Friends, it is heartening to at least see something in this male-dominated north about what women want.
The ongoing effort to have more women in traditional Old Boy’s Clubs like our legislative assembly should be the real business of government, that is to see there is more of an all-around voice.
As it is, women account for almost 50 per cent of our population, but only have a total of 10 per cent possible say in our one body of legislature.
Here the last few weeks of further education winds down and as a third-year Indigenous PhD student, issues and concerns like these remind me that the answers often have to do with our traditional ways of doing.
The medicine wheel, for instance – which I used as a format for a third-year university course I taught – incorporates just about anything you want to do in life.
Beginning with various theories, or ways of knowing, there are many Indigenous societies which have built-in guarantees for women.
Matriarchal societies like the Mohawk of the Six Nations and our southern relatives, the Navajo Dineh are two of these, which set the women right at the center of how things should be done.
This at the very least sets forth a more traditional, less ego and greed-based approach.
The teaching tool then goes on to historical instances, mistakes and omissions from the past, which need changing. Western-based official bodies, like our Government of the Northwest Territories, are pretty well modelled from the British, hence its male dominated nature.
Caroline Cochrane, one of the small group spearheading the effort to gain more female numbers in Northern government, brings up a very relevant point, that women are ‘socialized to be timid’, to automatically take the back seat on any issue, even when it directly involves their safely and well-being.
This brings back one of my former articles in A Mountain View, here in News/North, from some time ago, titled “Our spiritual power games”. It brought up the fact that men, in particular, like to push their weight around, even to the point of being especially appointed by God himself.
We see this going on all the time, even in the ‘traditional’ hand games, which only men are allowed to play, the dutiful wives and girls expected to back their men of choice.
When you put men at the front like this, you risk the grave danger of having situations like our Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, for one.
The medicine wheel continues on, to specifically include our Northern communities and the spiritual, but the point is that we do need more of the female voice in our future.
Mahsi, thank you.