This thesis compares anti-violence activism in Northwestern Ontario and the Kootenays, British Columbia. It is a history of the battered womens shelter movement based on research and oral histories conducted in Thunder Bay, Kenora, Nelson, and Cranbrook. I examine the socio-political status of Aboriginal women in these communities, and engage the literature on self-government to analyze First Nations responses to family violence. Strategies to help battered women varied according to the local manifestation of patriarchal relations, colonization, and hinterland-metropolis relations.Examining how these relationships influenced anti-violence activists decisions deepens existing analysis of how feminist strategies to help battered women were absorbed into other agendas for change. The mixed social economy of the 1970s and 1980s defined feminist activism as voluntary citizen participation. Contemporary discourses on the voluntary sector argued that volunteering was an effective way to integrate local expertise into policy development and service provision. However, as volunteers, women worked in the margins of local welfare bureaucracies. Activists who exposed how patriarchal and colonial relations produced inequitable social welfare practices had less direct influence on local welfare practice than those who did not challenge the integrity of the nuclear family and who did not insist that denying Aboriginal women access to social programs was racist.Debates between federal and provincial governments about jurisdictional responsibility for Aboriginal people complicated advocacy for First Nations women. Native womens lobby to end sex discrimination in the Indian Act, urban migration, invasive child welfare practices, and the Native Rights movement influenced First Nations womens conceptualization of family violence and their strategies for change. Aboriginal family violence programs advanced indigenous self-government and urban self-governance.The case studies document the local specificities that shaped womens responses to family violence. Women organizing in these communities did so in relative isolation from the womens movement. Metropolitan-hinterland relations limited their access to the provincial and federal resources needed to establish transition houses. Feminists and women who did not identify with the womens movement organized these programs. Activists strategies depended on how they understood their place in local in politics, and varying local manifestations of extra-local social relations.