DIAND consultations fail to impress women's group

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A new Native women's group, established in mid-November, is setting up shop in Ottawa.

Pam Paul, former executive director of the Native Women's Association of Canada (NWAC), is the president of the new National Aboriginal Women's Association (NAWA). Carolanne Brewer, who recently resigned as staff legal counsel for the Assembly of First Nations (AFN), is working for the new group. Jennifer Sinclair, recently laid off after working as a policy analyst for the AFN for four years, is also on board as vice-president.

Sinclair told Windspeaker about the new organization during a break in proceedings at the AFN Confederacy in Ottawa on Dec. 4.

"With the flip-flopping back and forth with the consultation for the governance, when [NWAC] opted out at the last minute again for the second time, Ontario, Yukon, Nova Scotia and several of the other smaller women's organizations who didn't have a voice at NWAC were saying they were now left out of the process," she explained. "When you only have one national organization for women's voices and if the national voice decides then that they are going pull out to support the AFN, then where do the other women [at the table] who feel that they want to be represented. . . go? There was no place. They approached Pam Paul and asked if she would set this national organization up to facilitate the process for them. She did. She contacted me and asked if I would help her out."

After being laid off by the AFN, the 39-year-old Long Plains First Nation (Manitoba) member was preparing to set up her own company.

"I wanted to call it Indigenous Policy Research," she said

That plan has been set aside for the moment as she works to establish NAWA, but the issues she holds closest to her heart will be part of what the new organization focuses on. Sinclair was working on research into rarely discussed and little examined effects of child welfare policies.

"What are the effects on the mother when a child is taken from her? What are the effects on the neighbors in the community when this happens? Even in mainstream adoption circles, the effects on the birth parents on losing their children is only just being studied," she said.

A great deal of harm had been done to mothers who were subjected to policies that were geared to removing Native children from their families. And because the practice has been so widespread, it appears, she said, to have affected the stability of many communities.

"If you can't have stability of families, then the chances of having a stable economy, which is actually made up of individuals working inside those economies . . . well, you could run into problems," she explained.

The AFN cuts have pushed this kind of research to the back burner, but Sinclair said NAWA will try to champion that kind of issue.

"With NAWA we wanted to allow women a chance to participate. Everybody talks about how women are the most vulnerable in society-other than children-but we're the ones who are supposed to look after the children, we're the ones who are most impacted by the Indian Act because we're not even recognized in the Indian Act," she said. "So with NWAC deciding to pull out and with AFN saying they're not going to put up with the tinkering with the Indian Act, for a lot of women it was, 'Well, no. Even if they're tinkering with the Indian Act, we would like to be there to 1) ensure our rights are being protected under the new draft, and 2) to ensure that those values that we bring to the family are also incorporated when they're looking at the types of restructuring that they're looking at under the Indian Act.' So that's what we've done."

With NWAC boycotting governance consultations, Sinclair's group has filled the void and occupies a place on the joint ministerial advisory committee. But if the minister is looking for an Aboriginal group that will rubber-stamp his governance agenda, she said he's looking in the wrong place. She's not impressed so far with the way DIAND is ortraying or interpreting the information they gathered at the consultation sessions.

"We're at the table, the minister's table. We're the women's group that is at the table," Sinclair said. "They gave us the consultations, the forms, which are bogus. I mean, you're going through them and a majority of the comment lines say 'Will not discuss. Will not discuss. No comment given.' But in the end when they ask what was the theme of the discussion, what was most prominent in the minds of the people: Accountability. Accountability. I didn't see a single question or a single comment dealing with accountability.

"The other questions they were asking, the way the government had worded the questions was very leading. So when it looked at chiefs and accountability, they only let the chiefs be the policy people and the staff be the administrators, which is totally incorrect because there's actually three levels that should be in existence, so they weren't even awarding the chiefs the proper role inside their questioning."

Although she said she believes NWAC is in decline, Sinclair said the new organization is not out to put NWAC out of business.

"We're moving into a place in our history where it's almost impossible to say that you're one voice representing all people. Our intention is not to replace. It's an alternative. We don't intend to go political. We intend to take policy issues, identify those issues, challenge government on those issues and also challenge us as women," she said. "Some of the women who will sit on our board are on the board of NWAC and there's no rules that say you can't. NWAC has a process in place that says you must belong to a regional women's organization. So all of the smaller local groups -and there could be hundreds of them in a province-each of them must be affiliated with the provincial organization, otherwise they do not have a voice at the national level. We do not agree with this. We would like to represent women, period. But, recognizng that there's no way we can manage or keep track of or co-ordinate the statistics of looking after individual women and being able to respond to individual women, what we had to decide was that we would represent groups of women, and a group could constitute five. If a woman called us up from a community in the North and said it was just her but she's having a hard time getting the attention of the chief or the council on certain issues, we're not going to say that we can go in there and make it right for them. Nor can we say that we can take those issues and work on the legislation and policy of government and change it so there will be an immediate effect. What we hope to be able to do is take our skills and teach this woman how to bring other women into her association so that we empower her to gain a voice through more women inside that community and that those women as a collective will be able to approach whatever it is."

She said the organization is now looking to build its membership.