This content was extracted from Wikipedia and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
Mary Sandra Lovelace Nicholas CM (born April 15, 1948) is a Canadian senator representing New Brunswick. Sitting with the Progressive Senate Group, she is the first Indigenous woman appointed to the Senate. As an activist on behalf of First Nations women and children, she received international recognition in 1979 for bringing her case to the United Nations Human Rights Committee. In 1985 she succeeded in having Parliament revoke a discriminatory section of the Indian Act, which had caused women marrying non-Aboriginals to lose status and also deprived their children of status but did not treat men the same who married non-Aboriginal women.