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CAROLE BLACKBURN University of British Columbia

Differentiating indigenous citizenship: Seeking multiplicity in rights, identity, and sovereignty in Canada

A B S T R A C T In this article, I examine how citizenship has been legally differentiated and conceptually reconfigured in recent treaty negotiations between the Nisga’a First Nation, the provincial government of British Columbia, and the Canadian federal government. The Nisga’a have sought a form of differentiated citizenship in Canada on the basis of rights that flow from their relationship to their lands and their identity as a political community. They have challenged the state as the sole source of rights and achieved a realignment in the relationship between their rights as aboriginal people, Canadian citizenship, and the Canadian state. [citizenship, aboriginal rights, sovereignty, nation-state, Nisga’a, Canada]

C itizenship has undergone considerable transformation since its inception as a legal identity linked with rights and membership in a nation-state. Globalization, migration, the displacement of per- sons, and the rise of identity politics in multicultural conditions have all contributed to the development of transnational, postna-

tional, layered, and differentiated forms of citizenship through which peo- ple simultaneously experience and claim differing sets of rights and forms of belonging (Beiner 1995; Habermas 1992; Kymlicka and Norman 1995; Ong 1996, 1999; Rosaldo 1994, 1997; Soysal 1994; Turner 1990). Differenti- ated citizenship refers to the legal entitlement of particular groups to dif- ferent rights in addition to the individual rights common to all citizens of a polity (Young 1995). Although uniform rights are popularly associated with democratic equality, scholars and activists have advocated for differenti- ated citizenship on the principle that the common rights of citizenship do not accommodate the needs of minorities or the legal and political rights of indigenous people (Kymlicka 1995:26; Young 1995). Indigenous peoples’ struggles with citizenship are unique in this regard. Although these peoples have long histories of exclusion from citizenship in places such as Canada and the United States, their political goals have always been about more than equal access to the rights of other citizens. Their self-identification as members of nations with rights of self-government distinguish their de- mands from those of other minorities and require legal solutions that en- able the existence, within a state, of rights in and allegiances to separate political communities (Ramirez 2007).

In this article, I examine how one indigenous group negotiated and defended a form of legally and conceptually differentiated citizenship in Canada. I do this through an analysis of how the people of the Nisga’a First Nation struggled for recognition of their aboriginal rights, including the ability to control their membership criteria and call themselves “cit- izens of the Nisga’a nation,” during recent treaty negotiations with the federal and provincial governments. The Nisga’a have spent more than a century seeking recognition of their aboriginal rights and title through a treaty. Their territory lies along the Nass River valley in northwestern British Columbia, where they historically fished, hunted, and traded the rich re- sources provided by the river and its watershed. In 1998, their negotiations

Differentiating indigenous citizenship � American Ethnologist

with the provincial and federal governments finally resulted in the Nisga’a Final Agreement, also known as the Nisga’a treaty. The treaty came with a CAN$190 million cash settle- ment and makes the Nisga’a owners in fee simple of 2,000 square kilometers of land.1 It includes a guaranteed alloca- tion of Nass River salmon, amounting to approximately 26 percent of the total allowable catch, a set of wildlife harvest- ing entitlements, and rights to all surface and subsurface re- sources, including timber and minerals, on treaty lands.2

The treaty is a precedent in British Columbia because it is the first treaty made in that province after more than a century of provincial government refusal to acknowledge that aboriginal people had rights to land. Nationally, it is the first to include recognition of the right to self-government as a treaty right per se; this is particularly significant be- cause treaty rights in Canada receive constitutional protec- tion and cannot be revoked by successor governments. At the Nisga’a’s insistence, the treaty also goes beyond the lan- guage of “member” or “participant” used in other modern treaties and identifies the Nisga’a as citizens of the Nisga’a nation.

Anthropologists have theorized citizenship as a status whose criteria subaltern peoples challenge and contest as they move toward full, rather than second-class, member- ship in states (Ramirez 2007; Rosaldo 1994, 1997). Schol- ars have also theorized citizenship as a category through which people are disciplined into particular kinds of sub- jects even as they struggle with the terms of their belonging (Ong 1996, 2006; Rose and Novas 2005). Nisga’a have fought to redefine their citizenship so that it reflects their rights, culture, and political goals in Canada. At stake is how much they have been able to evade being disciplined by norma- tive criteria of belonging in the process (Ong 1996:738). In the pages that follow, I argue that Nisga’a have challenged the hegemonic norms of citizenship for aboriginal people in Canada by refusing to equate their Canadian citizenship with the elimination of their aboriginal rights and identi- ties. They have sought an indigenous differentiated citizen- ship on the basis of rights that flow from their relationship to their lands and their status as a preexisting political com- munity. In this respect, they have disrupted the state as the sole source of rights and realigned the relationship between their rights as aboriginal people and their relationship with the Canadian state. The Nisga’a’s struggle to invest citizen- ship with multiple content and legal rights also shows, how- ever, that although citizenship is a useful focal point for sub- altern groups trying to renegotiate their relationships with states, it is fraught with hegemonic ideals of equality linked with universal rights and modernist subjectivities that can impede the political aspirations of those groups. Nisga’a have challenged the legal, political, and cultural criteria of their participation in Canada and continue to empha- size communal values and kin-based forms of belonging in their communities. These emphases sit, however, in uneasy

juxtaposition with the individualistic, market-oriented en- trepreneurialism by which Nisga’a citizenship and ability to be self-governing continue to be judged.

This article is based on interviews and participant- observation I conducted in Ottawa, when the treaty bill was being debated in the Canadian Parliament, in Vancou- ver, home to the Federal Treaty Negotiating Office, and in the Nass River valley. In Ottawa, I met and gained familiar- ity with a small community of negotiators and bureaucrats working to get the treaty through the House of Commons and Senate. The Nisga’a and the provincial and federal gov- ernments each had a treaty negotiating team. The provin- cial and federal teams were made up of employees from var- ious government departments, including the Departments of Indian Affairs and Justice, as well as external consultants working on contract. Many members of the federal team worked out of the Federal Treaty Negotiating Office head- quarters in Vancouver. The Nisga’a team included elected members of the Nisga’a Tribal Council, tribal-council em- ployees, and at least one non-Nisga’a lawyer. In the Nass, I talked with Nisga’a treaty negotiators as well as community members, elders, and others not directly involved in treaty negotiations. Of the approximately 5,500 Nisga’a, half live in the villages of New Aiyansh, Gitwinksihlkw, Laxgalts’ap, and Gingolx on Nisga’a lands (see Figure 1). The rest live and work in towns and cities outside the Nass valley, in- cluding Terrace, Prince Rupert, and Vancouver. When the treaty came into legal effect on May 11, 2000, I was staying in New Aiyansh. My most recent trip to the Nass occurred in 2007.

