Dec. 29, 2017
Sandra Lovelace Nicholas takes First Nations women’s injustice to the United Nations. Sandra Lovelace Nicholas was born on April 15, 1948, a Maliseet from the Tobique Nation in New Brunswick. When she married a white man, she lost her Indian status in the eyes of Canadian law, as per the Indian Act. That meant she and her children were denied housing, education and other benefits from her own band. Worse, even after she was divorced, she was not able to regain her Indian status. Two other women, Yvonne Bedard and Jeannette Lavell, had previously fought this unjust law and lost at the Supreme Court of Canada, so Lovelace Nicholas avoided that route. Instead, she took her case directly to the United Nations Human Rights Commission. There, on December 29, 1977, she declared that the Indian Act was violating women aboriginals’ rights under the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Four years later, the UN agreed, but it took several more years of debate and lobbying before the persistence of Lovelace Nicholas and other First Nations women paid off. In 1985, the federal government reinstated the rights of First Nations women and their children. For her work, Lovelace Nicholas was awarded the Order of Canada, then appointed to the Senate on September 21, 2005 by Prime Minister Paul Martin.
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