Women's Fightback: Canadian First Nations women under threat
Melanie H Morin reports in Niwhts’ide’ni Hibi’it’en (The Ways of Our Ancestors): “In 1897, drunken miners shooting their guns, blowing tinhorns and ringing the church bell broke down the doors of Gitxsan homes looking for women, though reserves were off-limits to Euro-Canadians. The federal Indian Agent — a representative of the Canadian government on First Nations reserves who enforced the racist Indian Act law from the 1830s to the 1960s — had no control over the situation and was told by Gitxsan leaders that ‘protection of the law [seemed] to exist only for the Whites and not for them, and...