Mary Two-Axe Earley was born in 1911 on the Kahnawake reserve in Quebec. She was a Mohawk and Oneida women’s rights activist.
She was denied critical rights under the Indian Act at an intersection of gender and race when she married a non-status man thereby losing her Indian status: she took on the monolith of colonialism and mobilized for change.
From 1876 to 2019, the Indian Act’s status provisions discriminated on the basis of sex, denying First Nations women and their descendants’ status in circumstances where First Nations men and their descendants were entitled to status. Prior to 1985, section 12(1)(b) of the Act operated to strip Indigenous women of their “Indian Status”, the term for registration under the Act, and barred them from passing on their status to their children if they married a man who was non-status. The section also meant that an Indigenous woman who sought a divorce from her status husband would have their status revoked.
Two-Axe Earley worked tirelessly for decades to bring about a change which would stop tying the status of Indian women to their husbands.
Finally, in 1985 the federal government responded to the numerous and ongoing calls for change and passed Bill C-31 to amend the Indian Act. The bill made various changes to the Act, and specifically reinstated status to women who had previously lost their status through marriage to non-Indigenous people. It also gave status to the children of women who regained status under the Act.
Two-Axe Earley continued her work for the remainder of her life, and was a widely celebrated activist, speaker and leader. She died in 1996.