A/HRC/27/52/Add.2 49. In addition, there have been a number of actions in recent years that have been viewed as affronting the aspired-to partnership relationship between First Nations and the Government. For example, the prioritization of the First Nations Financial Transparency Act, in a context in which indigenous governments are already the most overreporting level of government, has been perceived by First Nations to reinforce a negative stereotype of aboriginal people and governments as incompetent and corrupt, and to undermine rather than promote public support for indigenous self-government. Also, the unilateral changes to contribution agreements in 2013, without consultation regarding the wording and implications of these new agreements, included language which in other circumstances would appear innocuous, but which has been widely interpreted by First Nations to imply that receipt of their necessary operating funds was contingent on providing their consent to unspecified future legislative and regulatory changes. 50. Another example of actions that have strained the relationship between indigenous peoples and the Government is the international border arrangement put in place for the Akwesasne reserve, which spans the border between Canada and the United States of America, after the community objected to border guards carrying firearms on their reserve. Since the border station was moved, Mohawk residents of the reserve travelling entirely within their own territory but across the international boundary are required to leave their reserve and report to border services at the station. Failure to report in this manner may result in onerous fines, confiscation of vehicles and in some cases imprisonment. Mohawk residents perceive this arrangement as a punitive measure in response to the community’s activism. 51. More broadly, indigenous leaders complain that the federal Government frequently uses a discourse of responsibility to Canadian taxpayers for the cost of First Nations treaty benefits, without a corresponding acknowledgement of the vast economic benefits that have accrued to non-indigenous Canadians as a result of the constitutional treaty relationships that provided them with access to the national territory. This discourse places First Nations outside, and in opposition to, “Canadian” interests, rather than understanding indigenous people to be an integral aspect of those interests. 5. Membership 52. A key issue that affects the self-governance capacity of First Nations is the Indian Act definition of who qualifies as a “status” or “registered” Indian. Like other Canadians, First Nations individuals have often built families with partners from different backgrounds. Unlike for other Canadians, however, for many First Nations individuals, doing so carries serious consequences for their children’s ability to stay in their community as adults. This in turn has significant consequences for First Nations’ ability to retain diverse economic skills, since those most likely to “marry out” are those who have lived outside the community to gain education or experience. 53. While the Indian Act permits First Nations the option of making their own membership rules, many benefits follow statutorily defined status under the Indian Act, not membership. They include on-reserve tax exemptions, estate rules, certain payments and post-secondary education support and, perhaps most importantly, federally funded onreserve housing. This makes it difficult in practice for First Nations to enable non-status members to live on reserve, including children who have grown up on reserve and know no other home. 54. Those distinctions, compounded by two levels of status under the Indian Act, have the practical effect of imposing different classes of First Nation citizenship, within a convoluted regulatory matrix, regardless of the criteria or collective decisions of the First Nation. To simplify, under the Indian Act, 6(1) status is accorded to children with two status Indian parents (or to children with a status Indian father and a white mother who 14