Citizenship and aboriginal people in Canada: A history of exclusion

Aboriginal people have long experienced Canadian citizen- ship as something they could only acquire by giving up their aboriginal identities and assimilating into nonaboriginal society (Battiste and Semaganis 2002; Johnston 1993). After Canada became a country in 1867, politicians, administra- tors, and missionaries argued that aboriginal people had to become “civilized” before they could take on the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, including the franchise and the ability to own property. The government also drafted special legislation, known as the Indian Act, through which it made aboriginal people wards of the state and authorized itself to administer all aspects of their lives (Fiske 1995). It did this on the principle that aboriginal people were not yet competent subjects and had to be protected until they were assimilated into mainstream society, after which they would no longer need special oversight. When an aboriginal person was enfranchised, he or she was removed from the Indian Act register and ceased to have any legal status as an Indian. Although assimilation was the stated goal, in ac- tuality, the Indian Act facilitated the ongoing supervision of

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Figure 1. Map of Nisga’a territory.

aboriginal people as a racially segregated population, mark- ing their externality from the nation and separation from the rights and duties of Canadian citizenship.

Civil and political rights did eventually become avail- able to aboriginal people in Canada without the explicit condition that they give up their aboriginal identity and separate status, in part through indigenous activism and in- cremental amendments to the Indian Act. Aboriginal peo- ple continue, however, to struggle against hegemonic cri- teria of belonging linked with a normative white identity as well as for recognition of their rights to land and self- government (Johnston 1993). This struggle has a distinc- tive history in British Columbia because of the absence of treaties in that province. In most of the rest of Canada, the federal government made treaties with First Nations. The government made these treaties on the principle that abo- riginal people had a form of title, even though its main goal was to secure the legal surrender of this title in exchange for a set of treaty rights and small land allotments set aside for aboriginal use. Before retiring in 1864, the first gover- nor of British Columbia made a few treaties covering a small amount of territory on Vancouver Island but did not pursue treaty making elsewhere in the province (Tennant 1990:19). By the time British Columbia joined Canada in 1871, its

politicians were increasingly resistant to the idea that abo- riginal people had any rights to land at all. Settlers and politicians alike constructed the province as an empty and unencumbered space prior to the arrival of white civiliza- tion. They argued that lands might be set aside as reserves for First Nations but only as “gifts” from the Crown and not in recognition of prior aboriginal ownership (Tennant 1990:40–41).

These were the attitudes of the provincial surveyors who landed near the former village of Gitlakdamix to cut re- serves for the Nisga’a in 1888. Israel Sgat’iin, a well-known sim’oogit (hereditary chief ) of the Wolf tribe, sent them away at musket point. Within a few years, however, Nisga’a lands had been surveyed, and Nisga’a up and down the river were left with small reserves within what had been their much larger territories. Nisga’a then spent years lobbying federal and provincial governments for a treaty that would recognize their right to the land they knew to be theirs by virtue of ancestral inheritance. Other First Nations in British Columbia were equally active in this struggle, consistently arguing that they had never surrendered title to lands that were now farmed, logged, and mined by nonnatives. In the face of continued provincial denial of aboriginal title and the steady depletion of natural resources in their territories,

Differentiating indigenous citizenship � American Ethnologist

the Nisga’a broke with other First Nations in the province and took their case to the British Columbia Supreme Court in 1969. The risk they took was that a negative ruling would make it impossible for any other First Nation to get politi- cal recognition of aboriginal title in British Columbia, a risk that loomed large when they lost their case in the Supreme Court and then again in the British Columbia Court of Ap- peal. In 1973, they took their case, known as Calder v. the Attorney General of British Columbia, to the Supreme Court of Canada.

The ruling on this case was and continues to be a land- mark in aboriginal-rights jurisprudence in Canada (Asch 1999). Six of the seven Supreme Court justices found that the Nisga’a had aboriginal title in the past. Three ruled that this title was extinguished by the assertion of Crown sovereignty, and three ruled that it was not. The seventh jus- tice cited a technicality and abstained, creating a split rul- ing on extinguishment. The judgment in Calder affirmed that the Nisga’a had aboriginal title in the past and sug- gested that aboriginal title still existed for the Nisga’a and others who had not surrendered any of their territorial rights to Canada in a treaty. The federal government quickly established a Comprehensive Claims Policy to deal with land claims where treaties had not been made, including British Columbia, the Yukon, Quebec, and Newfoundland and Labrador. All claims negotiated since then are known as “modern” treaties or land-claims agreements. The fed- eral government also began negotiating with the Nisga’a. The province of British Columbia did not join these ne- gotiations until 1991. By this time, conflict between First Nations and logging companies had become so disrup- tive that even those politicians and businesspeople who had refused to acknowledge the existence of aboriginal ti- tle in British Columbia after Calder began to realize that the provincial economy depended on settling aboriginal claims (Blackburn 2005).

Debating differentiated citizenship

After the Nisga’a and federal and provincial governments signed the final agreement in 1998, it had to be approved by a majority of Nisga’a voters and ratified by the provin- cial and federal legislatures. This took two years. The politi- cal parties who supported the treaty held majorities in both governments but were vigorously opposed by other parties who argued that the treaty threatened the legal and polit- ical unity of Canada, cost too much in land and cash, and contradicted the democratic principle of equality before the law (Blackburn 2007). Some First Nations argued the op- posite position, which was that the treaty did not provide enough land, rights, or self-governing power to the Nisga’a. In British Columbia, anxiety around the treaty was partic- ularly high because approximately fifty other treaties were to follow. The provincial opposition party did everything

it could to block ratification, including launching a chal- lenge in the British Columbia Supreme Court, arguing that the treaty’s self-government provisions violated the distri- bution of powers allowed for in the Canadian constitution. The Nisga’a’s lawmaking and self-governing authority, in- cluding authority over citizenship, were also heated issues at the federal level. The treaty refers to Nisga’a “citizens,” defines a Nisga’a citizen as “a citizen of the Nisga’a Nation as determined by Nisga’a law,” and sets out criteria of en- rollment that are based on ancestry (Canada et al. 1998:10). In the Senate, this terminology and the powers the Nisga’a would have to control their citizenship criteria served as an entry point for discussion about the meaning of citizenship and the merits of a common versus a differentiated one for national identity, sovereignty, equality, and social cohesion.

