Description
In Men, Masculinity and the Indian Act, Martin Cannon, Onyota’a:ka (Oneida Nation) Turtle Clan, is about the inter-relationship between sexism and racialization. This book focuses on the impact of the Indian Act on the divisibility of Indigenous women into either/or ‘women’ or ‘Indians’. It also focuses on the collectivity of “Indians” in this Act, which affects men, women, two-spirit, transgendered or gay people. Men, Masculinity and the Indian Act notes that sexism is safeguarded in patriarchy, which invaded Indigenous nations during colonization. This is turn unbalanced and transformed the many inherently egalitarian nations' gender relations. This new relationship is characterized by male dominance in family, cultural and political life. Heteropatriarchy, which imposes European patriarchy rooted in religiously authorized ethnocentrism and monotheistic exclusivism normalizes heterosexuality, a mode of gender oppression. Heteropatriarchy informed the establishment of the Indian Act erasing nation-based gender understandings, sexuality, identity and ancestry and transplanting a western perspective on a woman’s race being federally recognized based on the man they married. Bill C-31 ushered in divisive debates in Indigenous communities about identity, authenticity and belonging for Indigenous women and men and also individual and collective rights. Although Bill C-31 appeared progressive it also brought into question special status citizenship rights to education, health, social services and land, protected under the Indian Act. Martin Cannon discusses the Haudenosaunee matrilineal culture of the kinship organization of grandmothers and mothers through both the Creation story and the Great Law of Peace, the Kayaneren’kowa and the Peacemaker’s message in the establishment of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy but also of the twinship of men and women in the gendering of Haudenosaunee culture. The Indian Act, court cases of sexism and racialized injustice (1969-1973), individual versus collective rights (1985-1999), sexism and Indigenous sovereignty (2007-2009) provide an outline of this book. The conclusion is followed by notes to the pages, references, and an index. Martin J. Cannon is a member of Six Nations of the Grand River, and associate professor in the Department of Social Justice Education at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and an adjunct professor of sociology at the University of Saskatchewan.