Mary Two-Axe Earley
Lost her Indian status for marrying a white man and spent thirty years getting the law changed
Mary Two-Axe was born on the Kahnawake Mohawk reserve near Montreal. Her mother, a nurse, died when she was ten, and she was raised partly by her grandparents. At eighteen she went to New York, where many Kahnawake men worked as ironworkers, and in 1938 she married Edward Earley, an Irish-American electrical engineer. Under the Indian Act, that marriage ended her legal existence as an Indian. She could no longer own property on the reserve, vote in band elections, or be buried in its cemetery. A Mohawk man who married a white woman kept all of those rights and passed them to his wife.
For years she accepted it. What changed her mind, she said, was the death of a friend in the same position, who had been ordered to leave her house on the reserve and died soon afterwards of the strain. In 1966 she sent a brief to the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, and in 1967 she founded a group called Equal Rights for Indian Women, travelling the country to find and organise women who had been quietly cut off.
The response from many band councils, which stood to lose members and land, was hostile. In 1975, while she was in Mexico City at the United Nations women's conference, the Kahnawake council served her with an eviction notice. She announced it from the platform, and the publicity forced the council to back down.
The law was finally amended in 1985. That June, at 73, she was the first woman to have her status restored. She died in Kahnawake in 1996 and was buried there.