québec differed even more from that of First Nations following the signing of the James Bay and Northern Québec Agreement (JBNQA), the first modern-day land treaty, in 1975. The Inuit signatories chose to be subject to the laws of Québec and governed by municipal administrations. The JBNQA, which will be discussed in Chapter 5, led to the creation of 14 Inuit municipalities represented by a public corporation known as the Kativik Regional Government.

It is important to mention that while being excluded from the Indian Act, the Inuit were still a target of the federal government policy of assimilation. In 2013, when many Inuit testified at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s public hearings in Montréal, Quebecers learned that Inuit children had also been placed in Indian residential schools and were the victims of the same prejudices: they were forbidden to speak their native language and punished if they did, their culture was disparaged, they suffered physical and sexual abuse, and so forth.