"Indian status was and is a fictitious creation"

Strong Women Stories
Gertie Mai Muise- Women rebuilding a non-status Mi'kmaq community
Gertie Mai Muise discusses identity and status in this chapter. She points out the interesting perspective that status strips Mi'kmaq identity. She recalls her assimilation by way of university and the contradiction of limited options post-graduation because of her status and gender. She talks about western values and how they infiltrated her education.
"if I had known how a universtiy education would separate me from my family, I would not have gone, and if my father and family had known what getting an education was and does, they wouldn't have been so insistent on my getting one."
She goes on to describe the education system as aggressive in its imposition of foreign values, and an act of violence against the spirit.
This is very interesting because I had not considered it in this way before. However, after more conscious consideration, I can see how the educational process is instituted by thories revolving around a black and white world concept of dichotomy. It teached systematic structure, right/wrong, pass/fail, ideologies as an approach to the rest of the world. It is functional in its own rite, but it does not leave room for the learning processes and forms of cultures that deal more with the gray than with concrete black and white.
She brings these concepts back to her people regarding the very idea of status.
"In order to prove we are legally Mi'kmaq in the eyes of the Canadian government, we are forced to certify our pedigree to comply with mainstream systems of identification."
She furthers that the whole process is expensive since many must hire genealogists to trace ancestry.
"The process.. has nothing to do with how we traditionally view ourselves"
Getting an education may have saved her from poverty, but it doomed her to a steeping in western identity.