Canadian Indian Experience of Double Citizenship in 1965
I have reanalysed old data, mostly unpublished, on Canadian Indigenes, partly in order to clarify the structural method, but mostly to attack the question of indigenous identity, with the help of a concept of « double citizenship ». My data indicate that the Sun Danse of the Blood tribe, observed in 1965, inserts catholic and Mormon narrations in the mythology without changing the older Algonquin armature, but its indigenous interpretation and ritualisation expresses the contemporary preoccupations of the Blood tribe very clearly. After adding an analysis of an innovating movement of a community of Manitoban Metis, I offer a concept of the « symbiosis of renunciation » that could lie at the foundation of the vigilant protection of indigenous citizenship ideology absorbing assimilation pressures. Double citizenship, then, is a precarious state whose survival depends on redoubled vigilance.