Politics Innovator: Michèle Audette, Canada

Michèle Audette, president of the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC), knows what it means to be invisible. Although she is a native Innu speaker, born in the Innu community of Mani Utenam in Québec, Audette was not granted Indigenous status when she was born because her mother had married a non-Native. At the time, Canada’s Indian Act—portions of which were repealed in 1985—removed official Aboriginal status not only from those who married non-Aboriginals, but from their children as well. Perhaps the only notable achievement of the law was that it sparked an...

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