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For most of his life, Stéphane Descheneaux didn’t know what to call himself.

Was he a white man, an aboriginal or was he Métis?

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In the eyes of the law, Descheneaux didn’t have enough aboriginal ancestry to be considered a status Indian — a title that comes with land and treaty rights. And yet some of his relatives, people who shared the exact same lineage as Descheneaux, were members of the Odanak First Nation — an Abénaki reserve just south of Sorel.

“It was baffling, I lived in this weird grey area, never really knowing where I belonged in the scheme of things,” he told the Montreal Gazette. “It’s tough to wrap your mind around it.”

The Indian Act had punished his grandmother, an Abénaki from Odanak, for marrying a non-aboriginal over 60 years ago. Under Section 12 of the law, enacted in 1951, interracial marriage was grounds for losing status and being forced to leave the reserve. Descheneaux’s mother met the same fate when she married a white man in the 1960s.