Settler violence is gendered: Syndel Thomas Kozar, ‘Erased by Policy: Gendered Policy Violence in The Indian Act and the Dispossession of Indigenous Women and Their Descendants’, Living Histories: A Past Studies Journal, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler violence is gendered: Syndel Thomas Kozar, ‘Erased by Policy: Gendered Policy Violence in The Indian Act and the Dispossession of Indigenous Women and Their Descendants’, Living Histories: A Past Studies Journal, 2025

07Oct25

Excerpt: Canada’s most enduring violence against Indigenous women and their descendants is currently written into Canada’s federal legislation: policies that have long targeted Indigenous women and their descendants with discrimination and erasure. My engagement with this work is rooted in personal experience, and I begin with a brief positionality statement to explain how my own status journey led me to critically examine the Indian Act’s ongoing impacts. From its enactment, the Indian Act has directly targeted Indigenous women and their children with discriminatory, assimilating policies. Despite these policies being acknowledged as discriminatory against Indigenous women and their descendants, Canada has not effectively addressed the systemic inequities to remedy the issue. Parliament first introduced Bill C-31 to rectify the sexual discrimination within the Indian Act, only to create more inequity. After backlash, Canada enacted Bill C-3, which, while granting status to many, continued to enable many of the previous prejudiced policies. Bill S-3 looked promising to remedy the core issues of the sexually discriminatory assimilation policies within the Indian Act, only to be passed without the crucial amendment. The Government of Canada is now enacting a collaborative process to look for further remedies for the inequitable policies, despite already having an effective solution to the remaining inequities with the disregarded amendment of Bill S-3.1 As a result, Indigenous women and their descendants are left to deal with the far-reaching consequences of these policies, including the socioeconomic marginalization and the heightened vulnerability they face in connection with the ongoing crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit individuals. With the current supports like Jordan’s Principle overburdened, Indigenous women and their descendants are left with little to support them in the aftermath of this political violence.2 The Indian Act’s gender-discriminatory policies continue to marginalize Indigenous women and their descendants. These harms are upheld by insufficient legislative reforms and Canada’s failure to implement meaningful change, resulting in lasting systemic inequities, reduced access to essential supports, and increased vulnerability across generations.

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