BACKGROUNDER
INDIGENOUS WOMEN TODAY: AT RISK AND A FORCE FOR CHANGE
Today’s indigenous woman is not easily categorized. She can be found in a variety of circumstances – in her natural place in the rural, independent indigenous community, in poverty on the reservation, in the big-city high-rise or the slum, or trailblazing in an intergovernmental meeting. Unfortunately, most indigenous women today remain at risk, whether colonized long ago or subject to today’s forces of globalization. But wherever you find her, she is essential to the survival of her family, her community and her culture.
Indigenous women in the developing world face many common threats: poverty, with little or no access to health care and education; armed conflicts; pollution; large-scale mining and logging; invasions of illegal miners; unsympathetic governments; loss of their lands; and human trafficking, to name just a few. Everywhere they are paid less, are given the lowest jobs, and are often subject to discrimination, humiliation and sexual abuse.
A round the world today, populations of indigenous peoples are under increasing pressures brought to bear by armed conflict, globalization and re s o u rce extraction, resulting in the loss of traditional lifestyles, migration off indigenous lands, or the loss of status by indigenous women in the traditional setting.
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Indigenous women around the world, from both traditional and non-traditional societies, agree on one of their greatest mutual concerns: the negative impact of their exclusion from decision-making processes that affect them, whether involving local, governmental, intergovernmental or civil society institutions.
Indigenous women have an important contribution to make at all levels of negotiation and planning having to do with their families and communities – in peacetime and in times of conflict. Their inclusion usually supports better, more environmentally sustainable outcomes that preserve the health of their communities as well as their cultural identities.
Loss of lands leads to exploitive work
In Latin America, thousands of desperate indigenous women and girls, newly landless and impoverished, easily end up in the sex trade. Because of the AIDS epidemic, some sex tourism has shifted away from Asia.
Today, it is a growing industry in Latin America. After Thailand, Brazil is now considered to have the second highest level of child sex trafficking in the world. Guatemala City has become a centre of international sex trafficking, with girls smuggled in from all over Central America. Estimates of the number of Brazilian children living as prostitutes range from 250,000 to as high as 2 million. |
 When indigenous women are victims of
crime, they often do not receive equal protection under the law, even by developed countries where the rule of law and human rights are taken for granted. In Kenya, 650 women, mostly Maasai, recently won the right to sue the British Ministry of Defence for rapes allegedly
committed by British soldiers over a 30-year period. Since the 1970s, Maasai girls and women have reported being raped by groups of British soldiers to the local authorities, who duly reported it to the British authorities. No punitive action has ever been taken. Nor is there any evidence, so far, that any action was taken to stop the rapes, which allegedly continued until 2000. Many of the girls, now grown women, have children of mixed-race parentage, are not accepted by the community, and do not expect to find husbands. |
Economic changes and military conflicts in Latin America have had terrible consequences for indigenous women and children. War has displaced millions. Hundreds of thousands of Indian farmers have lost their farms when government subsidies for export crops were stopped because of "restructuring" or trade agreements. Such small farmers are quickly bought out by large agribusiness, and the then-landless Indian peasants move to the cities and look for jobs, or migrate elsewhere.
In the Brazilian Amazon, gold mining, logging and the possibility of acquiring land have attracted large numbers of settlers into areas inhabited by indigenous peoples previously unknown to outsiders. Once the newcomers contact such indigenous communities and start paying, or bartering with, the girls for sex, it is not long before that is an accepted way to acquire goods and food. Before long, some of the indigenous people stop growing food. A traditional society first accessed by a large group of all-male miners can be damaged very quickly, with the brunt of the impact falling on young girls, who essentially become prostitutes.
Other indigenous women leave their home countries to find
work in maquiladoras, assembly plants that hire cheap labour to assemble parts from another market and return the finished product to that market. Maquiladoras prefer to hire women because they can be made to work longer hours, in worse conditions, and for less money than men. And because the women are migrants, they no longer have strong family networks to protect them. Violence and discrimination against women in maquiladoras have been widely documented, including humiliation, sexual harassment and intimidation, sexual assaults,
beatings, strip searches, forced pregnancy tests, firing of pregnant workers, and violence against union organizers.
Multinational onslaught: indigenous women and mining
The last reserves of natural resources and the last large tracts of land are often the homes of indigenous peoples. In the interests of economic development, multinational corporations are frequently given international access to cheap labour and the resources found on indigenous lands, if not the land itself — for hotels, resorts and golf courses, for ecotourism and park reserves. In many areas, land ownership is being consolidated in the hands of large companies, and hundreds of thousands of indigenous peoples are being forced to migrate.
