Press Release
July 12, 2007
UN Declaration on Rights of Indigenous People:
Linking women’s rights with collective rights
By Margaret Thompson
Systematic violations of
collective rights of indigenous peoples are the greatest risk factor
for gender-based violence against indigenous women, according to
Celeste McKay, an international human rights analyst and advocate
and Métis indigenous woman, who spoke at the Fifth Continental
Meeting of Indigenous Women of the Americas in Kahnawake, Quebec in
Canada, July 9-11, 2007.
“This is the first
international instrument to be adopted by the UN General Assembly
that codifies the rights of indigenous peoples, and is seen as an
essential advancement and recognition of human rights for indigenous
peoples, including indigenous women in particular,” said McKay in an
interview with FIRE. She noted that passage of the UN Declaration
on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is necessary for international
legal protection from the violence done to indigenous peoples,
including “the wrongs of colonization, under which indigenous
peoples have suffered massive displacement of our lands, our
cultures, and our spiritualities.”
McKay noted that
indigenous women are organizing against gender-based violence, which
includes sexual violence and discrimination, but also key in
indigenous women’s struggle is the interrelationship between women
gaining rights as individuals to live free of violence and gaining
collective rights of their communities, including the right to
sovereignty and rights as a nation.
“It is important to look
at the context, to make interconnections between violence against
women and the loss of collective rights [of indigenous peoples] as a
nation,” declared McKay. Likewise, the Beijing +10 declaration by
FIMI (Foro Internacional de Mujeres Indigenous or Indigenous
Women’s Forum) stated: “We maintain that the advancement of
Indigenous Women’s human rights is inextricably linked to the
struggle to protect, respect and fulfill both the rights of our
Peoples as a whole and our rights as women within our communities,
and at the national and international level.”
McKay noted that the UN system as well as many in the international
women’s movement focus more on oppression and rights of women as
individuals, but there is an “interrelationship and inextricability
of rights of indigenous women as individuals and their rights as
part of nations or collectives and you how can’t separate out those
rights.”
Analyzing these links
involves making the connection between colonialism and patriarchy,
according to Andrea Smith, an indigenous rights activist and scholar
from the United States. “Colonialism doesn’t work without
patriarchy, so the colonists worked to instill patriarchy because it
makes domination seem natural, so states could rule over indigenous
peoples, men could rule over women. Therefore, gender violence is a
tool of colonization,” said Smith.
The UN Declaration on the
Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which has been under discussion for 20
years, was strengthened during the Decade of Indigenous Peoples from
1995-2004, but faces obstacles because of the opposition of some
governments that resist recognizing the autonomous rights of
indigenous peoples to their land, territories and resources. A
final vote on the Declaration by the UN General Assembly has again
been delayed, despite approval by the UN Human Rights Council in
August, 2006. Opposition to the Declaration is led by the United
States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, among other nations.
The UN Declaration
addresses issues of protection of Indigenous peoples from
discrimination and genocide, and affirms the right to maintain
cultural traditions and secure access to lands and resources and the
right to self determination.
“For Indigenous
Peoples and Indigenous women, exercising our rights—both as
Indigenous Peoples and as women—depends on securing legal
recognition of our collective ancestral territories,” said Myrna
Cunningham, an indigenous Miskito woman of Nicaragua and a longtime
human rights activist, in a statement she made as a co-author of the
FIMI Report on Indigenous Women & Violence. “Our territories are the
basis of our identities, our cultures, our economies, and our
traditions. Indigenous rights include the right to full recognition
as Peoples with our own worldview and traditions, our own
territories, and our own modes of organization within nation-states;
the right to self-determination through our own systems of autonomy
or self-government based on a communal property framework; and the
right to control, develop, and utilize our own natural resources. “
This right to self
determination is one of the most debated principles in the
Declaration, which is a right granted to all peoples under the 1948
UN Declaration of Human Rights, but has not been extended to
indigenous peoples under colonization, said McKay. The UN
Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples would “essentially
codify the right of self determination as equivalent to the right of
all other peoples,” said McKay.
However, McKay noted that
governments such as the United States and Canada who oppose this
provision argue that “the right of self determination standard is
too high, that it needs to be further qualified in the document to
ensure that existing sovereignty and integrity is not violated.”
As a Canadian, McKay
expressed her own and others’ strong disappointment about Canada’s
strong opposition to the Declaration in its present form, which was
the result of 20 years of negotiations and compromises by all
parties including the government and indigenous peoples. She said
that she is concerned about Canada’s current conservative
government’s “lack of integrity and disingenuous position,” and that
Canada is becoming “an obstructor of human rights rather than a
defender” as it has been in the past. The previous Liberal
government had endorsed the UN Declaration.
The final resolution of
the 5th Continental Meeting calls on all governments,
including Canada, to support the UN Declaration.
The United States, which
has a history of contradictory attitudes and behavior toward
international law fears the domestic implications of the UN
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Currently US
corporations often have unregulated access to indigenous lands for
extracting oil, natural gas, mining, and pharmaceutical companies,
which enables them to reap enormous profits. Affirming the rights
of indigenous people’s to their land and resources is a key
provision of the UN Declaration, and will likely restrict corporate
access.
Noelli Pocaterra, a Wayú
woman from Venezuela, spoke to the 5th Continental Meeting about how
her country had also opposed the Declaration, and asked the women
participants to write a letter requesting the Venezuelan
government’s support for the Declaration. This letter was later
presented by Pocaterra to the Venezuelan Ambassador to Canada.
Andrea Smith said while
the UN Declaration is an important step, she questioned the approach
of using international instruments that call on the state to remedy
oppression or discrimination, when in the case of indigenous women,
it has been the state that is responsible for sexual violence and
other oppressions. She noted that many legal instruments call for
criminal justice remedies of the state such as more police or
prisons, So “Indigenous women are in a contradiction looking
to state to solve violence against Indigenous women when it was the
state that was responsible for it.”
Smith suggested that
Indigenous women and communities use the documents such as the UN
Declaration to target the state as a perpetrator of violence. McKay
said that the document includes several provisions in which
mitigation measures call for the state to work in conjunction with
indigenous peoples to develop solutions that do not violate the
rights to self governance, prior informed consent, and sovereignty
of the native communities.
END
For more information,
contact María Suárez of FIRE at:
maria@radiofeminista.net
For more information
about the Fifth Continental Meeting go to:
http://www.faq-qnw.org/5conti/news.html
To see FIRE’s coverage of the Fifth Meeting of go to
www.radiofeminista.org/
(Spanish) or
www.radiofeminista.org/indexeng.htm
(English).
You may use FIRE information, audio files, and photos and give
credit to FIRE (www.radiofeminista.net)
Other sources & links:
“Violence Against Women
is Rampant Around the Globe,” City
on the Hill Press(http://www.cityonahillpress.com/article.php?id=739)
FIMI Report, “Mairin
Iwanka Raya: Indigenous Women Stand Against Violence” (http://www.indigenouswomensforum.org/intadvocacy/vaiwreport.html)
Quebec Native Women Inc.:
http://www.faq-qnw.org/
FIMI – International
Indigenous Women’s Forum (http://www.indigenouswomensforum.org/index.html)
