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With Indian Act, Nadia Myre examines the recognition of Native identity in Canada. With the help of over 200 friends, colleagues and strangers, Myre covered the 56 pages of the federal government’s Indian Act with glass beads. In its original wording this document (which would eventually be amended by Bill C-31 in 1985) ran counter to the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and allowed a whole segment of Canadian society to be governed by measures characterized by discrimination and exclusion. The beading technique employed by the artist to blur the meaning of this text foregrounds an ancestral skill as a subversive technique used to cancel out the statute and reframe Native identity. On a symbolic level, the work has made it possible for certain participants who only recently reacquired their Indian status through the amendments to the Act to take back a past that had been lost to them.