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8 - Indigenous women and self-determination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2009

Karen Knop
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Summary

In Sandra Lovelace v. Canada, an indigenous woman successfully challenged the provision of the Canadian Indian Act that deprived her of her status as an Indian because she had married a non-Indian man, but would not have done so had it been an Indian man who married a non-Indian woman. This 1981 decision by the United Nations Human Rights Committee is often cited as pitting the equal rights of women against the right of self-determination of peoples, whether defined in terms of culture (the group's right to apply its traditional membership rules) or autonomy (the group's right to set the rules). For those who side with the equal rights of women, the Indian Act raises the same issue as the collective option in the 1919 peace treaties and the underlying principle of dependent nationality of married women: a woman's right to choose her membership in the self – state, nation, people, minority – on the same basis as a man. And, indeed, the Indian Act followed the principle of dependent nationality consistently. Not only did it deprive an Indian woman who married a non-Indian man of her Indian status, it granted Indian status to a non-Indian woman who married an Indian man. From this perspective, Sandra Lovelace simply brought the campaign for women's equal rights, begun by white women in the civilized world and promoted by them elsewhere, to her own primitive community.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2002

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