The Indian act needs to go away, as it's a racist, sexist and discriminatory document with a terrible history of much worse genocidal things, but it needs to be

The Indian act needs to go away, as it's a racist, sexist and discriminatory document with a terrible history of much worse genocidal things, but it needs to be dismantled in a structured way that doesn't also erode the current rights of First Nations. I have no doubt that indigenous persons you've talked to have expressed that the Indian Act needs to be removed and I expect they're speaking to the awful and discriminatory reasons I've mentioned. The big problem is that there's another group of people that will similarly express that the Indian Act needs to be repealed, and that group contains racists and people that don't care at all about First Nations rights. They express a desire to end the Indian Act so that the indigenous persons in this country will lose all rights, will be assimilated, and the Canadian government will then no longer need to spend any more money and time on this issue. While the white paper was from decades ago, the colonial assimilationist sentiment behind it has lingered around. So the statement that the Indian Act needs to be repealed while generally true in a very high level sense, can be an inflammatory statement depending on the context.