Women want to change Indian Act

Indian Affairs Minister Robert Nault has the support of one segment of the aboriginal population on his side in his effort to rewrite the Indian Act native women.

In Montreal on Friday to report on the results of 400 consultation meetings in native communities, Nault said he was told many aboriginal women despise the 125-year-old law.

They blame the law for imposing a sexist, patriarchal form of government on their communities.

"For example, matrimonial property rights," said Terry Brown, speaker of the Native Women's Association of Canada, "the woman doesn't have any under the Indian Act, so that when there's a family breakdown the woman is the one to leave."

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The NWAC represents women on and off reserves. Brown says the Indian Act perpetuates a system that's so male-dominated that 72 per cent of aboriginal woman choose not to live on a reserve.

Nault has vowed to rewrite the act, and says women will have to have a central role in doing it.

The Indian Affairs Department is facing more than 200 court cases challenging one or another part of the Indian Act, and most of them from women, he said.

"We need to understand the importance of a minister of the Crown having a piece of legislation that is being contested in the courts daily because of its ineptness," he said.

But while Nault describes the act as archaic, his efforts to have it replaced have been opposed by the Assembly of First Nations.

At the annual meeting of the AFN chiefs last July in Halifax, the AFN leaders demanded to be able to set their own process for changing the act.