In 1969 the federal government introduced a white paper with the goal of eliminating native status. According to the white paper, the “policies proposed recognize the simple reality that the separate legal status of Indians and the policies which have flowed from it have kept the Indian people apart from and behind other Canadians. The Indian people have not been full citizens of the communities and provinces in which they live and have not enjoyed the equality and benefits that such participation offers.” As presented by the Minister of Indian Affairs, Jean Chrétien, the proposal would have surrendered federal responsibility for native peoples to the provinces, repealed the Indian Act and transferred control of native lands to native peoples. Drawing from the language of human rights, the proposal would have effectively transferred the basic principles of Western liberalism to aboriginals by placing them on equal footing as other citizens. In doing so, the policy would have ignored more than a century of discrimination and handicaps imposed on native peoples by the Canadian state The policy was so vigorously opposed by a united front of native organizations that it was retracted by the federal government and quietly laid to rest. As Peter Russell has suggested, the human rights approach initiated by the federal government in 1969 was viewed as profoundly assimilationist and a threat to aboriginal collective rights:

Full and equal access for individuals of aboriginal descent to the democratic rights and economic opportunities of the mainstream society- the integrationist approach- was not something to be spurned. This approach, however, held the promise of being part of a postcolonial relationship only if it could be combined with an autonomist approach recognizing the collective right of Aboriginal peoples to survive and develop as distinct, self-governing communities on or in connection with traditional lands and waters...The inadequacy of the liberal, civil-rights approach as the basis for reaching a consensual accommodation with Aboriginal peoples became crystal clear in Canada in 1969. [Source: Peter Russell, “Colonization of Indigenous Peoples: The Movement toward New Relationships,” in Margaret MacMillan and Francine McKenzie, Parties Long Estranged: Canada and Australia in the Twentieth Century, Vancouver: UBC Press, 2003, pp.76-7.]