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August - 2007Aboriginal women create united front
By Gauri Chopra
Windspeaker Staff Writer
CORNER BROOK, Nfld.
Aboriginal women from across Canada gathered in Corner Brook, Nfld. from June 20 to 22 to talk about the issues affecting them and to try to come up with a plan to ensure those issues are addressed.
The women were participants in the National Aboriginal Women's Summit, hosted by the Native Women's Association of Canada (NWAC) and the government of Newfoundland and Labrador, with support from the federal government.
The theme chosen for the event was Strong Women: Strong Communities, with a special focus on issues of health, safety, wellness, equality, empowerment, strength, balance and honour.
All groups that attended the summit presented policy papers on issues they felt needed to be addressed. On the first day the topics were narrowed down to those delegates felt were most important to deal with and these created the agenda of discussion for the meetings. At the end of the summit, a number of recommendations were put forward, among them a call for governments to provide more financial resources to address Aboriginal women's issues, a recommendation that Aboriginal women be given a seat at the table when Indigenous issues are on the agenda, and a plea to make addressing the issue of violence against Aboriginal girls and women a priority.
"The essence of the summit was to have all of the issues that were affecting Aboriginal women specifically, but never really made it to the table when negotiations between Canada and Aboriginal peoples begin. And so we were really looking to solutions, because we knew that there were lots of reports about what the affects are, what the conditions were, and so we wanted this summit to focus on the solutions to those issues that we've been talking about for years and years," said NWAC executive director Sherry Lewis.
The end goal of the summit, Lewis said, was to create a document that any group wanting to do work in the area of Aboriginal women's issues could turn to that would help all organizations share information and be on the same page in terms of setting priorities.
"There has been very little co-ordination of Aboriginal women's issues. Governments make decisions on priority funding and priority issues, and so we felt that this document would assist anyone making a decision, whether it's about funding, priorities, internal planning ... So this document, this final document, was designed to do that kind of information sharing for anyone who wanted to get involved in Aboriginal women's issues," Lewis said.
The document will be of value to all Aboriginal women's organizations including NWAC, which will be able to use the information to help set it's own priorities, Sherry Lewis explained.
"The difficulty for the Native Women's Association of Canada is that any issue that affects Aboriginal peoples affects Aboriginal women, so there is a large number of issues out there that get sort of addressed, that don't get addressed at all. And so we were looking for some advice from women as to ... if we had to pull back and not cover as many issues, where should that occur."
Organizers of the women's summit were pleased with the amount of work that was accomplished during the three-day meeting. "There was some amazing, groundbreaking events that happened here," Lewis said.
One of those events was a press conference that saw all of the women leaders from Canada's national Aboriginal organizations standing together and calling for an end to violence against Aboriginal women, using the case of Kelly Morrisseau, a 27-year-old pregnant woman and mother to three young children who was murdered in Ottawa in December 2006.
"They said, 'The time has come for us to stand shoulder to shoulder and say that, although we have lots of political differences, on this issue we have a common understanding,'" Lewis said. "And so it was very powerful, for sure."
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