Red Ticket Women

• In Event: Indigenous Political Thought and Pluralism

Abstract

Between 1876 and 1951, an Indian woman who married a non-status man in Canada lost her Indian status and could commute her financial connection with her community. If she did not commute her interest, she could continue to collect these monies indefinitely. Her name would remain on band lists, but she had no other rights as an Indian. During the 30s and 40s, such people were called Red Ticket Women, after the colour of the special treaty card issued to them. This categorization has been an enduring, even if shifting, one. In later years, Indigenous women in similar positions came to be known as “exited Indian women,” and even after many had their Indian status re-instated in 1985, they became known as “Bill C-31 women.” In this paper, I explore the figure of the Red Ticket Woman as the origin of this popular representation of Indigenous women.
The figure of the Red Ticket Woman elides dominant representations of the colonial subject and legible forms of decolonial political resistance. Nevertheless, she has shaped how we come to know and understand Indigenous women’s political interventions over time. It is from here that we begin to see a lineage of accusations levied against Indigenous women who engage in political activity that defies the forms of political action sanctioned by male-dominated Indigenous organizations. Indeed, as Carlson and Steinhauer wrote in Disinherited Generations, Indigenous women activists from this time period were “insulted, ridiculed, and humiliated.” They were called “Squaw Libbers” and intimidated with beatings and threats that they and their families would be shot if they tried coming back to their reserves” (2013: xv).
Dominant analyses of Indigenous women’s political activity, from this period in time, have a tendency to either subsume interventions of Indigenous women within the movements of collective Indigenous political formations on the one hand, or to situate them as forms of internal opposition or external co-optation on the other. Such assessments tend to focus on the techniques of resistance that Indigenous women were employing or on the perceived object of their critiques. These tendencies are a consequence of traditional orientations to the study of Indigenous political mobilization in Canada, which locate Indigenous political actors within narratives of rights and resistance and relegate Indigenous peoples to dichotomous frames of collective versus individual rights, and/or essentialism versus anti-essentialism. However, such debates and analytical frames have obscured our ability to recognize and appreciate the full character and extent of their political interventions.
Indigenous women’s activism from this period merits further interrogation because, even when given scholarly attention, the full extent of their interventions remain underappreciated and insufficiently analyzed. As those who found themselves on the periphery of their communities and of broad structures of representation, and whose political actions took place outside of these realms, Indigenous women’s activism defies simplistic narratives of Indigenous political advocacy. By revisiting their actions in a way that hones in on, rather than glossing over, the messiness of the conflict between Indigenous men and women, we stand to gain greater understanding of the complexity and plurality of Indigenous women’s interventions and, broadly speaking, of their political lives and visions.

Author

• Gina Starblanket, University of Calgary