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- The pass system (1885–1951) was a Canadian federal government Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) segregationist policy, first initiated on a significant scale in the region that became the three prairie provinces in the wake of the 1885 North-West Rebellion—as part of a series of highly restrictive measures—to confine Indigenous people to Indian reserves—newly-established through the numbered treaties. The "Indian pass system"—introduced as a temporary emergency measure to quell First Nations resistance—was formalized and became permanent under successive federal governments. In archived correspondence between the three federal officials who were the "most prominent in the development and implementation of Indian policy" in the 1880s and 1890s—John A. Macdonald (1815–1891), Edgar Dewdney (1835–1916), and Hayter Reed (1849–1936), it was evident that they were all cognizant of the lack of a legal basis for the pass system, and that it did not respect treaty agreements. The pass system, according to a University of Calgary history professor, Sarah Cooper, "was never a law; it was never codified in the Indian Act, and it can only be described as a 'policy.'" The pass system remained in place until the 1940s— and allegedly in some cases, into the 1950s—to segregate Indigenous peoples in the prairies from the tens of thousands of newly-arrived immigrants and settlers who were claiming fertile prairie farming lands as part of the federal policy of promoting massive agricultural production. The pass system was mainly implemented in Alberta and other regions in the western prairies, in Treaty 4, Treaty 6, and Treaty 7 areas. Federal officials rationalized that "Indians had to be kept separate from the rest of society for their own good, as contact tended to be injurious to them," according to Sarah Carter, a history professor at the University of Calgary. The pass system was enforced by the Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) through an amendment to the Indian Act which granted local Indian Agents the powers of a Justice of the Peace. Through their judicial power over almost every aspect of First Nations' lives, the local agents could enforce the pass system arbitrarily. Under the pretext of criminal code vagrancy laws and loitering provisions of the Indian Act, they authorized North-West Mounted Police (NWMP) officers to detain Indigenous people who were off reserve without the required document signed by either an agent or one of the instructors of the agricultural programs. Most detainees would be returned to their reserves; punishment for leaving the reserve without a pass could include imprisonment. A July 11, 1941 letter from the federal government instructed all local Indian agents to submit all passes to Ottawa to be destroyed and to phase out the system. The 2015 report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) investigation described the policies of the pass system, the Indian reserve system, the Indian residential school system as "aggressive assimilation". (en)
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