Belonging. Identity. Who do you think you are? Who do they say you are? For thousands of indigenous Canadians, it's complicated. Records have been obscured or obliterated through hundreds of years of assimilation. The federal government — from bureaucrats to Indian agents — made these decisions based on the political mandates of the day. First Nations have made their decisions. So have individuals. In this occasional series, The Status Card, Tanya Talaga, the Star's indigenous affairs reporter, will look at the complexities and who is making these decisions and how.

CORNER BROOK, N.L.—Retired master corporal Matthew Connolly has spread his prized spiritual possessions on his dining room table.

He carefully touches each as he explains its significance. He starts with a beautifully carved drumstick made from the wood of an old sweat lodge. Then he unrolls the red leather case that holds his eagle feather, given for service to the community. He moves to a hand-held drum, then a smudge kit, then a satchel of tobacco.

From his wallet, he retrieves a small, laminated white card to show the words “Teluisi Kelusit Paqtism” — Speaking Wolf, Connolly’s Mi’kmaq name. He grew up proud knowing he is a direct descendant of Mattie Mitchell, the revered trader and explorer who is recognized as a founding father of the Mi’kmaq in western Newfoundland, likely arriving here in the 1700s from Cape Breton.

Connolly, 57, may believe he is indigenous but the government of Canada does not. Connolly was one of 82,630 people who received a letter dated Jan. 31, 2017, from Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, denying his application for membership in the Qalipu Mi’kmaq First Nation, a landless band headquartered in Corner Brook, Newfoundland.

His rejection came at the end of an unprecedented enrolment drive that saw 101,000 claiming Mi’kmaq ancestry and applying to join the Qalipu, a band made up of nearly a dozen Newfoundland indigenous communities. Applicants were judged on a points system developed by six government representatives and six from the Federation of Newfoundland Indians (FNI) to assess how Mi’kmaq someone is.

Thirteen points grants membership. Points were given to those who live in one of Newfoundland’s 66 Mi’kmaq communities, and to those who could prove they were culturally involved with the Mi’kmaq before June 2008, when the federal government officially recognized the Qalipu. Points were also given if applicants could produce affidavits that they had engaged in activities such as hunting and powwows, and if they had airline receipts to show frequent visits to Mi’kmaq areas.

But how and why points were given to some but not others has caused endless confusion and can border on the absurd. In many families, some siblings were accepted and others rejected. In the case of twin toddlers, one gained membership and the other did not. The first president of the Federation of Newfoundland Indians was rejected and so was a recent Indspire Awards recipient. Indspire Awards are handed out only to indigenous people.

The 100,000 applicants came from across Canada and beyond — from Hong Kong, California and Australia — all claiming Mi’kmaq ancestry. But Ottawa and the Qalipu band council agreed “it was neither reasonable nor credible” to expect that all of them would become members of the First Nation, “particularly given that approximately two-thirds of the applicants did not reside in any of the Mi’kmaq communities targeted for recognition in this initiative,” Qalipu’s website states.

Connolly’s rejection was blunt: “You did not meet the requirements for acceptance by the Mi’kmaq group of Indians of Newfoundland.”

He only received three points. This stunned Connolly, who has a home in Corner Brook, has participated in cultural events and powwows and has worked for the Qalipu band. He believes multiple mistakes were made when his application was assessed and is “emotionally devastated.”

“I have been Mi’kmaq all my life. This blows me away,” says Connolly, whose rejection means his Indian Status card — assigned by the government identifying him as an indigenous Canadian entitled to benefits such as free prescription drugs and tax exemptions — will be suddenly void once the Qalipu membership list becomes official in 2018.

“Talk about making you feel as if you are nothing,” says Connolly, who worked in Canada’s army, navy and air force, finishing his career as an instructor on safety training. “It makes you feel useless. Mattie Mitchell was my fourth great-grandfather. I have every piece of document I needed.”

Connolly’s cousin is the current chief of the Qalipu First Nation, Brendan Mitchell, who was accepted. However, some of Mitchell’s siblings and Connolly’s siblings were not.

All Connolly can do now is appeal and wait for Ottawa to decide if he is indigenous, regardless of what his heart says.

The Mi’kmaq fight for recognition began in 1949 when Newfoundland and Labrador joined Confederation and Premier Joey Smallwood famously pronounced that there were “no Indians on the island of Newfoundland.”

That proclamation, however wrong, meant the Mi’kmaq were automatically excluded from the Indian Act — legislation from 1876 that governs indigenous life, including the criteria for who belongs and who does not.

The Indian Act does not have a point system to determine who is indigenous and who isn’t — that is unique to the Qalipu process. Section 6 of the Indian Act determines who is a Status Indian, registered on the government’s list of indigenous people.

However, the act is a flawed, paternalistic piece of legislation. It allows the government to decide indigenous ancestry, and the act decreed that status was handed down through the male line only. It wasn’t until a court challenge that this was changed in 1985, but many indigenous women are still fighting to gain official status.

A slight, friendly man with a sharp nose and dark eyes, Brendan Mitchell, 62, thinks this enrolment drive is “disgusting.” He has spent years trying to get the indigenous and northern affairs ministry, now led by Carolyn Bennett, to stop this poorly understood point formula . His community is being torn apart — pitting brother against sister, husband against wife, neighbour against neighbour.

