Gender-Based Violence in the Era of Truth and Reconciliation: Confronting Canada’s Indian Act, 1876 to the Present

Canada’s 1876 Indian Act ushered in patriarchal rule as a means of displacing Indigenous women from both their land and their seats of political power. Of particular interest to this paper, the Indian Act posed a formidable problem of gender bias through what Indigenous studies scholar Audra Simpson has termed the “technique of status,” whereby Native women who married outside of the Indigenous community lost their federal legal standing and rights under the Canadian government as “Status Indians.” In the nearly 150 years since the implementation of this policy, violence against Indigenous women—in the forms of murder, rape, reproductive injustice, disenfranchisement, discrimination, and policing—continues to characterize the settler-colonial relationship between Canada and First Nations.

The United Nations and Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, in their studies of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada, have successfully identified discrimination, such as that carried out by the Indian Act, as a leading indicator of the disproportionate levels of violence against Native women evident today. Within this context, this paper takes up legislative efforts and case law aimed at remedying gender discrimination in the 1876 Indian Act—from Lavell v. Canada (1971), Bédard v. Isaac (1972), and Lovelace v. Canada (1981) to Bill C-31 (1985), Bill C-3 (2010), and Bill S-3 (2017)—all of which have attempted to restore the rights of Indigenous women lost to the Indian Act. I analyze, in particular, the tense interplay between these developments on the federal level and local responses specific to the Mohawk Council of Kahnawá:ke, a tribal nation situated just outside of Montreal. Together, these findings speak to settler colonialism as a driving force behind gender-based violence in Indigenous communities from the nineteenth century onward, and offer critical insight into the role of gender in Canada’s era of Truth and Reconciliation.