Part V: The Global North (North America and Europe)
Part V: The Global North (North America and Europe)
PROFILE: Indian Rights for Indian Women: Kathleen Steinhauer, an Indigenous Activist in Canada
Sarah Quick
Kathleen Steinhauer (1932–2012) was a woman who bridged many worlds, many identities. She identified as First Nations and as Métis; while some assumed she was white. When I knew her she never wore pants, always skirts or dresses; and when she danced her traditional-style jigging in outdoor competitions, she would often wear a signature hat—daintily bobbing in time with the fiddle while her feet executed the steps with precision. She was also an activist but one who worked behind the scenes, collaborating with her more vocal friends on First Nations policy in Canada. It is important to note that after 1985 and Canada’s constitutional reforms, three umbrella groups were recognized as “Aboriginal” or Indigenous—Inuit, First Nations, and Métis. Those who had previously been recognized as Indians via treaty and the Indian Act are now known as First Nations. Métis has complex and contested meanings. It may refer to an affiliation with the Métis Nation that has a specific cultural history stemming from the Red River region of Manitoba or to a broader understanding of individuals and groups with mixed European and Indigenous ancestry. In Kathleen’s case, she is Cree (First Nations) and white through her parents, but she also identified with the Métis Nation culturally speaking.
See: Kathleen Steinhauer Red River Jigging at the John Arcand Fiddle Fest in Saskatchewan, Canada, https://youtu.be/qqlNZAVhJ9A.
Kathleen initially grew up on Saddle Lake reserve, a Cree First Nations reserve in eastern Alberta, Canada. She then attended a Protestant residential school, the Edmonton Indian Residential School, from age five to eight. Here she and the other children regularly received corporal punishment, especially if they spoke Cree (see Steinhauer and Carlson 2013 for more details). A more positive story from her residential school years was when Kathleen recalled in an interview I conducted with her how she and other girls would secretly dance in the basement through a warning system they developed: one girl would watch and listen near the door, another at the landing to the upstairs, and another at the top of the stairs down to the basement. These girls were not completely passive in how they survived the residential school system. Once her mother realized that the school was mistreating Kathleen and her sisters, she began to homeschool them. Other First Nations and Métis children did not have this luxury, but she had some leeway, since her mother was white and adamant about the conditions there (Steinhauer and Carlson 2013, 16).
Kathleen continued her schooling by training as a nurse. After she had been a nurse for a number of years, she married her second husband in 1965. With this marriage, she lost her treaty rights because her husband was a “non-status Indian.” She, along with many other First Nation