Bills are first introduced in the Senate chamber and then sent to committees, where senators question wit- nesses on the strengths and weaknesses of the proposed legislation. They are then returned to the Senate for final de- bate and vote. Senators ultimately passed the treaty bill but not without worrying that the treaty would weaken Canada by foregrounding a heterogeneity in rights, sentiments, and political identification that would make the country politi- cally less stable and conceptually more difficult to imagine. One senator wondered why the words citizen and citizen- ship had to be used at all, arguing that they “give the im- pression that native people are leaving the country or some- how have different or special rights that may supersede the rights of the rest of us.” In the Senate Committee on Abo- riginal Affairs, this senator opined that Canadians “want to be equal” and “to be treated fairly and justly in this land. There is the feeling that ‘citizen’ conjures up some special rights in a way that diminishes others in the citizenship cat- egory. If they are citizens of Nisga’a, are they still citizens of Canada? That is what I am being asked.”3 Others worried the treaty created a form of dual citizenship that would frag- ment the political cohesion and social unity a common cit- izenship should foster. People “are struggling to find some unity in Canada” one senator said, in a veiled reference to the threat of Quebec secession. “We rally around symbols of citizenship.”4 Another described citizenship as the coun- try’s highest honor and cautioned against introducing any duality into a term of such legal and symbolic significance. A nonaboriginal witness from a right-wing think tank sim- ilarly argued that aboriginal people should not have dif- ferent rights than other Canadians because this “will work against concepts of Canadian citizenship for the polity as a whole” and “undermine all common Canadian citizenship values.”5

As citizens of the Nisga’a nation, Nisga’a do have “dif- ferent or special rights” that other Canadians do not, in- cluding rights to self-government and land. This is the point of differentiated citizenship for aboriginal people; the dif- ferentiation rests on the principle that aboriginal rights are

American Ethnologist � Volume 36 Number 1 February 2009

inherent and temporally prior to the rights of nonaborigi- nal Canadians. The Nisga’a’s pursuit of this differentiation and their use of the word citizen to label themselves chal- lenge the public expectation that citizenship means equal rights; they also challenge the expectation that universality in rights is part of the social contract whereby citizens have equal entitlements and responsibilities in a shared or com- mon community (Ignatieff 1995:70; Ong 2006). Senators are clearly well aware of this expectation. From the perspective of the Nisga’a, however, the notion that citizenship means equality in rights and treatment masks their historical ex- periences of discrimination, both before and after they at- tained the formal rights of Canadian citizenship. In their experience, equality and inclusion in Canada have been most notable in their absence, and their appropriation of the term citizen involves a critique of such exclusions. Their challenge is to keep and build on the word and some of what it stands for in liberal political theory while investing citi- zenship with meaning specific to an indigenous politics and indigenous resistance.

The Nisga’a who testified to the Senate committee ar- gued that citizen was the best word to signal their affilia- tion with the political community that is the Nisga’a nation. They did not deny that the treaty meant they had different rights but hastened to say that they sought a differentiated citizenship within Canada. Many indigenous people think of themselves as dual citizens in ways that combine belong- ing to their aboriginal nations and the larger states in which they live (Biolsi 2005:251; Ramirez 2004:401). In the com- mittee hearings one Nisga’a negotiator said,

We do not understand why anyone would object to the use of the term “citizen” to refer to the members of the Nisga’a nation. No doubt, if we had agreed to describe ourselves merely as members there would have been little or no objection. We believe that the correct word to describe someone who belongs to a nation is “citi- zen.” We wish to affirm, not deny, our existence as the Nisga’a nation, a nation that is within Canada.6

Their lawyer added to this argument, saying that to deny the Nisga’a the ability to use citizen was to deny “their ex- istence as a nation, as a nation within Canada.” At stake, he said, was not dual citizenship in the international-law sense but, rather, recognition that the Nisga’a belonged to a unique form of political community. He and others ex- plained that, although members belonged to voluntary or- ganizations, like clubs and even the Senate itself, this did not suggest a political identity in the way that citizen did.7

The Indian Act also identifies aboriginal people as “mem- bers” of bands, and Nisga’a refused to repeat this terminol- ogy. “Band member,” one negotiator told me, “meant there’s no such thing as self-definition. You were defined by legis-

Figure 2. Nisga’a lands signpost. Photo by C. Blackburn.

lation, which was the Indian Act. It relegated you to status as a member of a band in a confined reserve.”

Nisga’a are drawing heavily on the linkage in lib- eral theory between citizenship and the modern nation- state to say that they were politically independent, self- governing people prior to the arrival of settlers (Hall and Held 1989:173; Turner 1993:7). They are building on a term of Western, rather than indigenous, political theory to make an argument about their status as a nation. They are also in- vesting citizen with the significance of the relationship be- tween their rights and territory. When I asked a Nisga’a ne- gotiator why they had insisted on citizen, he said, ruefully, that this really got the right-wingers going but that “the self- description as citizens is really a declaration that we’ve al- ways had this inherent connection to our land.” There was no other term to use “to make that connection.” He spoke of how the huwilp (sing. wilp), the matrilineal kin groups to which all Nisga’a belong, are based on and embody an- cestral rights to territory that are distinct from Western forms of property ownership. Aboriginal scholar John Bor- rows (1999:80) has called indigenous citizenship “landed citizenship” to capture the importance of land to aborig- inal peoples’ understanding of their rights and identity (see Figure 2). In this respect, the citizenship Nisga’a claim is different from the deterritorialized citizenships that are linked with globalization and contemporary neoliberalism

