Short Paper:

“The Two Major Living Realities”: Urban Services Needs of First Nations
Women in Canadian Cities
 In “‘The Two Major Living Realities’: Urban Services Needs of First Nations

Women in Canadian Cities,” Evelyn Peters overall essay depicted how First Nations

women used a spatial framework, more precisely, a map of identity and nation; to

describe their needs for services in urban areas of Canada. These First Nation Women

insisted on culturally appropriate services, access to reserve communities and cultures for

urban residents, the importance of aboriginal rights in urban settings, and participation in

First Nations governing structures that crossed boundaries between city and reserve.

To begin, Peters argues that exploring the contemporary geographies of

Aboriginal women helps non-Aboriginal researchers recognize the taken-for-granted

geographic concepts through which they organize their analysis of urban space. In doing

so, by analyzing women as a whole in urban spaces, is ignoring the diversity and

differences of these women. Thus, Peters essay tries to stray from categorizing

Aboriginal women as exotic and different from other women by suggesting that First

Nations women’s needs do overlap with the needs of other women in cities but, First

Nations women have employed differences from non-Aboriginal women insofar as their

struggle against the effects of colonialism. This difference of women’s struggles can be

shown in the title of her article, “Two Major Living Realities” firstly, the reality of being

a First Nation women and secondly, the reality of living in an urban environment.

Nonetheless, in addressing colonialism, Peter’s answers why the majority of

Aboriginal women are living in urban cities, what accounts for these women in the cities

and what are the issues that made them migrate. Firstly, the significance of this change

goes beyond simple population movements. As it developed, colonial ruling labelled

indigenous cultures as incompatible with urban life. At the same time the legislation and

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its administration helped in the eraser of First Nations women’s roles in their

communities. Insofar as their political rights to decision making, their status as an

Aboriginal was dependent on their husbands or fathers, in which ‘marrying out’

accounted for almost all First Nation women to loose their status. Thus, the city has a

particular meaning for Aboriginal women, an importance that points specifically to

gender and cultural origin. As a result indigenous women had to move due to forced

migration because non-status Indians were not allowed to live on reserves; for better job

opportunities, to escape patriarchal structures and so forth. But in doing so, these women

lost access to many of their rights, freedoms, practices and community networks that is

connected to their Aboriginal cultures. These multifaceted geographies of exclusion

provide the basis for First Nations women’s redefinition of the city and an illustration of

why women more then Aboriginal men are situated in urban settings.

Peter’s illustrates that against the spaces defined for them because of their gender

and their cultural heritage, First Nations women have created nonconformist geographies

which redefine the relationship between First Nations peoples and the urban environment

in which it creates new spaces for the women. However, Peters believes that we must

think of ways to understand the intersectionality of these indigenous women and ways in

which their occupying spaces and the difficulties of migration can be improved upon.

That the Canadian government and Aboriginal reserves needs to “… address their

situation as women in the city but also take account of their needs as First Nations

women” (pg. 49) in order to create/integrate better social and community services such as

separate or improved housing, daycare services, drug and rehab counselling for First

Nations women. As well as ample governmental services that abolishes the stereotypes

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such as police and court systems, child welfare and income securities. Thus if these

Aboriginal women have a stake in negotiating their own spaces and contesting the system

of regaining, re-creating or revaluating cultural traditions in a process of healing and

move beyond the damage of the colonial legacy that has left them high and dry.

To conclude, Peters attempted to unravel how colonial processes and their

negotiation with Aboriginal people and the government in Canada defined the city as

space in which First Nations peoples and cultures did not belong and was not wanted but

was abolished with repercussions to the First Nation women when they were forced to

migrate to urban areas due to the Indian-Act. Thus, colonial ruling created a different

impact on First Nations men and women; as a result the geographies of exclusion were

gendered as well as expressed to cultural origins. Peters leads us to believe that by

challenging the significance of urbanization in legislation, public policy, and in

administration, First Nations women are redrawing and renegotiating spaces of

Aboriginal rights and territory and redefining the women's places in them. Thus Peters

was able to turn significant attention to the cultural and gendered meaning of urbanism by

focusing on the multifaceted geographies of identity, struggles and conflicts which

illustrates a new meaning and beginning to the phrase urban spaces with relation to

indigenous women in Canada.

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 Work Cited

Peters, Evelyn. 2000 ‘ ‘The two major living realities’: urban service needs of
First Nations women in Canadian cities’ in Gendering the City: Boundaries and Visions
of Urban Life eds. K. B. Miranne and A. H. Young (Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield)
41-62