A Guest in Her Own House

Mary Two-Axe Earley was born on October 4, 1911, in Kahnawà:ke, a Kanien'kehá:ka (Mohawk) community south of Montreal. At 18, she moved to Brooklyn for work, where she married Edward Earley, an Irish-American electrical engineer. Under section 12(1)(b) of the Indian Act, a status Indian woman who married a non-status man lost her status, while a status man passed his on to his wife and children.

By 1967, she was active with Indian Rights for Indian Women. Widowed in 1969, she returned to the house her grandmother had left her; to stay there, she had to transfer it to her daughter. She would call herself "a guest in my own house." In 1975, at the International Women's Year conference in Mexico City, she learned she had been ordered to leave the reserve within 60 days; the international outcry got the notice withdrawn.

In 1983, at the First Ministers' Conference on Aboriginal Constitutional Matters, she was refused the floor. Quebec Premier René Lévesque then gave her his seat at the table.

On June 28, 1985, Bill C-31 amended the Indian Act. On July 5, in Toronto, she became the first person reinstated under the revised Act. She died in Kahnawà:ke in 1996. In 2025, the Government of Canada designated her a national historic person. Her fight is a reminder that no one undoes an injustice alone: it took allies, a platform, and someone willing to give up a chair.