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Differentiating indigenous citizenship � American Ethnologist

(Delanty 2000:2; Falk 2000; Ong 2006). Nisga’a introduce duality into Canadian citizenship but do not speak of thin, flexible, or postnational attachments that can be strategi- cally deployed but, rather, of an identity and rights rooted in territory (Lee 2006). In New Aiyansh, a woman who had returned to Nisga’a territory after some years away affirmed this a priori relationship to the land when she said, “I’m a Nisga’a citizen first before I’m a Canadian citizen. We’ve known all along that we belong here, in this place. If they want to call this country where we are Canada, then I’m also a Canadian citizen.”8

Citizenship, nationhood, and sovereignty are deeply in- tertwined and their contemporary rearticulations a focus of much scholarly inquiry (e.g., Hansen and Stepputat 2005; Ong 2006). Whereas Nisga’a link their right to call them- selves “citizens” with their status as a nation, politicians wondered if the presence of a group of people with separate rights and calling themselves “citizens of the Nisga’a nation” challenged Canada’s sovereignty. Treaty negotiators reas- sured everyone who asked that the treaty did not weaken the federal government’s authority over Canadian citizen- ship or create an uncontrollable legal duality in the state. One told the Senate committee that he only agreed to the word citizen “because of how it is defined in the treaty and because all of the rights that accrue to such a person are specifically stated in the treaty and nothing exists outside of it.” He insisted that the powers the Nisga’a have over their citizenship have nothing to do with the power to grant Canadian citizenship and that nothing about Nisga’a citi- zenship produced dual citizenship in Canada. As he said, “If someone comes to Canada legally and goes onto Nisga’a lands and is made a citizen, whatever the federal law is with respect to that person’s ability to remain in Canada re- mains the law under which he or she is governed. That per- son has no special rights with respect to Canadian citizen- ship as a result of that.” Nisga’a citizenship, he explained, “relates to their lands, their assets, and living within their territory.”9

Others were more categorical that Nisga’a citizenship did not threaten Canadian sovereignty. One employee in the federal Department of Indian Affairs responded to my queries about citizenship by saying, “They can call them, you know, coffee cups, but they called them Nisga’a citi- zens.” Flipping through the treaty, she explained, “It says somewhere in here that this is not about nationhood. . . . It’s not about the determination of citizenship in Canada, and the Nisga’a citizens are still citizens of Canada as well. They’re just also Nisga’a citizens, it’s not really a dual pass- port situation, because a passport, you need a passport to a nation, like to a sovereign nation, and this is not about sovereignty.” A member of the federal negotiating team likewise told me that, although member would have saved them a lot of trouble, citizen did not mean much more than that. He explained that there are limitations

to the lawmaking authority Nisga’a will have over their citizenship:

They can’t grant passports or entry into or out of Canada or create citizens or take citizenship away from anybody—Canadian citizenship. They can’t do any of that. The word that’s used in the Indian Act is member, and that’s one significant reason why the Nisga’a, and why we accepted, moving to a different language. . . . And so citizen was used. And I don’t know if it was a good use or bad use, I suppose it’s academic at this point because that’s what it is. But it doesn’t mean more than if we had used the word member. . . . It’s used in a way that does not in any way imply sovereignty.

Nisga’a do not see citizen as implying this much sovereignty either, but they do see the term as doing more than these comments suggest. Citizenship involves “a po- litical identity, an expression of one’s membership in a po- litical community” as well as a set of rights (Kymlicka and Norman 1995:301). Nisga’a are using citizenship to signal both of these things, insisting that they have rights as citi- zens of the Nisga’a nation not because of the racialized dif- ference generated by the state and linked, formerly, with their exclusion but because they belong to a previously ex- isting political community that holds inherent or extracon- stitutional rights (Wilkins and Lomawaima 2001). Nisga’a’s insistence on these rights and the ability to decide who gets access to them challenges hegemonic practices that locate citizenship in rights that are granted or denied by the state (Gordillo 2006:167). The converse argument, that all Cana- dians should have the same rights and be governed by the same laws, presumes that Canadians have rights that flow only from their status as citizens of Canada.

The treaty does not create the Nisga’a as sovereigns but it does produce a novel kind of political space in Canada (Biolsi 2005). Nisga’a have decision and lawmaking power over their lands, resources, and cash assets. They do not have exclusive jurisdiction, but they do have paramount jurisdiction—meaning their laws trump federal or provin- cial laws—in areas relating to Nisga’a government, citizen- ship, language, and culture. Their self-governing powers make them a unique configuration; they are more than a municipality but less than a province. They are an “abo- riginal government,” possibly best described as sui generis, a thing in itself.10 Their right of self-government is written into the treaty and thereby constitutionally recognized as an aboriginal right. In treaty and land claims negotiations before the Nisga’a Final Agreement, the federal government insisted that self-government be negotiated in so-called side agreements. This meant that the self-governing powers of a First Nation were not part of the final treaty, did not re- ceive constitutional protection, and provided the First Na- tion with a delegated form of authority akin to a municipal- ity. First Nations have been critical of the municipal model

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American Ethnologist � Volume 36 Number 1 February 2009

of government for some time; municipalities have jurisdic- tional authority that is delegated by provincial or federal governments and that can be changed or taken back at any time. Nisga’a negotiators would not accept self-government as a side agreement to the treaty because this would leave them in a similarly vulnerable position and because they refused to accept that their right to self-government could be “given” or “loaned” to them by the Crown, as delegated authority implies.

