In her article, “Colonialism and the Struggle for Liberation: The Experience of Maliseet Women”, Andrea Bear Nicholas tried to show that colonialism led to a profound change in the social structure of the Maliseet people. The author discussed the colonialization process and its effect on the status of native peoples through the lens of the confessions of a Jesuit priest who was involved in the attempt to convert and civilize the Innu people in the 17th century, a people whose culture is extremely close to the Maliseet culture. The author tried to show that the women’s subordination in the Maliseet structure was a result of colonialism, and consequently, their struggle to regain their traditional rights must be integrated into the larger struggle for the rights of the Native peoples. In this article, Bear Nicholas (1994) thoroughly addressed a very sensitive everyday phenomenon, the discrimination of native women by their own people and shows that this is not a traditional phenomenon in the Maliseet community but rather, this is one of the outcomes of European colonialization and began being implemented by means of the Indian Act.
In the article, the author reviewed the confessions of Jesuit priest Paul Lejeune, in whose confession the author found a description of Europeans’ colonialization strategies. First, Bear Nicholas (1994) showed that, before the arrival of the Europeans, the Maliseet people lived in egalitarian communities in which men and women participated together in the decision-making process, and leadership status was temporary and based on momentary needs. The equal status of men and women in the Maliseet society previously to European arrival is proved by the lack of gender in the Maliseet language, by the bilateral recognition of ancestral lineage which means that both maternal and paternal lineages are equally important, and by the fact that a new couple could live either with the woman’s family, or with the man’s.
The struggle of the Native women for their rights represents an everyday phenomenon which is integrated both in the larger sphere of women’s rights, and in that of Native people’s rights. Bear Nicholas (1994) showed in her article that the Indian Act represented a very discriminatory piece of legislation because it stipulated, among others, that the Native women would lose their Indian status if they married White men. Women’s protests and their long struggle to regain their rights within the community is integrated into the larger feminist struggle because the subordination of Native women in their communities is modeled upon the European patriarchal system, whose values were forcefully implemented in the Native social structures for centuries. However, it is also integrated into the broader struggle of the Native people to regain their right of self-determination and their autonomy, since the return to the traditional way of life of the natives would also lead to the return to an egalitarian system. The Indian Act was amended in 1985 by the Bill C-31 which recognized the Indian Status of women who married non-status men. However, as Bear Nicholas (1994) showed, this act, although meant to correct an injustice, was wrongly implemented in a forced way by the government.
This way, nothing important was achieved for the higher purpose of the Native women’s struggle, because the government continues to interfere in the problems of the Native people, and because their interference resulted into another forced imposition from a higher authority. The maintenance of a hierarchical system continues to feed the discrimination which Native women experience every day. This phenomenon will be extremely difficult to reverse because, as the author showed, the native communities have been extremely influenced by the culture of the dominant group, and changing this mentality again, and bringing it back to the earlier egalitarian form is extremely difficult. This is particularly true because the mirage of wealth and prosperity promised by the entrepreneurial world attracts the Native people and determines them to adopt an individualist, and exploitative attitude, which stands opposed to their cooperative, respectful and sharing culture (Bear Nicholas 1994).
Therefore, as shown above, the above article allows an insight into an everyday phenomenon which affects the lives of Native women, namely, the discrimination they face not only into the wider society, but also, within their own communities. The author argued that in order to regain the respect and equality status they once enjoyed in their communities, Maliseet women need to integrate their struggle into a wider struggle for the restoration of the community consensus decision-making traditions, and collective responsibility.
References
Bear Nicholas, A. (1994). Colonialism and the struggle for liberation: the experience of Maliseet women. University of New Brunswick Law Journal 43, pp.223-239.
