Men, Masculinity, and the Indian Act

Canada’s Indian Act is infamously sexist. Many iterations of the legislation conferred a woman’s status rights through marriage, and even once it was amended First Nations women could not necessarily pass their status on to their descendants. What has that injustice meant for First Nations men? Martin J. Cannon challenges a decades-long assumption that the act has affected Indigenous people as either “women” or “Indians” – but not both. He argues that sexism and racialization within the law must instead be understood as interlocking forms of discrimination that disrupt gender complementarity and undercut the identities of Indigenous men through their female forebears.