Genealogies of belonging: Kin or contract in the making of citizens

The treaty’s citizenship criteria distinguish between peo- ple who live on Nisga’a lands and are Nisga’a citizens and those who may live on Nisga’a lands but may not qual- ify as Nisga’a citizens. Only Nisga’a citizens are entitled to the treaty rights, to fish, for example, or to participate in self-government by voting in Nisga’a elections. Crit- ics argued that the treaty was a set of race-based rights and railed against the establishment of ethnic enclaves on Canadian soil. Some senators were uncomfortable with the ethical and political implications of having a governing en- tity within Canada that did not practice universal citizen- ship. How, they asked, could the Senate sanction the for- mation of a government that would base its membership, and the ability to vote, on ancestry? Some compared the use of ancestral or “birthright” criteria for Nisga’a citizen- ship with the government’s former use of blood to define who was an Indian. Until 1951, an Indian in Canada was “any male person of Indian blood reputed to belong to a particular band,” “any child of such person,” and “any woman who is or was lawfully married to such person” (Jamieson 1978:43). Referring to the possibility that the Nisga’a could embarrass the state by repeating its previ- ous legal reification of race through blood, one senator noted that the Indian Act began “a racial blood defini- tion” but that now it was possible to have “this unbeliev- able paradox that the reprehensible notion of blood in the definition of the Indian Act, which was European and for- eign to the aboriginals, may somehow continue on in this treaty.”11

Blood has a long history in the racialization of aborig- inal people in North America but is not a criterion for cit- izenship in the Nisga’a nation (cf. Biolsi 1995; Halualani 2001). Enrollment in the Nisga’a nation and access to the treaty rights does, however, depend on ancestry. A person may be enrolled, according to the treaty, if he or she can show that his or her mother was Nisga’a and belonged to one of the four Nisga’a pdeek, or tribes. Nisga’a are matri- lineal in their kinship reckoning. For enrollment purposes, a person’s qualifying Nisga’a mother can be on either the ma- ternal or paternal side and as far back as five generations. A person may also be enrolled if adopted by a Nisga’a as a

child, even if the person is not aboriginal. A person who is a descendant of either of these categories is eligible for en- rollment. Lastly, a person may qualify for enrollment if he or she marries a Nisga’a, is aboriginal, and has been cultur- ally adopted according to Nisga’a cultural adoption proto- cols. A nonaboriginal person who marries a Nisga’a and is culturally adopted does not qualify for enrollment and cit- izenship; such persons cannot vote and have no access to the treaty rights. Nonaboriginal people who live on Nisga’a lands for short periods, such as schoolteachers or police of- ficers, cannot become Nisga’a citizens and cannot vote in Nisga’a elections.

Nisga’a defended the link between matrilineal ancestry and citizenship as culturally appropriate and a positive act of self-government. The ability to determine membership is fundamental to indigenous self-determination, particularly because settler governments have so long arrogated this re- sponsibility to themselves (Jaimes 1992). A tribal-council employee who worked on the citizenship criteria explained that they were crafted to reflect Nisga’a cultural practices and to be as distinct from Indian Act definitions as pos- sible, meaning the Indian Act’s former blood requirement and its emphasis on tracing Indian status through men. Un- til 1985 aboriginal women in Canada who married nona- boriginal men lost their legal status as Indians, as did their children, whereas nonaboriginal women who married In- dian men acquired Indian status ( Jamieson 1977). Now, as this Nisga’a individual explained, “Nisga’a criteria for en- rolment begins with a person’s mother,” so even if a person’s mother married a non-Nisga’a, that person would still be entitled to enroll. He said this “corrects some hardships” but “also . . . make[s] sure that what happened with the Indian Act never happens again.”

It is not surprising that senators read ancestry as blood, given the taken-for-grantedness of blood in Anglo- American kinship reckoning and the linkage governments have made between blood quantum and Indian identity in the law (Turner Strong and Van Winkle 1996). Senators and witnesses who spoke to the committee also worried that the ancestral linkage used in the citizenship criteria precluded universality in rights within the Nisga’a nation. What began as a concern about blood became a discus- sion about whether the Nisga’a really grasped the commit- ment to equality, minority rights, and democratic principles that citizenship is supposed to entail. A witness from the organization Citizens Voice on Native Claims argued that the “closed membership society” the Nisga’a wanted went against the grain of the last two centuries of evolution in Western political thought,12 and the spokesperson from the conservative think tank cited “the evidence of history and all logic and reason and the development of western polit- ical thought” to critique the treaty’s membership criteria.13

Senator Grafstein, a Liberal senator from Ontario, was par- ticularly vocal on this issue. He linked universal citizenship

Differentiating indigenous citizenship � American Ethnologist

rights with the principles of modern democracy in a way that questioned the Nisga’a’s commitment to the latter. He asked the Nisga’a why they did not provide “something that we consider to be important in so-called European style of governance, and that is to establish or entrench minority rights within the institutions.”14 Grafstein raised the twin specters of tribalism and ethnic primordialism, asking if nonuniversal citizenship is “the vision we want for a united Canada with the globe shrinking in the twenty-first century? We have yet to learn the bitter lessons of the twentieth cen- tury respecting the clash between ethnicity on the one hand and open citizenship on the other.”15 He said the Nisga’a seem to have wanted to move from a purely “tribal sys- tem” to a democratic one but that, with respect to minority rights, they did not go all the way.16 “A citizen,” he declared, “should be a person, without qualification. If he meets an objective standard, he is entitled to vote. . . . That is what cit- izenship is. . . . In the Nisga’a treaty,” however, “people are excluded. You cannot become a Nisga’a citizen . . . unless you are born into the tribe. This sets up . . . a conflicting no- tion of citizenship.”17

Nisga’a and federal and provincial negotiators ex- plained that they wanted to safeguard the treaty assets— the land, cash, trees, and fish—for the use and benefit of the Nisga’a. If nonaboriginal people could become citi- zens and vote in Nisga’a elections, they could influence the management and distribution of those assets. Negotiators also argued that the lawmaking authority of Nisga’a gov- ernment pertains mostly to Nisga’a citizens, so that non- aboriginal people living on Nisga’a lands are not actually governed very much by the Nisga’a. Most significantly, if nonaboriginal people could enroll under the treaty and be Nisga’a citizens, they would then have access to the treaty rights of the Nisga’a people, rights that are a subset of the aboriginal rights recognized and protected in section 35 of the Canadian constitution. These rights come from aborigi- nal peoples’ presence as self-governing communities before Canada became a country; they are not the universal enti- tlements of all Canadians (Borrows 2001). When the presi- dent of the Nisga’a Tribal Council defended the particularity of Nisga’a rights, he reflected the conviction that the treaty rights and assets are the ancestral inheritance of the Nisga’a people. Using an idiom of kinship that did not resonate well in the Senate, he said,

