Enough is Enough: Social Justice for First Nations Women

Caroline Ennis

I don't have a formal presentation and I am not a speaker, and I want to warn that English is not my first language, Maliseet is my first language - so I don't speak like an academic. I don't speak to a lot of groups, I used to years ago when we were lobbying to change the Indian Act, but I don't anymore. What I was asked to speak on was connecting this new program in criminology at St. Thomas University to what has happened to First Nations women in years past. So what I thought I would do is sort of talk about what started the whole process in the first place and why we walked to Ottawa to change the Indian Act.

First of all, I do think that the things that have happened to Indian people are criminal and I think it started from the beginning. The State committed its first criminal act against Aboriginal people from day one. The last speaker that we heard from this morning talked about corporations breaking the law - corporations can only break the law because governments allow them to do that. I think it is the government itself that created the problems that we still experience today, especially in terms of the Indian Act. When they were debating the Indian Act and trying to enact the Indian Act, the parliamentarians of that time actually said that the intent of it was to make Indians disappear, which is genocide! But we are so polite that most of us won't say that it is genocide, but that is what it is because the intention was for us to disappear. Which is why non-native women were given Indian status and Indian women lost theirs. It is because the Indian woman is the one who has the language, who has the culture and she is the one who is going to pass these things on to her children. If that is lost then Indian populations are going to be lost eventually if most of us didn't marry within our own tribes. For me that was really a crime, and it was allowed to happen because the Canadian people allowed it to happen. Even today, like what is happening in Nova Scotia, those kind of things shouldn't be allowed to happen because it is affecting everybody, is affecting you and we are all responsible for the earth and none of us are doing anything. We can sit in conferences like this and talk about all the pollution that is happening and what the corporations are doing to the earth, but very few of us, and me included, do anything about it. Most of us don't even try to recycle or do things that are possible within our own lives. So in terms of connecting it to crimes, I think this was the major crime of the century - enacting the Indian Act was done intentionally to make the Indian people disappear from Canadian society.

I want to give you a sort of idea of what it was like on the reserve previous to all the things that went on, like the walk to Ottawa and the UN complaint. At the time I was a student here at St. Thomas, so I was not living on the reserve because we had an apartment here in Fredericton. My children were small plus I was trying to carry 5 subjects and on weekends I was going home to help with whatever was going on, and sometimes in the middle of the night they would call and say "oh they are coming to burn us out", and I would have to wake my two small children up and put them in the car and rush up to the reserve. Usually by the time we got up there they had settled the problem, but it was all very extreme.

The thing that started it off - there was an older lady whose daughter was being kicked out of her home for the second or third time, because the Indian Act specifically said that the home belonged to the man and they were doing this. As a result, Indian women were having to live in basements or one was living out in the park in a shack that was meant for water, there were some living in trailers and they were really crowded. So this woman, and Eva Sualis and her niece Glenna Perley (who really was the person that came up with a lot of the ideas in this struggle) had gone to the courts. She was married with five children and I think the courts allotted her a dollar per year, even though her husband was an elected counsellor and getting paid for that plus he had a job. The court gave her a dollar a year, or something ridicules like that. The federal human rights commission had just been set up around the same time that we were occupying the Band office, and we went to them and they said "sorry, but the Indian Act is exempted from the human rights act". I didn't know what that made us if we were exempted from the human rights act. We had gone to the Chief-in -Council many times to try and set up meetings. We couldn't even call and he would hang up on them, and if they went to the Band Office itself they would just ignore the women or walk out. So one day they just had it up to here - that is why this book is called Enough is Enough. Glenna and Eva Saulis decided to stay right there until the elected council was going to start listening to them. The council gave them some promises and the women left the first time, but the second time they actually organized and they went from house to house and said "we are going to occupy the band office and we want people to join us", and that time they got a whole bunch of people and they stayed that time and it went on and on. But I am getting ahead of myself.

For years and years on my reserve, women who were alone had a really hard time, and my mother was one of them - she was my motivation. When I got involved with this a lot of people assumed I was married to a non-Indian because I was so involved with this, but that was not my motivation. My motivation was watching my mother go through this discrimination and I have always associated the Indian Act with that discrimination because our elected leaders would say to us "you know, the Indian Act says this is the way it should be and so it has got to be correct, it is the law of Canada". When my mother was bringing us up, there were five of us. In the winter time even though the Indian agent received money for the reserve, he wouldn't allow us to have any wood to heat the house, so we had to resort to actually going to the convent where the nuns were. At night when they were at church we would take our sleds and go there and get enough wood to last us one day. Towards the end of that winter the Chief and the Indian agent said that they were going to hire somebody to put the wood in the cellar so we couldn't get it - and that is what happened. I remember my brother and I, it was probably around 8:00 p.m., going out in the woods to saw wood. That is how we managed that winter and after that my mother moved away from the reserve. It was that thing that motivated me to fight against this discrimination. The only reason she was discriminated against was because she was a woman and she didn't have a man. And then it started happening to people in other generations. I lived with a woman who was the next generation whose husband had left her and they did the same thing to her - and the it started happening to Glenna's generation and my generation, and that is why I got involved because I saw a pattern of discrimination, and to me it was the spirit of the Indian Act at work in our community.

