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She has personally felt its effect, receiving hate mail in 2010 when she was pregnant with her first child and having a house built for her family. This summer, her sister was threatened after coming to her defence, Ms. Horn-Miller said.

“It’s a lot of fear, a lot of cyber-bullying, a lot of harassment,” she said. “If the law was a good law, the spirit of the community would be positive. But this law has only created havoc and heartbreak.”

The issue flares up periodically, most recently in 2010 when the council sent letters advising 26 people they had to leave because they were living with non-natives.

This time, a grassroots movement has taken matters into its own hands. Protesters angry that a Mohawk teacher and her non-native husband were building a house in the centre of town succeeded in stopping construction in August. A list began circulating on the Internet of some 60 people in the community who were allegedly violating the membership law.

Cheryl Diabo, who lives on the reserve with her Québécois boyfriend, said it was a day after she discovered her name was on the list that a hand-drawn sign appeared outside her home reading: “My name is Cheryl Myiow [her father’s last name] & I live with a white man.”

She immediately took it down but was shaken up. “I realized that this tactic was very much like the tactic that was used to mark where Jews were living during the Holocaust,” she said.

Ms. Horn-Miller, whose children aged one and four are not recognized as band members because their father is not Mohawk, was one of three people to send a lawyer’s letter to the band last week threatening a lawsuit if the rule concerned mixed-race couples is not rescinded.