By way of comparison, would any one of you seated across the table in this room allow strangers or individ- uals who stay with you temporarily to decide how your family’s internal assets would be handled? Would you do that? That is the problem that faces us: people who come into our communities maybe for a year, two years or three years and then they are gone. . . . Would you al- low someone to handle your family’s personal assets? I do not think so.18

Senator Grafstein’s response to this is illustrative: He took issue with the family analogy, and he suggested that the assets in question come from Canada. “These are not family assets,” he said. “These are public assets that are held in trust as fiduciaries. What I am talking about here is the right of a citizen to fully participate and vote on mat- ters affecting his life and the area in which he chooses to reside. . . . The right to vote goes to the heart of any right to participate in a civic society.”19 Grafstein wondered why, “having accepted the European notion that you get nation- hood or sovereignty and, with that, you get citizenship, then why would you not take the next step which is, under the European thesis, the minority rights entailed in citizenship? In other words, why . . . take two-thirds of the package and not the last third of the package?”20 Others emphasized the importance of the right to vote to democratic values, calling it “almost biblical” and something “embedded in us.” Anything “that discounts that value or blocks it,” one witness argued, “is amongst everything else, unconstitu- tional.”21 The representative from Citizens Voice on Native Claims said that the treaty “establishes a right to vote based on race” and asked how “this racially based right to vote” could “be reconciled with the concept that all Canadians are equal?”22

At the point of almost achieving the treaty, the Nisga’a found themselves being criticized for not being modern enough. Implicit in the canonical narrative of moderniza- tion is evolution up and away from social groupings and relationships built around kin, custom, or tribe toward au- tonomy, individualism, and relationships based on modern legal forms, of which contract is preeminent (Coombe 1998; Perry 1995:561; Turner 1993). Senator Grafstein’s reference to “tribal systems” and his urging of the Nisga’a to go that “next step” suggest these distinctions. In this trajectory, the modern citizen emerges as “an abstract political subject no longer formally confined by the particularities of birth, eth- nicity or gender” (Turner 1990:194). Attachments based on blood, language, or religion are to be replaced by an enlight- enment model of modern political participation based “on the idea of an educated, post-ethnic, calculating individual, subsisting on the workings of the free market and partici- pating in a genuine civil society” (Appadurai 1996:142–143).

This placement of the Nisga’a on the margins of moder- nity is not new but, rather, has long been made in con- junction with the criteria of citizenship and belonging for Nisga’a and other First Nations in Canada. Indeed, it has corresponded with the state’s previous exclusion of abo- riginal people from citizenship. The Senate debate was an- other instance in the long conversation about Nisga’a peo- ple’s suitability as Canadian citizens. It took the form it did because, in their defense of ancestral membership criteria, the Nisga’a suggest that they have not given up the kinds of tribal affiliations that originally marked them as not mod- ern, not yet ready for Canadian citizenship and in need of

American Ethnologist � Volume 36 Number 1 February 2009

assimilation. Although the federal government has repudi- ated its former policy of assimilation, there remains an ex- pectation that, to be a citizen, one must be recognizably “modern” in the sense of understanding the importance of equality, the rule of law, and upholding the values of democratic society (Ignatieff 1995:55). While Nisga’a defend their right to control their citizenship criteria as an empow- ering act of self-government, they insist on enacting self- government in ways that complicate the presumed asso- ciation between evolved, democratic forms of governance and the universality in rights that is supposed to replace particularism (Ignatieff 1995; Young 1995). For their polit- ical opponents, this casts doubt on their capacity for self- government and the suitability of the form of citizenship they seek within Canada.

Citizenship and self-government

During the committee hearings, one senator asked if the Nisga’a had a word for citizen that could be used instead of the symbolically loaded English one. She speculated that, if there was such a word, there also must be a set of rights and responsibilities that flowed from it.23 In response, the presi- dent of the Nisga’a Tribal Council said,

It is important for the committee and the rest of the honorable senators who are not present to recognize very clearly that every citizen of our nation today be- longs to one of the four major crests that we hold. There is no Nisga’a today that is born who does not belong to one of these four groupings of clans. Everyone fits into our structure. There is no individual standing off to one side who has nowhere to go. You belong. You are born into a lineage. You are born into our nation.24

The president did not give an answer about indi- vidual rights but about belonging tied to kinship and birth. All Nisga’a are members of one of four exoga- mous pdeek, also called “tribes,” including Ganada (Raven– Frog), Laxgibuu (Wolf–Bear), Gisk’aast (Killerwhale–Owl), and Laxsgiik (Eagle–Beaver). The pdeek are identified by their two major crests and constitute the four corner posts of the Nisga’a nation. Each one is composed of matri- lineally defined huwilp, or houses. Members of a pdeek are descended from a common ancestor but cannot trace their descent to one woman; members of a wilp, however, can. A wilp is named after its highest-ranking sim’oogit, or hereditary chief. Children belong to the wilp of their mother and have access to territories, known as ango’oskws, through this matrilineal affiliation. They also have rights to ango’oskws through their father, who belongs to a different wilp and pdeek. A person’s father’s wilp is that person’s wilk- silaks. People in the same wilksilaks perform specific ser- vices for one another throughout life and make important

contributions to feasts at one another’s marriage and death. In the past, if someone wanted to pass through or hunt, fish, or collect berries on the ango’oskw of another wilp, that per- son had to ask permission of the sim’oogit. If the person did not and was caught, he or she could be killed or taken into slavery. This seldom happened because people were, on the whole, taught to respect the laws governing trespass and ac- cess to territories. People who had no relatives and did not know their origins were way’aayin, meaning “not whole” or “not healed,” because they had no one to look after them.

