Times & Transcript (Moncton)
Thu 17 Apr 2008
Page: D6
Ginette Petitpas-Taylor Woman’s view

Sharon McIvor of British Columbia is carrying a torch lit many years ago by Aboriginal women of Tobique — giant killers all. Early next month, Sharon will be in Tobique and will meet some of those women.

Canada took notice that hot summer of 1979 when the women of Tobique organized to obtain Indian rights for Indian women. The week-long walk by Tobique women and children from Oka to Ottawa attracted lots of
attention.

The national media was eventually following their every step. Politicians who had initially refused their requests for a meeting in Ottawa, suddenly had aides hand-delivering acceptance letters to the marchers on the trail. The walk — one of several actions of the Tobique women — brought the plight of Indian women to the national consciousness, if not conscience.

They wanted respect, starting with equal right to housing on reserve land and an end to the sexist provisions of the Indian Act. When they got to meet with Prime Minister Joe Clark, they insisted that his wife Maureen McTeer be there “because we knew she supported women’s rights,” recalls Caroline Ennis, one of the leaders.

A few months later, another of the Tobique women, Sandra Lovelace (now Senator Sandra Lovelace Nicholas) appeared before a United Nations committee and ultimately convinced them to find Canada in breach of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. By 1985 — the federal government still moved slowly because the male leadership within First Nations communities was opposed to the changes — the Indian Act was finally amended.

Aboriginal women who marry a non-Aboriginal no longer lose their status. Nor do their children. And an Aboriginal man no longer gives status to a non- Aboriginal wife.

Indian status is important because it means being able to live on reserve land and qualify for health benefits and post-secondary education. To many, it also means a connection to a community and identity as an Aboriginal person.

Women celebrated those amendments — Bill C-31 — even though they knew they were flawed. Bill C-31 did not require that the government provide extra land and money to accommodate the women and children who would regain their Indian status.

Furthermore, while the Indian status of women who had “married out” and that of children born of these unions was recognized, full Indian status was reserved only for those who trace their ancestry along the male line.

Band membership was separated from Indian status. First Nations bands were given the power to deny membership to reinstated women and their children — a crafty “compromise.” The federal government through the Indian Act continued to decide who qualifies as “Indian” but First Nations, already surviving on thin resources, were made to look like villains for refusing band membership to newly reinstated status individuals. Today, the majority of reinstated or “C-31 Indians” live off reserve.

Nevertheless, Bill C-31 was seen as a step forward and the Tobique women are credited with some of that victory.

After the 1985 amendment, that feisty New Brunswick group was showcased in books and documentaries.

Meanwhile, in 1985, British Columbia law student Sharon McIvor was applying to regain her status — one of over 100,000 people who eventually applied. McIvor, as the daughter of a status Indian woman and a non-status Indian man, could be recognized as a Status Indian, but her children could not. If, instead, Sharon’s father had been status and her mother non-status, she and her children would have had status.

McIvor — now a lawyer and a professor of Aboriginal Law in British Columbia — will be in Fredericton on May 6 to give a free lunch presentation about her latest and spectacular win. Later, she will participate in a day-long forum at Tobique First Nations where she will meet some of those walkers from 1979.

In McIvor versus Canada, “an unprecedented constitutional case”, the British Columbia Supreme Court said the 1985 amendments did not get it right; rather than eliminating sex discrimination, they postponed it for a couple of generations. The court ruled the amendments contravene international conventions on human rights, women’s rights and children’s rights as well as the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. By drawing a distinction between male and female ancestors in determining who is a status Indian, the amendments offend the basic notion of human dignity, and imply that “one’s female ancestors are deficient or less Indian than their male contemporaries.”

If the government of 1985 did not do right by Aboriginal women, the current federal government has done no better. According to the B.C. Supreme Court, the Canadian government used every possible tactic to delay Sharon McIvor’s case getting into court for 17 years, and so the court refused the government’s request to be given two years to find a remedy.

At the last moment, on the day McIvor’s case finally went to court, the government reversed itself and recognized McIvor’s son’s Indian status. The tactic did not work. McIvor pressed on for the sake of all the other descendants of Aboriginal women.

The government is now appealing McIvor’s win, in a case she says they know they won’t win.

In another move, the federal government eliminated the Court Challenges Program that had covered some of McIvor’s costs (the same program that got the Marie-Claire Paulin case before the Supreme Court and won more rights for New Brunswickers last week). So Sharon McIvor has to raise funds and do a lot of the work herself to get her case to the higher courts.

It is what First Nations mothers are having to do to give their children their birthright.

Ginette Petitpas-Taylor, of Moncton, is Chairperson of the New Brunswick Advisory Council on the Status of Women. Her column on women’s issues appears in the Times & Transcript every Thursday. She may be reached