Honouring the Custodians of the Land, on International Women’s Day

By Kanya D'Almeida Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 7 2014 (IPS) - Every year, on March 8, the United Nations and its member states — which collectively comprise the vast majority of the world’s population — observe International Women’s Day.

Celebrations span the globe, with millions lauding achievements in gender equality, while thousands of others strike a more somber tone, reflecting on the violence and destitution that continue to characterise too many women’s lives.

While hard to predict how nations, communities and corporations will mark the day, one thing is guaranteed from one year to the next: that the Western media will paint the “women’s movement” with names and faces pulled from the top hat of the global one percent.

According to Forbes magazine’s 2013 list of the world’s most powerful women, only “top politicians and CEOs, activist billionaires and celebrities” make the cut for recognition, with some spots reserved for “next gen entrepreneurs and media mavens, technologists and leaders in philanthropy.”

But those who gathered for the high-level luncheon at the U.N. headquarters Friday saluted a different kind of woman, a woman who wears no makeup and owns no bank account, but carries whole villages on her shoulders: the indigenous women of the world, who currently number 370 million across over 90 countries.

Upon receiving the U.N. Women for Peace’s humanitarian award, actress, producer and activist Trudie Styler called attention to the plight of indigenous women, “the very people who take care of life sustenance”, and who, all too often, find themselves clinging precariously to the last rung of the development ladder.

The U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) says indigenous women make up one of the most vulnerable communities on this planet, often forced to wage a daily battle against crushing poverty, trafficking, eviction from their ancestral lands, illiteracy, an almost total absence of formal healthcare and extreme gender-based violence.

“This violence,” according to the UNPFII, “is exacerbated when indigenous communities find themselves in the midst of conflict.” For too many of these women, conflict comes in the form of extractive industries, widely considered to be among the world’s most environmentally destructive enterprises.

By the U.N.’s own definition, indigenous communities are defined largely by their attachment to the land that feeds and sustains them, and their determination to “preserve, develop and transmit to future generations those ancestral territories…as the basis of their continued existence as peoples.”

When this land comes under threat, it is the indigenous communities – often times led by women – who rise up, not out of choice but out of sheer necessity.

Speaking at the awards ceremony Friday, Styler recounted her own experience working with an indigenous woman in northern Ecuador, Maria Aguinda, who sparked a movement of 30,000 people in defense of the land by taking on the energy giant known then as Texaco, but which would later become Chevron.

The now-landmark case loosely referred to as Chevron versus Ecuador began a good 20 years ago when Aguinda became the first plaintiff demanding compensation from the corporation for dumping billions of gallons of toxic waste into the pristine Amazon rainforest while drilling for black gold.

The resulting health crisis – including documented birth defects and increased cancer rates caused largely by the pollution of groundwater supplies – has been borne primarily by the women, who are faced with the unhappy choice of either feeding their children toxic water, or letting them go thirsty.

“The waters are completely polluted with hydro carbons, 180 times higher than levels considered safe here in the U.S.,” Styler told IPS. “My task now is to shed light on this catastrophe that’s going on in Ecuador, but really mirrors so many catastrophes that involve basic loss of life sustenance.”

Still very much in the margins, the struggles of indigenous women are gradually nudging their way into the mainstream through cases just like the one unfolding in Ecuador, inching closer to the recognition the United Nations decided, decades ago, they so richly deserve.