Item – Theses Canada

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OCLC number
66890584
Link(s) to full text
LAC copy
LAC copy
Author
Cannon, Martin J.
Title
A history of politics and women's status at Six Nations of the Grand River Territory : a study of continuity and social change among the Iroquois.
Degree
Ph. D. -- York University, 2004
Publisher
Ottawa : Library and Archives Canada = Bibliothèque et Archives Canada, [2005]
Description
4 microfiches.
Notes
Includes bibliographical references.
Abstract
This dissertation contributes to the political history of the Six Nations of the Grand River Territory, and to the literature concerning the status of Iroquois (i.e. Haudenosaunee) women. I document the factors responsible for transforming women's status, including: nineteenth-century residential schooling, government policy and colonial interference. These factors led to religious dissimilarities, differences in acculturation and a willingness to experiment with and sometimes reconfigure social and political organization. They also led to the transformation of gender relations, kinship organization, governance and the once esteemed status of Haudenosaunee women. I document some of this historic change in this dissertation. I also illustrate how the history of women's status is one that has resulted from a complex process of intrusion and accommodation that took place historically at Six Nations. More generally, I argue that women's status was indeed transformed--and also maintained--following colonization, and that the decline of traditional governance and women's changing status cannot be understood as separate events in history. I explore the coincident history of both patriarchal and colonial injustices at Six Nations by considering historically significant events in time: the implementation of a band council government in 1924, the Report of Andrew T. Thompson, and histories of racism and sex discrimination in the ' Indian Act'. The 'Indian Act' (R. S. C., 1985) continues to determine matters of governance, citizenship and Indian status at twenty-first century Grand River. I document the way in which it has also defined--and divided--some members of the Grand River Territory. The 'Indian Act' and other institutionalized discrimination continues to structure and transform the Haudenosaunee--including women's status and political history--into the twenty-first century. The research I present here contributes to a much overdue history of politics and women's status at Grand River, and also, to an emerging body of literature that considers the history of colonization and women's history as this concerns all Indigenous peoples.
ISBN
0612991512
9780612991514