IRIW used the voices of many Indigenous women who had lost their status across Canada to protest and stand up to the government.
Part of the way the Government of Canada legislated Indigenous populations was by assigning Indian status.
If an Indigenous woman married a non-Indigenous man, she lost her Indian status, and so did her children.
Increased activism in Canada was partly in response to government actions, such as the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, and the 1969 White Paper.
There was a notable court case proceeding in Canada at this time as well, as Jeanette Corbière Lavell had brought an action against the Canadian government for discrimination under the Indian Act, after she had lost her status for marrying a non-Indigenous man.
[5] Around this time, Indian women in Canada took advantage of the trend of activism and started to collectivize in the fight for their rights.
One of these was a group called Equal Rights for Indian Women, which was formed in 1967 by Mohawk activist Mary Two-Axe Earley in Quebec.
[10] Similarly, when Mary Two-Axe Earley married an Irish-American electrical engineer in New York, she lost her Indian Status.
[11] Earley held a fellow Mohawk woman named Florence in her arms as she died, and believed her cause of death to have been the stress of losing her status and being ordered to sell her house and leave the reserve.
[6] In the late 1960s, Kathleen Steinhauer wrote to several other women who she thought might be opposed to Section 12(I)(b) of the Indian Act.
She contacted Jeannette Corbière Lavell, Jean Cuthand and Mary Small Face Marule to gauge their support.
And we were off.A meeting of the Voice of Alberta Indian Women group was held in Saskatoon in March 1968.
In attendance were all of the founders except for Nellie Carlson, who had pneumonia: Steinhauer, Earley, Lavell, Marule, Margetts, and Monica Turner, who went on to become the group's first Eastern president.
[7] The Alberta end of the organization, consisting primarily of Carlson, Margetts and Steinhauer, began to work with leading male Indigenous activists to foreground the issue of gender discrimination.
"[17] Some felt as though changing the section on gender and marriage in the Indian Act would make the treaties invalid or even destroy them, and that the reserve lands would be taken away as a result of the group's advocacy.
Since IRIW was a collective made up of non-status Indigenous women, the government did not fund them like other Indian organizations.
[1] This proposed bill had the intention of amending the Indian Act but made no reference to marital or gender discrimination.
Due to the strong condemning of this bill to the committees reviewing it, IRIW gained support from those, especially women, in Parliament.
[21] Their protesting gained significant attention nationally and also from government members, such as Gordon Fairweather, the Human Rights Commissioner, who publicly voiced their support that the Indian Act needed to be amended.
This is a success as the protesting and hard work of IRIW led to the acknowledgement of the discrimination Indigenous women faced, and a concrete step taken by the government in attempting to fix it.
With this legislation, a new concept was created, called the 'second generation cut-off,' which was supposed to be non-discriminatory based on gender.