“Is this what they mean by truth and reconciliation?” Mitchell asks.

Corner Brook is an anglo-dominated village, dotted with brightly coloured homes hidden behind snow banks that often reach one storey high in the winter. The local Tim Hortons is always packed, and a Japanese restaurant offers cod tempura. Corner Brook’s winding, hilly roads fall under the shadow of the Corner Brook Pulp and Paper Mill, one of the largest employers in this town of 20,000.

For hundreds of years, Newfoundlanders kept their indigenous heritage hidden. But even so, Smallwood’s pronouncement fell like a blanket across the island, suppressing the Mi’kmaq culture, beliefs and traditions even though there is evidence that indigenous people have been on the island since the 1600s. Often families just didn’t talk about it.

One municipal worker says she was stunned when her application was accepted — she had no idea she was indigenous until she stumbled upon her family’s history. “My grandfather never even knew about it,” says the woman, who refused to identify herself because members of her family were rejected and are appealing. “They hid it because of racism. But we were suspicious. He knew his plants, his prayers and it was his looks and the way he did things,” she says.

Connolly says “racism wasn’t a word we used growing up.” He hid his identity from his classmates. “Everything was clique-y — the Indians lived on one side of town, the Catholics on the other. But if you said you are Indian, you’d get beat up in the schoolyard,” he says.

But there were indigenous communities all over the island, especially on the west coast — in Stephenville, St. George’s, Flat Bay, Deer Lake and Conne River. In 1973, the communities united to form the Federation of Newfoundland Indians, headed by John Oliver and then Calvin White, to fight for recognition, as without it they were not part of the Indian Act, they held no treaty land and received no special benefits as other Status Indians do.

In 1984, Ottawa gave status to all the members of Miawpukek First Nation, a community along the Conne River in southern Newfoundland, the first — and until the Qalipu, the only — Newfoundland nation recognized.

In 1989, the federation took the government to court seeking eligibility under the Indian Act. In 2008, an agreement created a landless band, which after a contest, took the name Qalipu (Mi’kmaq for caribou). During an enrolment process, 23,877 applicants were accepted as members.

Between Nov. 30, 2009, and Sept. 22, 2011, 4,000 more applications were received. But then unpredictably, in the 14 months before the deadline of Nov. 30, 2012, applications surged by another 70,000 applications as word got out about an enrolment drive, according to government records.

Something wasn’t right. In 2013, the Qalipu and the government signed a supplemental deal to reassess every person who had been accepted or who wanted to be.

A committee was made up of equal representatives from the federation and the ministry. It established the points system. Applicants had four years to assemble their paperwork and the deadline was June 30, 2016.

Once again, more than 100,000 applied. (Everyone who applied before had to reapply.)

Mitchell knows there are those who want to get something for nothing, people who have applied but don’t have a trace of Mi’kmaq blood.

“One woman stopped me at a restaurant where I was having dinner with my wife,” he says. “She told me that she applied. I was surprised and said, ‘I didn’t know you had indigenous blood.’ She said she didn’t. But she wanted the tax breaks.”

On Jan. 31, 2017, the letters went out: 18,044 members had been accepted, 68,134 were rejected and 3,984 applications were deemed invalid. Among the rejections were 10,512 Qalipu members who did not meet the minimum points. Like Connolly, they will lose their Status Indian cards in 2018 when the final membership list is presented to Parliament.

“I begged (Indigenous Affairs) Minister Bennett not to do this,” says Mitchell. “These people have had their cards for five years and they’ll lose them.”

The biggest reason for rejection is the failure to live in a Mi’kmaq community, explained Fred Caron, the ministerial special adviser at Indigenous and Northern Affairs who is handling the membership drive.

“You need to have a strong cultural connection,” Caron said in a teleconference call with reporters after the rejection letters were sent. “The high threshold will likely be difficult to meet if they don’t live in the community.”

Rejection letters, like the one Connolly received, outline each decision and include how the enrolment committee allocated the points in each individual case. In Connolly’s case, he received 0 points for “frequent visit to members of a location of the Mi’kmaq Group of Indians of Newfoundland” (worth up to four points depending on strength of evidence and the frequency of the visits).

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Only rejected applicants who received an appeal notice along with their Jan. 31 letter are invited to appeal. The appeals have to be mailed in by March 31 and will be heard by “a legal team of appeals masters” before a decision is sent out, the Qalipu website says.

No other Indian Act nation stipulates that members must live in the community or face losing their status. People move, says Mitchell, whose brother, a lawyer in Halifax, was rejected, along with his sister in Toronto.

Calvin White is an elder of the Flat Bay band, which is based about an hour’s drive southwest of Corner Brook. Flat Bay is a fishing community of 314 on the windy Atlantic shore. Every person who lives in Flat Bay is indigenous but their community is not classified as a reserve.

“I don’t think there is another aboriginal community anywhere in this country that has the unique structure that Flat Bay has,” White says. “We are not a municipality. We incorporated as a band council. We do not receive any core funding from any level of government, either provincially or federally, yet we are the only government in this community. We are a true Indian self-government.”