We worked 10 years to change the Indian Act, and at first it had nothing to do with restoring status, it had more to do with accountability on the reserve because at the time the Chief and his family - there were maybe 5 of them - who were working at the band office. There was no such thing as accountability, he could tell people whatever he wanted to. When we started lobbying we tried to get Indian Affairs to get them to account for some of the money and provide housing for women, but Indian Affairs would just say that it was an internal matter and that they couldn't get involved - which is why we went to the human rights commission and all these other agencies.

When Glenna came up with the idea for the walk that was the only thing left for us to do, there was nothing else that we had not already tried. I was really naive. I had no idea what it took to organize something like that. It is fortunate that I enjoyed organizing stuff otherwise I probably would have said "no way". My husband at the time was working at the human rights commission and he talked to Noël Kinsella, and he allowed us to use the telephones at the New Brunswick Human Rights Commission so that we could generate support - because we didn't have any funding at all. So I went to work at the Human Rights Commission and I was there day after day for a solid month trying to get the issue of the walk into the newspapers, and finally I connected up with people like Ann Crocker, Status of Women and they started helping.

Through all the years of lobbying the only church that really helped us was the United Church. For example, when we walked from Oka to Ottawa, we asked Catholic churches along the way to see if the women could sleep in the basement after we had walked a certain distance, and they all said "No". But the United Church provided funding for us and they did numerous fund-raising efforts, and the Status of Women - federal and provincial - they both helped. It was mostly women that were helping us, and we specifically asked only for women and children to walk because the RCMP is so paranoid about Indians that we didn't want Indian men being beat up or for them to do something just because they were walking with us. We figured there was not too much they could do to women and children. I went to the RCMP headquarters in Ottawa and I asked for an RCMP from home to come and walk with us because I knew he would help, plus I knew they were watching us. At first the RCMP refused but the police officer did show up and help us out. So it really was a lot of work. If I had known it I don't think I would have done it. For about a year after the walk I couldn't do anything, I was just totally exhausted. I remember when we got to Ottawa I was doing all the things I had to do, but there was this "Caroline" up above me watching me going through the motions - maybe that is a nervous breakdown. I don't know what it was but I was watching myself doing all these things and listening to all these speakers, and everyone was so emotional they were all crying, and me, I did not feel a thing. I couldn't feel happy, I couldn't feel sad - nothing. I just knew that I had to take it easy after that, so I did not do anything for a whole year - I just rested.

It took a long time after the walk to change the Indian Act. Sandra went to the United Nations, and I don't know how many times we thought it was going to pass and then it wouldn't. Then Joe Clark, who was in the government then said he was going to change the Indian Act, and then his government fell. We were all sitting in the living room crying when his government fell, not because of the government but now the Indian Act was not going to be changed again. So those are some of the things that Aboriginal women have to contend with.

It is not as bad now. For example, if a woman is having a really hard time on the reserve and a bunch of women, not just the Tobique women, but a bunch of women go as a collective to the Chief-In-Council and say "this is not right and we want you to change it", they will generally do it" - at least on our reserve. We also don't abuse it. We are trying to encourage the younger ones to get involved in it and we are trying to stay out of it deliberately. Plus some of the people have died - Eva Saulis, Glenna and my two aunts were killed, and those people were all a part of the walk. So it has changed quite a bit, but the Indian Act is still exempted from the human rights act, and I don't think that in a country like Canada that is held up as a model around the world it should be that way - I don't think people know that the Indian Act is exempted from the human rights act. Once when Gordon Fairweather (past chairperson of the Canadian Human Rights Commission) was talking here at the university we went out and picketed him, but it is actually the government. It is the same thing with accountability. When we walked at that time, we walked because of the lack of accountability, and that lack of accountability is still there today. This lack of accountability goes right back to what the government has done to us Aboriginal peoples. That system that they set up is not our system. If our own systems of government were in place, the abuses that are taking place now wouldn't be taking place, and they wouldn't have taken place back then.

I suppose to some extent you can blame the Chief-in-Council today, but it is really the government that is at fault because they created the system and now that it is all screwed up they want us to straighten it out. The only way I can see it going back to the way it should be is to go back to our own ways, which is previous to the Indian Act. We had our own laws, we had constitutions, we had a system of government that was there and operating perfectly well - and to me this is the only way to settle the problems we have now. To a certain extent that has happened with the Indians at Restigouche. They have a Micmac Grand Council and they are operating under the old ways and not under the Indian Act ways. They still have the elected government but they also have the traditional government and the two sort of balance each other out. I think this is really needed because of the problems that we are having.

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© 2007 Atlantic Human Rights Centre, St. Thomas University