Memory Serves: Oratories by Lee Maracle

Author:Lee Maracle [Maracle, Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Criticism, Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, Canadian, Women Authors
ISBN: 9781926455457
Google: 2EKErgEACAAJ
Publisher: NeWest Press
Published: 2015-11-15T23:21:55.123975+00:00

INDIGENOUS WOMEN AND POWER

WE ARE NOT FEMINISTS; WE ARE GENDER COMPLEMENTARY.

Panel presentation, Indigenous Feminisms conference, Edmonton, 2006

I hear these words and I want to roll off my chair, gnash my teeth, and pound my fists. Although I believe the term gender complementary, coupled with the term governance, describes many societies of the past, it does not address our situation today. It unashamedly suggests that because we were gender complementary in the past we should not be feminists today. A different past does not form the foundation for opposition to feminism.

We are besieged by a patriarchal settler state. We have limited self-government at the state’s good will. This patriarchal settler state has shown itself incapable of sustaining its good will. It is chronically shrinking our sovereignty, as well as the legal basis for it here and around the world. Furthermore, the position of Indigenous women is decidedly lower than the position of Indigenous men. The reduction of Indigenous women to second-class citizens within their communities includes the refusal of our nations to restore the gender complementary systems of the past. The issues facing women are ignored at both tribal and government levels. The authority of Indigenous women is not gender complementary in our communities. Family violence is about violence against women and children, but gender complementary advocates rarely address this phenomenon.

Gender complementary forms of power existed before patriarchal invasion, but they were dismantled. The boarding school system removed the children who were to be schooled in this system. Because we have not had the opportunity to study the original knowledge systems, they have not been maintained. Tribal leaders, mostly men, are not concerned with integrating the female complement to the original governing systems today, except in a few instances. The current tribal governments and national chiefs’ organizations are not lobbying for investigation into gender complementary systems of power, nor are they strategizing to end male-on-female violence in our communities. Our women have been disempowered.

Restoring female positions of power is not what the gender complementary group of Indigenous women is pursuing. Rematriation and decolonization must be our response. Rematriation and the restoration of our original systems would be a feminist activity were the gender complementarists to ensure that our current tribal governments were actually gender complementary.

In 1997, Wendy Grant-John came close to winning the AFN Grand Chief position, but she conceded to Phil Fontaine after a two-hour discussion. I have a memory of some of the women being saddened by her concession, as they feared that women’s issues would again take a back seat. How has it come to pass that women’s issues exist separate from those concerning men? How has it come to be that the standard of what is normal for women is lesser for Indigenous women? Why have Indigenous women become the most violated, the least educated, and the most overworked and unprotected human beings in the history of Turtle Island? Indigenous Studies does not have a women’s component.

Some uncomfortable questions need to be asked of our leadership.

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