The Indian Act is a piece of explicitly racist legislation passed in 1876. It added to the institutionalized racism that is still around today. It was an attempt to amalgamate all previous legislation related to indigenous populations.
What it really did was remove all land rights from indigenous populations and give them to the government, to allocate at their convenience by a government official (ie Indian Affairs Minister). The reserve system came out of this Act, leaving indigenous people as tenants of the government. The Act was also an attempt to assimilate indigenous people through a heavy "civilizing" discourse. Indigenous culture was viewed in this legislation as a stepping stone on the way to the white settler ideal. Legislators expected that indigenous people would eventually become farmers or disappear entirely.
The Act was also effective in stripping any sense of self governance from indigenous people, creating them as wards of the state and gave control to the government as to who qualifies as a "status Indian". Amendments to the Act in 1884 was presented under the guise of giving some power back to local indigenous governments.
Really, the Act continued to try to extinguish important ingenious ceremonies such as the Pot Lache, by banning the practices. Assimilation remained the focus of the Act as it was altered to force all indigenous children to endure the residential school system.
