Debating Indigenous Women’s Citizenship Status in Canada

• In Event: Confronting Patriarchy in Government Institutions and Policies

Abstract

How should liberal democracies act in response to minority cultural practices, such as polygamy, which conflict with women's rights? This common question wrongly assumes that conflicts exist and that liberal democracies can solve them. Instead, through a cross-regional comparison of three dissimilar policy debates in Canada, South Africa and Europe, my book project finds that contending policy actors forged a variety of relations between multiculturalism and women’s rights and that policy actors debated these relations rather than solved conflicts. I therefore ask: how and why did policy actors create these relations and what were the political effects of debating them? To answer these questions, this chapter analyzes the Canadian policy debate over the citizenship status of native women expelled from the tribe for marrying non-native men. I integrate interpretive and post-structural methods to develop a systematic, discursive institutionalist approach essential for comparative analysis. In this chapter, I apply this integrated approach to hundreds of official documents and 50 semi-structured interviews. I explain how parliament forged a policy reforming native women’s citizenship status rooted in a consensus among indigenous women leaders and chiefs that multiculturalism and women’s rights converged. I then investigate how and why the executive branch quashed this policy reform. I argue that the government insisted multiculturalism and women’s rights conflicted to justify its continued domination of indigenous peoples at minimal financial expense while maximizing territorial exploitation. Ultimately, the government signed Bill C-31, which asserts a conflict between multiculturalism and women’s rights. I unpack how defense of this bill and the content of the policy itself produced three negative effects. It fueled cultural chauvinism against native peoples, delegitimized native women as political actors and subordinated multiculturalism and women’s rights to the nation. As is well-established, Canada is a world leader in promoting both multiculturalism and women’s rights. Moreover, all three dissimilar cases in this book project produced similar results. I therefore argue that unless women members of marginalized groups exercise sufficient power to shape policy outcomes that are about them, liberal democracies should not debate relations between multiculturalism and women’s rights. The problem is not a conflict between multiculturalism and women’s rights, but liberal democratic domination of marginalized women.

Author

• Denise Marie Walsh, University of Virginia