But even if the community is allowed to keep its land, when a mining company, a multinational corporation or a development project intrudes on the community, it can disrupt the delicate balance of the community’s independent lifestyle and start the progression of its decline. Depending on the situation, the independent indigenous woman, the primary vessel for the transmission of the culture and the language, can quickly become disempowered and dependent. |
 In Canada today, the sexual abuse of Aboriginal children is at crisis proportions. In some communities in Canada, up to 90 per cent of the young people in the sex trade are Aboriginal. In 2001, Save the Children, in collaboration with the Canadian government,released Sacred Lives:
Canadian Aboriginal Children and Youth Speak Out About Sexual Exploitation — a study looking at why this is the case. The writers talked to young people who have been sexually exploited in 22 communities. In addition to the well-known problems of the residential school
systems, they pointed to the cumulative effects of endemic racism and the breakdown of their cultures and family lives combined with factors such as poverty and limited access to education.
The residential school system in the United States and Canada was designed to assimilate Aboriginal peoples into the dominant society, but introduced another legacy into the indigenous communities, one that would prove immeasurably destructive. In addition to breaking
children’s spirits, keeping them far from their mothers — robbing them of their languages, traditions and cultures — these schools essentially held generations of Native children captive and inflicted upon many of them physical and sexual abuse, with complete impunity, for decades. The residential school system continued until the 1970s.
Such damage is difficult to undo, as physical and sexual abuse often repeats itself anew each generation.It has been said that there are northern communities today in which the entire female population has been sexually assaulted by males who are living in the community with them — their brothers, cousins, uncles, fathers and grandfathers. Some of the abusers may be in positions of power, where it is less likely that they will be held accountable. Under such circumstances, women may feel powerless to effect change. |
Large-scale mining operations introduced into communities in Papua New Guinea and the Philippines provide just such an example. On an island in Papua New Guinea, the women, the traditional landowners, were reduced in a few short years from a position of near equality with men to one of subordinate dependence with increased workload and no income, and in some cases they became victims of domestic violence.
From “women landowners” to “female dependents”
Antes de que comenzara la explotación minera en la isla de Misman, en 1989, las mujeres tradicionalmente heredaban y eran propietarias de la tierra y cumplían un importante papel en la vida pública, con un estatus prácticamente igual al de los hombres. Dado que se trataba de una cultura basada en la agricultura de subsistencia, los hombres se dedicaban a despejar la tierra para cultivar los grandes huertos que las mujeres administraban y cuidaban. El control sobre los cultivos otorgaba a las mujeres cierto grado de poder y control.
Before mining came to Misiman Island in 1989, the women traditionally inherited and owned the land and had an important role in public life, with nearly equal status with men. In their subsistence farming culture, the men cleared land for the large gardens which the women managed and cared for. Control over the yams they grew gave women a certain amount of power and control.
When the mining company came to negotiate for the land, its officials chose to bargain only with the men of the community — even though the women owned the land. The result was that all the royalties and rents the company eventually paid went directly to the men, and the women had no say over how the money would be spent. Suddenly, the men could acquire money and spend it without consulting the women.
The action of the mining company directly impaired food production. First, there were fewer food trees because of the loss of land to the mine. Second, because so many of the younger men, wanting cash, went to work for the company, there were not enough men available to clear new land for the women to garden.
Because the women could no longer produce enough food to eat, they needed money to buy it. But the men had control over the money — which they could also use to buy beer and liquor.
On the island today, with the introduction of cash and the exposure to store-bought food and goods, social values have declined rapidly. Traditional social structures have broken down, producing a "generation gap" that has damaged the standing of the women. And with liquor and drunkenness have come domestic violence and increasing divorce rates.
The mine will close in a year or two. Unemployment will rise; cash will be depleted; the environment, quickly damaged, will not recover on its own. In the short time the mining company has been there, women, once nearly equal, have become subordinate to men and dependent upon them. The women will not have much means of regaining their lost standing once the mining company, with its jobs, cash and store food, leaves the island. Another outcome could easily be imagined if the women had been included in the negotiations for the use of their own land.
From “female miner” to “housewife”
The story in the Philippines’ Cordillera has both similarities and differences. The indigenous women and men had worked as equals in small-scale mining operations for generations, but now, because of large-scale mining, they have been driven to look for informal work outside the communities, with predictable results. Some of the women must stay home to care for children, while older children have been sent to work in the city to help the family make ends meet. The stay-at-home women have become housewives, economically dependent on their husbands. Water sources have dried up because of mining, and women have to walk long distances to get water for household needs. Sometimes they spend hours in line before they walk long distances back with their heavy loads.
