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Mary Two-Axe Earley
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Mary
Two-Axe Earley
By Ila and Rhondda
Who was Mary Two-Axe Earley?
Who was she?
Mary was an elder, human rights activist and an advocate for indigenous women and children. She was born on October 4, 1911 and died August 21 1996. Mary Two-Axe Earley was a pioneer and architect of the Canadian women’s movement. Her political activism helped to forge a coalition of allies to challenge Canadian laws that discriminated against Indigenous women. Most of her political advocacy spanned the last three decades of her life, and she was particularly active in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.
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Early life and education
Earl(e)y life
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Education
Mary Two-Axe Earley grew up on the Kahnawà:ke reserve, a farming community near the St. Lawrence River, on Montréal’s south shore. The Kanien’kehá:ka are members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (Six Nations or Iroquois Confederacy).
Childhood
As a child, Two-Axe Earley stayed with her mother, who was an Oneida teacher, healer and nurse, as she cared for vulnerable members of their communities. Tragically, when she was just 10 years old, her mother died of the Spanish flu while attending to sick students in North Dakota.
Later in Life
Cont.
At the age of 18, during a time of limited employment opportunities for people on reserves in Canada, Two-Axe Earley left her ancestral land and migrated to the United States in search of work. She settled in Brooklyn, New York, where a Mohawk community, “Little Caughnawaga,” grew around the steel and iron industries during the boom of the 1920s. It was here that she met and married Edward Earley, an electrical engineer of Irish-American origin. They had two children, Rosemary and Edward Earley.
Activism
Activism: Women’s Rights and Indian Status
Mary Two-Axe Earley spent much of her life fighting against the injustices that the Indian Act created for Status Indian women. An amendment to the Act in 1876 removed land and treaty rights for Status Indian women who “married out” (i.e., married a non-Status Indian man). In 1966, after one of Two-Axe Earley’s Mohawk clan sisters died in her arms of a heart attack, she became vocal about Indigenous women’s rights. She firmly believed that stress was a contributing factor in her friend’s death, since she had been denied property rights in Kahnawà:ke under the Indian Act. Two-Axe Earley mobilized a series of speaking and writing campaigns to raise the profile of abuses faced by women who had been denied status, treaty and property rights under the Indian Act. On July 5 1985, Two-Axe Earley had her status reinstated at a Toronto ceremony with a letter from David Crombie, minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development. At the ceremony, Two-Axe Earley stated, “Now II’ll have legal rights again. After all these years, I’ll be legally entitled to live on the reserve, to own property, die and be buried with my own people.”
Awards + Honors
Awards
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Honors
On 17 October 1979, Mary Two-Axe Earley was recognized for her work with Indian Rights for Indian Women, and received the Governor General’s Persons Case Award for her notable contributions to the advancement of equality and rights for women and girls in Canada. In the 1980s, Two-Axe Earley was celebrated by York University in Toronto with an honorary doctorate of law, made an Officer of the National Order of Québec and in 1985 and issued a National Aboriginal Achievement Award in 1996.