Can one woman make a difference?
A new senator carries the burden of hope for native women looking for their rights to be protected, enforced and restored

Dianne Rinehart
Special to the Sun

Tuesday, October 11, 2005
http://www.canada.com/vancouver/vancouversun/news/editorial/story.html?id=e3f95e4e-0759-414b-8687-23df26bd0c12

It's been almost 30 years since Sandra Lovelace Nicholas took her case to the United Nations, arguing that Canada's Indian Act violated her human rights by stripping her of her status rights -- including her home on band lands -- because she had married a non-Indian.

On Wednesday, Lovelace Nicholas, a Maliseet from New Brunswick's Tobique Nation, was honoured for her successful fight for native women's rights by being named to the Senate.

But the housing rights she fought for -- not to mention the most basic human rights of safety, education, and health care -- are still being denied to native women across Canada, who, as a result, often end up homeless, impoverished and powerless, making them easy targets for beatings, rapes, abductions -- and murder.

As native women often describe it, they are "the poorest of the poor" in Canada, earning average annual incomes of $13,300 compared with $19,350 for non-native women.

Making them more vulnerable: under the Indian Act they have no legal claim to 50 per cent of the matrimonial property -- unlike every other woman in Canada. Instead, when they and their children flee a violent or unhappy marriage, they not only lose their home to their spouses, but, because of a lack of housing, are frequently forced from the reserves, ending up impoverished in city ghettos where they often eke out an existence by prostituting themselves, ending up as targets for drug pushers and sexual predators.

In fact, native women's organizations estimate that the vast majority of native Indians living impoverished in city ghettos -- an estimated 40 to 50 per cent of natives live off reserve -- are women who have had to leave their band lands to make a living or escape violence. And many of them are the original women who were stripped of their status before Lovelace Nicholas won her case, and have yet to have their homes returned to them by band councils, says Beverley Jacobs, president of the grossly under funded and overworked Native Women's Association of Canada.

Once gone, it is difficult for them to access the $9.1 billion in government funding that goes to native peoples, almost all of which is delivered by band councils who do not share housing, health, education and social welfare funding with band members who live off reserves.

Losing access to their homes -- either because bands have not given them back their former homes or because matrimonial laws do not protect them -- puts native women at physical and financial risk, with criminal results.

According to Amnesty International, Canadian native women between the ages of 25 to 44 are five times more likely than all other women of the same age to die as a result of violence.

And native women cannot count on the police to protect them. Critics say police across the country rarely get excited about missing persons reports about native girls and women, allowing sexual predators to murder with impunity.

About one-third of the 69 missing women in Vancouver, 27 of whose remains are said to have been found on pig farmer Robert Pickton's property, are native women, though aboriginals make up only four per cent of the B.C. population.

Meanwhile, Edmonton police acknowledged this year they too are looking for a serial killer, after 12 prostitutes -- many of whom were aboriginal -- were found killed since 1988, and another 68 remain missing.

The Native Women's Association says there are at least 500 cases of missing or murdered aboriginal women in the last 20 years.

Native women are being targeted because their attackers "know the police won't do anything," says Jacobs. "It's racialized and socialized violence."

It's not like the government doesn't know what is going on. It's aware that many native women stripped of their status have yet to reclaim their homes, while a Senate report called A Hard Bed to Lie In released in 2003 demanded that native women immediately receive matrimonial rights protection in the same way other Canadian women do.

"This is probably the most embarrassing human rights issue in Canada today," says Conservative Indian Affairs critic Jim Prentice. "This government doesn't have the courage or the vision to act."

Still, without resources, native women across the country are fighting for the same rights as other Canadian women -- and the same opportunities.

Among them: Squamish band member Wendy Lockhart Lundberg has been fighting for more than 20 years for her mother to regain her family homes on the Squamish reserve, while her aunt, Mazie Baker, continues to battle for more transparency of the Squamish band's spending.

Lockhart Lundberg is fearful her mother, Nona Lockhart, 80, who lost her status in 1947 when she married a non-native, will die broken hearted, never reclaiming the homes taken away from her -- nor able to access band benefits -- despite repeated presentations to numerous senate committees.

Still, the government continues to ignore the plight of native women, Lockhart Lundberg notes, pointing to the fact that $700-million promised more than a year ago for aboriginal health care has yet to be dispersed.

"All those announcements by the government about new funding going into aboriginal programs is meaningless," she says. Further: "As most programs and services are delivered on reserve by band administrators, women like my Mom [and me] are unable to access those programs, that funding. And even the majority on reserve will not benefit from the additional funding -- it is controlled by the administrators," she says referring to earlier auditor-general reports of a lack of transparency and accounting in band spending.

Lockhart Lundberg's experience is that of thousands of native women across Canada: Is anyone listening?

If not to her, Lockhart Lundberg hopes they will listen to the new senator.

"With her knowledge of the issues and her leadership, I hope that Sandra Lovelace Nicholas will be able to work in the Senate and force the Government of Canada to recognize and exercise its legal and moral duty to protect, enforce, and restore the rights of native women."

Can one woman make a difference? One can only wish Lovelace Nicholas well.

Dianne Rinehart is a former magazine editor and news correspondent in Ottawa, Vancouver and Moscow, and founder of a charity called Give Girls a Chance (www.givegirlsachance.org) that helps educate girls in Third World countries and less fortunate girls in Canada.