BANTUSTANS

Fighting the native patriarchy (Andrea Mrozek, Western Standard, January 11th, 2006)

Leona Freed's ex-husband physically abused her. But she had three children and stayed with him for about five years before walking out. For many women, finally leaving the abuse marks a new beginning: Assets in family law court are split 50-50, and a judge makes the call on support issues. That wasn't the case for Freed; leaving her ex only sparked bigger problems. Family law didn't apply in Freed's case, and still doesn't for many other women like her, because of where the abuse took place -- on a native reserve called Hollow Water, a couple of hours north of Winnipeg.

Provincial and territorial family laws regarding matrimonial property rights don't hold on native reserves. When the band forbade Freed from taking her children with her when she left (her husband's mother was a band councillor), Freed had to work her way through the courts off-reserve for nine months to win her kids back. The experience heightened her native activism -- though not the sort you're likely to see on the evening news.

That's because Freed isn't fighting for more money for natives, but rather for the basic freedoms the rest of Canadians take for granted: property rights, accountable governance and women's equality.

When she's not at her day job as an aide in a Portage la Prairie, Man., seniors' home, Freed is working for the First Nations Accountability Coalition of Manitoba, which she started out of her home in 1995, and now has 5,000 native and Metis members across Canada. But Freed is ready to give up. The system, she senses, favours those Indian groups that play by Ottawa's rules -- selling out natives as second-class citizens, in exchange for billions in federal handouts.

It is sad such a courageous woman is despairing over the “system”, rather than the chronic racism that leaves the mainstream left no more interested in her plight than they are in the plight of Muslim women.