In her analysis of cultural citizenship, Aiwha Ong asks “if a minority group can escape the cultural inscription of state power and other forms of regulation that define modes of belonging within states” (1996:738). Ong theorizes cul- tural citizenship as a disciplinary process that involves mak- ing people into particular kinds of subjects within nation- states. Others have formulated cultural citizenship as the attempt by minorities to bring their cultural difference into their participation in mainstream society and institutions (Rosaldo 1994, 1997). Nisga’a have resisted much of the in- dividualizing thrust of state assimilation policies and invest their citizenship in the Nisga’a nation, and, therefore, their citizenship in Canada, with social content that has long been considered inimical to the attributes of modern citi- zenship. Although they have been subjected to disciplinary intervention on the part of state and church, they continue to value forms of personhood that emphasize kin-based so- cial obligations and collective responsibilities. Nisga’a dis- tinguish this collectivism from the individualism of non- Nisga’a, describing the white world, in particular, as cold and lacking support. “It’s harder to be a white person,” one man said to me. “The support is not there.” He explained how, for him,

ultimately what it comes down to is, I’m not by myself. I saw this especially when my uncle died. There was a lot of fear when he passed away, because all his re- sponsibilities were ours now. . . . But when I went to our tribal feast and I saw the strength of our house, I knew I wasn’t by myself. Halfway through, I knew it was going to be okay. We had lost a significant member but what he taught us was there.

After the Senate debate was over, I attended a stone- moving feast in New Aiyansh. Traditionally, a stone-moving feast is held one year after a person’s death. It marks the movement of the headstone from display in front of the house of a relative to the actual gravesite. It is also usually the time when the deceased’s Nisga’a name is passed on to a successor. High-ranking names are the property of the wilp and are linked with rights to territory as well as crests, songs, and dances. The host wilp, in this case, the wilksi- laks of the person taking on the name, conducts a range

Differentiating indigenous citizenship � American Ethnologist

of business during the feast, including giving other names, settling financial accounts, and, occasionally, performing a cultural adoption, known as a “taking in.” At the feast I at- tended, elders from the hosting wilp called a white man who worked for the Nisga’a Tribal Council to the front of the hall to take him into their wilp and pdeek. When I asked a se- nior woman about the procedure and its significance, she said the person being taken in really wanted to be involved in the community and that, to do so, he had to become part of the tribal system. Once this happens, she explained, “you are part of an extended family. You have obligations to them and share the good times and the sad times. You have to be there for the feasts, doing your part.” People who have been taken in and failed in their obligations can be publicly censured, and Nisga’a complained that many nonaborigi- nal people do not understand how hard it is to fulfill the du- ties of this particular kind of citizenship.

At the same time that Nisga’a conduct lives that are framed by the obligations that kinship and marriage pro- duce within and across huwilp and pdeek, they often talk about what they have lost as a result of state- and church- sponsored attempts to assimilate them. In so doing, they critically reflect on their production as unfit citizens, ac- cording to both their standards and those of the dominant society, by the state apparatuses that have regulated their lives. When Nisga’a talked about their parents’ and grand- parents’ generations, they described lives of hard work, so- cial responsibility, and interdependence within the frame- work of the wilp and pdeek and linked this way of life with their former practice of self-government. They complained that the younger generations have become too dependent on government assistance. Most blamed the Indian Act, which dates to 1876, and the introduction of welfare in the 1950s for their loss of self-reliance, self-government, and in- terdependence, saying that, when welfare was brought in, the elders warned them that people would forget how to work. People reserved their most contemptuous comments for the Indian Act, describing it as suffocating, oppressive, destructive, archaic, and regressive and as something that restricted their movement and prescribed what they had to do on a daily, monthly, and yearly basis. “Over time,” one woman said, “we became helpless,” so that “when the treaty came about and the reality was there for us to be self- governing, lo and behold, our people are a dependent peo- ple.” She and others spoke of being stuck in an Indian Act mentality and of needing to deprogram themselves so they could become “healthy, thinking people” again.

This talk of dependency is significant because depen- dency is generally cast as antithetical to the responsibili- ties of citizenship in capitalist societies (Fraser and Gor- don 1997). Those who make claims on the state are judged negatively in relation to those who manage to pull them- selves up by their bootstraps. This is not new, but in the current ascendancy of neoliberalism, good citizenship is in-

creasingly defined as the duty of individuals “to reduce their burden on society,” to maximize their individual capital and be “entrepreneurs of themselves” (Ong 1996:739). How- ever, although Nisga’a’s commentary on their loss of self- reliance brings them into proximity with neoliberal norms of citizenship—standards by which they have been and continue to be adversely judged—they are not just recapitu- lating a neoliberal rationality in their self-critique. They are commenting on the dilemmas facing them in light of their disciplining out of interdependence and into dependency and on the desirability of the market-oriented, individual- istic subjectivity that continues to have disciplinary force, ideologically as well structurally. Nisga’a want to generate wealth on their lands and reduce the economic impover- ishment in their communities at the same time that they challenge the norms of wealth and poverty that are domi- nant in nonaboriginal society, and they worry about what kind of cultural compromises they will have to make given that they are surrounded by nonaboriginal society and in- stitutions. Why, Nisga’a have recently asked me, do we con- tinue to be measured by an external yardstick? The treaty has brought them into discussion not only about eligibil- ity for citizenship but also about what their internal norms of citizenship behavior should be; these debates take place around issues such as whether to move into a system of fee-simple property ownership in their villages, how non- Nisga’a should behave to be taken in, and how to stimulate economic development. At issue is the extent to which, at the point of achieving aboriginal self-government, Nisga’a are required to govern themselves in the neoliberal sense of being self-regulating, self-disciplining individuals.

Conclusion

The Nisga’a’s pursuit of differentiated citizenship has im- portant implications for the study of citizenship as a place from which to claim rights, responsibilities, and identities in liberal democracies. This is because Nisga’a have experi- enced both coercive exclusion and coercive inclusion in and around the category of “citizen” and because of their politi- cal objectives. In Canada, aboriginal people were denied the civil, political, and social rights of other Canadians because they were seen as insufficiently civilized, and governments and churches worked to transform them into the kind of in- dividuals who could become citizens. Their contemporary struggles to assert citizenship in their indigenous nations and to define if and how to be citizens of the states they live in are inseparable from these histories. That aboriginal peo- ple assert rights to self-government and self-determination makes their legal and political goals distinct from those of other minorities. It also makes their claims more challeng- ing to states, heightening what is at stake in the reconfigu- ration of the rights, identities, and governing authority con- nected with citizenship.

