Aboriginal Rights -- Treat Rights What is the difference between Aboriginal Rights and Treaty Rights?

According to Module 7 ("Aboriginal and First Nations Peoples and Social Policy") Aboriginal Peoples stood in the way of Canada's nation building strategy. The Indian Act of 1876 basically was intended to try to assimilate Aboriginal Peoples into the social and political culture of Canada. There was no doubt about the skills of the Aboriginal Peoples, and there was little doubt that they were "sovereign peoples" that had their own laws, but they were not seeing "Aboriginal rights" from the Indian Act of 1876.

In fact since the act "marginalized large segments of Aboriginal societies from each other," and from the greater non-Aboriginal society, this act took rights away from them. The Act was in effect a kind of cultural racism, taking away self-determination and other rights.

Aboriginal rights are "inherent rights," that is the rights they had prior to European colonial powers came to Canada and usurped those inherent rights from the native (First Peoples). Aboriginal rights are those rights that gave the Aboriginal groups the right to their own form of governing their culture, and their own self-determination,...

Those dramatic differences in culture caused the Caucasians from Europe to see the Aboriginal peoples as unworthy of respect (Voyageur, et al., 137).
Moreover, because the "Euro-Canadians viewed Aboriginal people as having neither legal nor moral claim to the land" -- the very land that the Aboriginal peoples had lived on and cultivated and were provided subsistence by -- the colonialists used their corrupt view of the law to justify their "taking of Indian land" (Voyageur, 138). Treaty "rights" really boiled down to taking away and Aboriginal rights of First Nation peoples, who "…increasingly [are coming] under the control of the state and its institutions" (Voyageur, 156).

The key difference between a Eurocentric view of the family and an Aboriginal one is that…