Sandra Lovelace and Janet Corbière-Lavell
Activists fighting for aboriginal women's rights
Two Aboriginal women became known for their fight against the sex-based discrimination contained in the Indian Act. Sandra Lovelace (left), a Malecite from New Brunswick, lost her Indian status in 1970 after she married a non-Indian. She wouldn’t have lost this status had she been a man who married a non-Indian woman. During the same period, Janet Corbière-Lavell (right), an Ojibway from Ontario who had been in the same situation, made an unsuccessful appeal before the Supreme Court of Canada to have the discriminatory article in the Indian Act invalidated. In a split decision in 1973, the Supreme Court ruled that the Canadian bill of rights did not take precedence over the Indian Act. This defeat and the lack of any further domestic recourse saw Sandra Lovelace take her case to the United Nations Human Rights Committee where she won. In June 1990, in Montréal, the two women received the Robert S. Litvack Human Rights Award.