With employment has come unemployment, and with unemployment has come new anti-social behaviour familiar to big cities, such as gambling and drinking. Many parents can no longer afford to send their children to school, so there are more young people hanging around. Other parents are working abroad. Since mothers have less time to spend with their children, the traditional ways are being lost. Families are breaking down, and indigenous communities that once were tight-knit and strong are weakening. When women do find work, they are paid less than men for the same work. Sometimes they find work as domestics, where they are often humiliated and sexually abused.
It was different, before. The traditional family mining that went on for so long was sustainable and equitable, with cultural values and rituals. A woman miner had her own source of income, and a status nearly equal with that of men. In farming, too, the labour was cooperative. But now farming is no longer profitable: the rice-fields have dried up because of the impact the mining had on the water tables.
The mining company had no trouble gaining full title to this land. At the time of colonization, the indigenous peoples did not think they needed a piece of paper to prove they owned their land, so they, unlike their more educated neighbours, never registered it. Today the mining is finished, but the mining company is engaged in new enterprises: special economic zones, ecotourism, mineral water production and subdivision development, among others. The government still recognizes the mining company’s claim to the land over that of the indigenous people that have always lived on it.
However, indigenous resistance has worked in the Cordillera, where women have long taken an active role in fighting large-scale mining operations. In 1937 and 1962, the Ibaloy and Kankana-ey women of Itogon won compensation for crops lost from the depletion of water sources. And between 1989 and 1997, the mining company’s open pit mining was blocked from entering into four new communities. Word about the effects of open pit mining on wet-rice agriculture spread, and no new mines have been opened in the Cordillera.
Indigenous women in conflict areas and in peacemaking
To d a y, while the world’s eyes have been focused elsewhere, conflicts in areas inhabited by indigenous peoples in
Africa, Asia and Latin America have escalated. In war-torn societies, it is often the women who keep societies going. In the Manila Declaration that came out of the International Conference on Conflict Resolution, Peace Building, Sustainable Development and Indigenous Peoples (December 2000), indigenous peoples have made clear their wish that women be included in decision-making at all levels, in peacetime and in wartime.
The value of indigenous women in conflict prevention and peacemaking is being more widely recognized. Efforts are being made to employ their natural talents and abilities as mediators, and to find places where they can employ their traditional roles as mediators in multinational peacekeeping operations.
At a recent high-level panel at the United Nations, several indigenous women presented papers on the topic, along with Security Council Member States and United Nations peacekeeping officials.
Stella Tamang, chair of the International Indigenous Women’s Caucus, told the panel that many, if not most, ongoing armed conflicts take place in areas where indigenous peoples live. While conflicts claim innocent lives and displace thousands of families, no one sees how the indigenous women are protecting the elders, the sick and the children in her country of Nepal. The women "are shouting and screaming, but they are not heard and seen." Armed conflict, male-dominated and male-perpetrated, is a struggle, she said, between the traditional
masculine qualities of physical strength, power, anger, greed and hatred against the feminine qualities of love, affection, forgiveness and tolerance.
In the current conflict in Nepal, she noted, women are playing important roles as mediators, negotiators and fighters. Because so many of the men have been sent abroad, the Nepalese indigenous women are now not only caretakers, food providers and protectors: they have become negotiators with both the government security forces and the rebels — for the protection and survival of their families, most of whom are now headed by women.
She concluded by saying that indigenous women from many traditions are excellent mediators and naturally resolve conflicts:
Nepal’s Tamang women are taught from birth to mediate and resolve conflict between family members and between families. They will go to great lengths to do so, including cooking special foods and perf o rming rituals. In the Philippines, the Maranao women usually play the role of mediators in conflict situations. Whenever there is family conflict, it is always a woman who addresses critical issues and brings the parties to settlement. Women are well respected and influential in the community. In the Arumanen Manobo tribe in the Philippines, women are sent as emissaries to the adversary to settle conflicts. The women see the role of mediating and resolving conflicts as an important responsibility in their community, and they take it on even at the risk of their own lives. But they are usually successful and prevent the conflict from escalating. Among the Maasai pastoral peoples of East Africa, women, and especially mothers of warriors, are so revered that no warrior would hurt them. Maasai women sometimes remove their lower skirts to demonstrate their weakness and sympathy for both parties. The women, and sometimes even girls, are often helpful in restoring peace in a conflict situation. In the Samburu and Maasai communities, women, children and the aged are never attacked during armed conflicts. The gesture of cutting the grass — an item of great value — and holding it up is a request to stop the fighting.