When White and John Oliver began the Federation of Newfoundland Indians, he never expected it would end like this. About 500 Flat Bay members “live away,” he says, mostly young people who moved for school or careers. Most received rejection letters.

“Those are the people we are really concerned about,” White says. “We are totally opposed to the idiotic point system. That is not how you define a person’s heritage, lifestyle or who they are.

“All of those people who are away are mostly people who are under 50,” he says. “The band was a promoter of that. We didn’t have any economic opportunity in our community. We have no land claim to pursue economic development.

“School is where you need to be. You can’t fight the battle with ignorance, without knowledge. But to punish those people and tell them they are no longer Indians because they don’t live in Flat Bay — that is a crime.”

Flat Bay has produced medical professionals, lawyers, RCMP officers, teachers. White raised six children. His daughter Judy White is a lawyer and the CEO of the Assembly of First Nations. Three of Calvin White’s sons were rejected, but Judy was not. They all live away.

Also rejected was John Oliver, the first president of the Federation of Newfoundland Indians. Oliver is retired and lives in Okanagan Valley in B.C., to be close to his grandson, who has special needs, but he calls White every month. “He is a founding member, a man who contributed,” White says. “He was the president of the federation and he was denied.”

Up the jagged coast of the Appalachian Mountains lies the picturesque, tiny community of St. George’s, a former French fishery village famous for its blueberries. The Mi’kmaq here can be traced back nearly four centuries.

Here, Odelle Pike waits patiently for mail.

“I haven’t got my letter. My children have,” Pike says. “They kept their status. But my sisters, their kids, they’ve lost it.”

Pike and six of her siblings were at a former Anglican church that is now a Mi’kmaq community centre, preparing for a bingo fundraiser.

Off the top, she couldn’t recall how many of her 19 siblings lost their status, except that most of those who had left were rejected.

“My sister Aileen, she just won an Indspire award (for indigenous Canadians who make a difference). She lives in Fort McMurray. She lost her status. Her husband was chief of the Indian Crossing First Nation near Stephenville, New Brunswick, from 1990 to 1998, and he lost his status,” she says. “My other sister who works for aboriginal justice in Ontario, she lost her status. I have oodles of nieces and nephews who lost status. Really, there is no rhyme or reason.”

Pike is president of the Newfoundland Aboriginal Women’s Network, involved in working to prevent violence against women, and raising awareness. The group was working flat out to get St. George’s women’s applications in before the deadline.

“We have a high illiteracy rate here,” she says. “People didn’t understand what was going on, how to fill the forms out.

“There is so much upheaval in our communities now. I can’t explain it. It is like somebody died. Where do we go from here? The federal government is breaking all the rules. There are human rights — people are allowed to move. Nowhere else in Canada do you go through this process. The Qalipu are still being discriminated against.”

How can two people in the same family receive opposite decisions?

Newfoundland-born Jerry Le Roux, who moved to Ontario, filled out identical applications for himself, his son and twin daughters, VOCM reported. Le Roux told the radio station his son was rejected with 11 points. One twin was accepted with 13; the other twin struck out with six.

Right now 10,000 people from Corner Brook are members of Qalipu, noted Kelly Anne Butler, the aboriginal affairs officer and aboriginal adjunct professor at Memorial University’s Grenfell campus.

Before the 2008 agreement, Corner Brook did not have the high percentages of people identifying themselves as Mi’kmaq like in other communities such as Flat Bay or Conne River.

“But in Corner Brook, there was an explosion of numbers, of people who weren’t members of the (Federation of Newfoundland Indians) but then applied to Qalipu,” she says. “They have legitimate ancestry but I don’t know if all of them would say, ‘I’m a Mi’kmaq person’ but that they are of Mi’kmaq ancestry. You have longtime members and you have people who either didn’t have an interest before or who didn’t know and started doing research, then joined the band.”

That 100,000 applied doesn’t shock Butler.

“This is an island. Everyone is related to everyone. I totally believe 100,000 have the ancestry. How close it is to them is another story.”

The Joseph Boyden identity controversy hasn’t done them any favours, she adds. Boyden, the celebrated Canadian novelist who has told stories rooted in indigenous life and claims he has indigenous roots, was the subject of an Aboriginal Peoples Television Network investigation in December. The story maintained Boyden’s indigenous ancestry was overblown.

“We, as a group of applicants, have been challenged so much over the last decade,” Butler says. “So when the APTN piece came out, at first, I felt really bad for him. But then it kept getting worse and worse and now I think he is part of the reason why we are being challenged.

“When you have this large group of newly acknowledged ancestry, those are the ones everyone focuses on and so we all get called ‘wannabes,’ ‘pretendians’ or ‘Air Miles Indians,’ all sorts of negative things. No one deserves that — even the people who are just finding out about their heritage,” she says.

“And now, 10,512 of them are getting it taken away. Maybe if we could go back in time we could say they shouldn’t have got it in the first place but I’m not going to say that. But it’s been years now and now the government is taking it away. That is cultural trauma. Their identity is being taken away.”