2. Women's Perspectives - Christian Aboriginal Infrastructure ...

None of these provisions applied to Indian men. They could not be enfranchised against
their will after 1951 except through a stringent judicial inquiry procedure as prescribed in
the revised Indian Act. This difference in treatment created a huge imbalance between the
number of enfranchised men and the number of involuntarily enfranchised women.
Between 1955 and 1975 (when forced enfranchisement of women stopped), 1,576 men
became enfranchised (along with 1,090 wives and children), while 8,537 women (as well
as 1,974 of their children) were forcibly enfranchised and lost their status. From 1965 to
1975, only five per cent of enfranchisements were voluntary; 95 per cent were
involuntary, and the great majority of these involved women. 35
Post-1951 to pre-1985: Growing awareness, growing tension
Between 1951 and 1985, equality and civil rights movements were a prominent feature of
the socio-political landscape in North America. Aboriginal voices were being raised, and
there was growing awareness of the concerns of Aboriginal people, including the
concerns of Indian women. The governments of the day were making some effort to
consult Aboriginal people about issues affecting them, but there was little change in the
Indian Act until the early 1980s.
The status provisions of the Indian Act and the exclusion of women who married out
were of great concern to the Aboriginal women's groups that sprang up during this
period. In 1970, the Royal Commission on the Status of Women tabled its final report.
The commission was particularly concerned that the "special kind of discrimination under
the terms of the Indian Act….the loss of Indian status, or enfranchisement, implies that
rights and privileges given to a member of a band…will be denied to that
person….Enfranchisement or deletion of the name of an Indian from the Indian Registry
is much more frequent for women than for men". The commission recommended that the
act be amended "to allow an Indian woman upon marriage to a non-Indian to (a) retain
her Indian status and (b) transmit her Indian status to her children". 36
Two important court cases challenged this inequality head on. Jeannette Corbiere Lavell,
an Ojibwa woman and member of the Wikwemikong band on Manitoulin Island in
Ontario, had married a non-Indian in 1970. She was living in Toronto when she brought
the action in 1971, charging that subsection 12(1)(b) violated the equality clause in the
1960 Canadian Bill of Rights on the grounds of discrimination by reason of sex. She lost
her case at trial, the judge taking the position that this was an issue that Indians ought to
resolve for themselves by pressuring Parliament for an amendment to the Indian Act if
they agreed that this was necessary. 37 Lavell later won her case on appeal. 38 However, this
decision was revisited when another case was brought forward by Yvonne Bedard.
Yvonne Bedard, from the Six Nations Reserve in southern Ontario, lost her status when
she married out in 1964. She separated from her husband in 1970 and returned to the
reserve with her two children to live in a house inherited from her mother. In order to live
in her family home, Bedard found she had to obtain band council permission to reside onreserve,
as she was no longer a status Indian and therefore no longer legally entitled to
inherit property on the reserve. Nor were her children. She was given a year to dispose of
30