Although a woman’s mediation may not always end a conflict, it can often help to pave the way by calming a situation and allowing negotiations to take place. In addition to mediating, Ms. Tamang said, women also make excellent negotiators, and they should be included, at both national and international levels, at peace negotiations. She also asked that they be trained in more formal peace processes.
Carmen Jerez, Director of the Educational Network of Ambayata (Ecuador), briefed the panel about the conflict situations affecting indigenous communities in Latin America. She said, "We do not like to be only victims who watch as our sons, husbands and families are assassinated, until we are obliged to leave our territories and start another life in cities and countries that look at us with indifference and bring us to complete marginalization. Indigenous women must not become invisible."
The "big powers", she said, view indigenous peoples as just an obstacle to development, but for indigenous peoples, and especially for the women, mother earth — Pachamama — "is only lent to us for a lifetime, and each generation must care for her for future generations".
Indigenous women, she said, do not like to see the tragedy of war repeating itself over and over. And that is why they are eager to participate in all levels of conflict prevention, conflict resolution and post-conflict peacebuilding. In Latin America, they have already demonstrated that they have the capacity to do so effectively, and their participation is based on a dialogue across cultures that promotes respect.
One happy ending: the Tamang
The carpet factories in Kathmandu are full of Tamang girls, and because they are so pretty, of all the Nepali women in the South Asian sex trade, half are Tamang. In Nepal today, the Tamang are an indigenous minority making up only 4 per cent of the population, marginalized and pushed aside. Historically, they have always lived in the mountains, along the Tibetan border, with a rich cultural tradition that includes a language quite distinct from Nepali. The society is patriarchal, and in bad times women and girls suffer the most. Times are bad in Nepal today. With more than half the population living below the poverty line, 42 per cent of children between the ages of 5 and 14 work to earn additional income for the family.
When Stella Tamang saw how many Tamang girls were working in carpet factories in Kathmandu, she started a school, the Bikalpa Gyan Kendra (Alternative Learning Centre), to help them learn skills that they could use to make money back home in their villages. She wanted to send the girls back to their villages with economic options that would enable them to maintain their dignity and independence, and at the same time preserve Tamang culture. The school enrols girls between the ages of 13 and 17, into an 18-month residential programme. The curriculum includes sustainable agriculture, market gardening, traditional handicrafts such as weaving, knitting and basket making, how to run a small shop or a day-care centre, and conflict resolution. After first learning traditional handicrafts, such as knitting or weaving, the students then run a small shop, where they sell their goods. Ms.Tamang describes it thus: “This is a learn-and-earn program, because if the students cannot earn, their parents will not send them to learn."
School graduates have found they can return to their villages and begin entrepreneurial enterprises with microcredit, or they can go on to complete their formal educations and pursue careers such as nursing or teaching. Some students were taken with the entrepreneurial spirit while still in school, and started a day-care centre for the many Tamang children they saw in Kathmandu in need of care while their mothers worked in the carpet factories. Now Tamang working mothers have a place to leave their children, and the Tamang girls are themselves making money.
Unfortunately, Stella Tamang has found that despite the success of her school and its girls, she is still struggling against traditional Tamang culture. Sometimes families are suspicious, afraid to make the financial sacrifice to send their daughters to the school, rather than to the carpet factory or the brothel. They don’t believe the promise that their daughters will be safe and happy, and they don’t believe the promises of economic independence and a bright future. But success is hard to beat.
Indigenous women: into the future
Driven by their need to preserve and protect, indigenous women have been participating in the international arena for decades, attending the international conferences that first attracted indigenous participation, such as the 1992 Rio Earth Summit and the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, and participating in the 1995 Beijing Conference on Women and the follow-up Special Session of the General Assembly in 2000. As indigenous voices are becoming heard more clearly in the United Nations, so too are the voices of indigenous women making themselves heard more distinctly, apart from indigenous peoples, and apart from women in general. Now that the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues is fully operational, indigenous women are receiving much needed institutional support as they seek to draw attention to the needs of this especially vulnerable group.
Media contact: Ellen McGuffie, UN Department of Public Information, Tel. 212-963-0499, e-mail mcguffie@un.org
Secretariat for the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues: Tel. 917-367-5100; on the internet: www.un.org/esa/socdev/pfii
Published by the United Nations Department of Public Information — DPI/2335B — May 2004
Developed for the internet by the UN Website Section, Department of Public Information © United Nations 2004
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