Women at the forefront of a healing movement

Idle No More Toronto organizer Wanda Nanibush delivered a lecture to an overflowing house at the University of Toronto’s George Ignatieff Theatre on Nov. 12.

She delivered the 16th Annual Dame Nita Barrow Lecture on the subject of Idle No More: Histories of Indigenous Women’s Resistance. Writer, media creator, community animator and arts consultant, Nanibush is also Curator-in-Residence at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery.

Two well-behaved little girls played quietly with books and colouring pencils on the stage just below the lectern where Nanibush delivered her lecture. It was a reminder to the audience that this was a gathering organized by Aboriginal women.

There were no adults to chase the girls back to their seats, urging them to be quiet and sit still; another reminder, this one of cultural differences, that children are cherished by the community and, as such, are never a nuisance. The opportunity for listening and social interaction is a learning experience for the child.

The thrust of Nanibush’s lecture was the resiliency of Indigenous women and how their traditional leadership role fell victim during the process of colonization and how women have reclaimed it, most recently through the Idle No More movement.

The INM movement, she said, is largely led by grassroots Indigenous women, but is not exclusionary.

“It’s a movement where men and women, Elders and children hold hands together and round dance,” she said. It’s based on traditional cultural teachings and “we think of the mind-body-spirit as engaged together in a dance of balance,” unlike Western thinking that splits the mind and body away from each other.

The actions under the INM banner have been mainly peaceful and ceremonial in nature, making it markedly different from other massive international Indigenous-led movements in history, she said.

Nanibush spoke about the history of racism against Aboriginal women in Canada that started at the time of contact and was reinforced by policies and legislation, primarily the Indian Act.
Women were shut out of Indian Act-leadership until 1952 and, even now, there are very few Indigenous women who are leading Band governments, she said.

Nanibush explained at length about how the Indian Act dictated that status Indian women who married non-Indians lost their status, which included treaty rights, rights to education and health benefits and the right to live in their home community.
When this was challenged in the courts by Indigenous women in the 1960s, Nanibush said, the male leadership did not support them. In fact, the National Indian Brotherhood (the forerunner of the Assembly of First Nations), along with some of the prairie Indian organizations, were intervenors in the case together with the Canadian government.

“They made strange bedfellows,” said Nanibush. It was not until 1985 that the Indian Act was amended and the discriminatory section removed.

Indigenous women have assumed leadership roles in the healing movement, said Nanibush. Friendship centres, most of the major urban organizations, day care centres, have largely been started by Aboriginal women across the country.

“They’ve been working at the ground level healing their communities from historical trauma…and have counteracted cultural discontinuity all brought on by colonialism and racism,” she said.

Later in her talk, she said, “The amount of control exacted over Indigenous people, it’s more than a policy. It’s something  that’s lived through the body and the mind and that’s where our women have worked, getting that level of control out of our bodies, out of our minds, out of our spirit. And out of our families.”

The main thrust of the INM movement that is taking centre stage right now, Nanibush said, is the Indigenous nationhood movement.

“That nation-building process is an action that we are doing as a people for ourselves and with each other as Indigenous peoples. That is all the work we have to do to de-colonize, de-Christianize, to pick up our bundles…and learn how to govern from that place and learn how to raise our children from that place and learn how to heal from that place. That’s the Indigenous nationhood movement.”