American Ethnologist � Volume 36 Number 1 February 2009

At the Senate hearings, one Nisga’a negotiator said, “The word citizen does not have a single fixed meaning in every context in which it is properly used.”25 Stuart Hall and David Held make a similar point when they write that citizenship, “like all key contested political concepts of our time . . . can be appropriated within very different political discourses and articulated to very different polit- ical positions” (1989:174). Nisga’a have insisted that they are citizens of Canada through their citizenship in the Nisga’a nation, using the words citizen and nation purpose- fully to signal that they are not just one more element in Canada’s multicultural mosaic. Although they have strug- gled for cultural citizenship as the right to be culturally dif- ferent while belonging to Canadian society (Rosaldo 1994), they have also insisted on a legally differentiated citizen- ship on the basis of their inherent rights as aboriginal peo- ple (Young 1995). Nisga’a have used “citizen” and “nation” as tools of identity and struggle in ways that have chal- lenged the normative force of these concepts; they have also disrupted the relationship between citizenship, nation- hood, and sovereignty. They have done this without link- ing either citizenship or nationhood to sovereignty in its strongest sense, and it is clear that Nisga’a faced consider- able limitations in this regard. The treaty detaches Nisga’a nationhood from sovereignty but it also means that Cana- dian sovereignty is not linked, monolithically, to an undif- ferentiated citizenry, because Nisga’a bring their rights as Nisga’a citizens into their rights as Canadian citizens.

It is in the interest of aboriginal people to explore all possible reconfigurations of sovereignty and the spaces within it. Nisga’a have created a novel political space within Canada. In the nature of its jurisdiction and source of au- thority, it is unlike a municipal, provincial, or federal order of government. Their government is distinct and changes the relationship they have with the Canadian state, and Nisga’a welcome their transition from being an Indian Act band to a nation with governmental decision-making abil- ities that do not require oversight from the Department of Indian Affairs. They rightly celebrate autonomy and self- government but are faced with the difficulty of what that can and should look like now that the treaty is in place. They do this while elements of citizenship, sovereignty, and identity are disarticulated and recombined in multiple con- texts around the globe. What it is to be self-governing cit- izens of the Nisga’a nation will emerge in ongoing contes- tation and struggle as Nisga’a live the rights the treaty now protects.

Notes

Acknowledgments. I would like to thank Wilp Wilxo′oskwhl Nisga’a and members of Nisga’a Lisims Government for their as- sistance, without which this article would not have been possible. I

also thank the many people involved with or affected by the treaty who shared their time and knowledge with me. I am particularly grateful to Jane Collier, Gaston Gordillo, and the two anonymous reviewers for American Ethnologist for comments and insights that helped me improve this article, and to Andrew Martindale for his generous assistance with mapmaking. I would also like to thank Don Donham and the editorial staff at American Ethnol- ogist for their assistance and accessibility throughout this pro- cess. I presented an earlier version of this material at a session of the 2006 American Anthropological Association meetings in San Jose, California, and thank Jennifer Chertow, Timothy Choy, Brian Daniels, Greg Feldman, and Nicholas Hultin for their contributions to that panel. Portions of the research for this article were funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Mellon Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford Uni- versity, and the University of British Columbia Humanities and So- cial Sciences Fund.

1. This includes 1,930 square kilometers of former provincial land and 62 square kilometers of former Indian reserve land.

2. For the full text of the treaty, see Canada, British Columbia, Nisga’a Nation 1998. This is the 250-page document that was a common sight during my research and that I have relied on here. An electronic version of the treaty is also available at Indian and Northern Affairs Canada 2004.

3. Senate, Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on Abo- riginal Peoples (hereafter, Senate, Proceedings), 36th Parliament, 2nd Session, Issue 3, 16 February 2000.

4. Senate, Proceedings, 36th Parliament, 2nd Session, Issue 3, 16 February 2000.

5. Senate, Proceedings, 36th Parliament, 2nd Session, Issue 4, 22 February 2000.

6. Senate, Proceedings, 36th Parliament, 2nd Session, Issue 4, 22 February 2000.

7. Senate, Proceedings, 36th Parliament, 2nd Session, Issue 4, 22 February 2000.

8. This does not mean that Nisga’a citizenship can only be expe- rienced on treaty lands. See Ramirez 2007 for a discussion of how Native Americans remain connected to tribal homelands while liv- ing away.

9. Senate, Proceedings, 36th Parliament, 2nd Session, Issue 3, 16 February 2000.

10. Senate, Debates, 36th Parliament, 2nd Session, Vol. 138, 5 April 2000.

11. Senate, Debates, 36th Parliament, 2nd Session, Vol. 138, 10 February 2000.

12. Senate, Proceedings, 36th Parliament, 2nd Session, Issue 6, 21 March 2000.

13. Senate, Proceedings, 36th Parliament, 2nd Session, Issue 4, 23 February 2000.

14. Senate, Proceedings, 36th Parliament, 2nd Session, Issue 4, 22 February 2000.

15. Senate, Proceedings, 36th Parliament, 2nd Session, Issue 3, 16 February 2000.

16. Senate, Proceedings, 36th Parliament, 2nd Session, Issue 4, 22 February 2000.

17. Senate, Proceedings, 36th Parliament, 2nd Session, Issue 3, 16 February 2000.

18. Senate, Proceedings, 36th Parliament, 2nd Session, Issue 7, 23 March 2000.

19. Senate, Debates, 36th Parliament, 2nd Session, Vol. 138, 6 April 2000.

20. Senate, Proceedings, 36th Parliament, 2nd Session, Issue 4, 22 February 2000.

Differentiating indigenous citizenship � American Ethnologist

21. Senate, Proceedings, 36th Parliament, 2nd Session, Issue 7, 23 March 2000.

22. Senate, Proceedings, 36th Parliament, 2nd Session, Issue 6, 21 March 2000.

23. There is no direct translation for citizen. A Nisga’a language teacher suggested that hli gadihl Nisga’a—meaning “the people of the Nisga’a,” or “the Nisga’a people”—might work, but she could not think of anything “that says citizen.” She said, in the past, what people were called depended on where they lived on the Nass River.

24. Senate, Proceedings, 36th Parliament, 2nd Session, Issue 4, 22 February 2000.

25. Senate, Proceedings, 36th Parliament, 2nd Session, Issue 4, 22 February 2000.

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accepted July 22, 2008 final version submitted August 5, 2008

Carole Blackburn Department of Anthropology Department of Sociology University of British Columbia 6303 NW Marine Drive Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1

[email protected]