First Nations women have always been leaders

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/01/2016 (3574 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Being a First Nations chief in Manitoba is a tough job. You’re on call all the time, the person everyone looks to for solutions to every problem. You must cope with the triple whammy of chronic underfunding, profound poverty and a Canadian public that suspects you’re a corrupt, overpaid mooch.

You are stymied by unyielding federal bureaucracy and a relic of an Indian Act. You lurch from one deadly crisis to another. Then, band politics being what they are, you get defeated after two years.

It’s a wonder anyone wants the job, let alone a woman. Still, Manitoba has remarkably few female chiefs, far fewer than the national average. That’s despite the fact indigenous women overwhelmingly dominate grassroots movements such as Idle No More, are three times better-educated than indigenous men and seemingly run nearly every social service organization, band department, policy shop and community group in the indigenous world.

First, though, a bit of good news.

Nationally, about a fifth of First Nations are helmed by women, roughly the same as the percentage of cities led by female mayors. That’s an imperfect comparison, to be sure, but a useful gauge. Similarly, about 22 per cent of band councillors in Manitoba are women, which is also pretty close to the number of female city councillors across Canada — 26 per cent.

In the last 20 years, the number of female chiefs has doubled Canada-wide, according to Cora Voyageur, a University of Calgary sociologist and First Nations woman who literally wrote the (only) book on this topic. As she says, it’s tough to find a corner of the mainstream political world where the number of women in elected roles has doubled in two decades.

Now for the bad: more than a third of the province’s reserves have no women serving on council at all. And, Manitoba has only seven female chiefs, about 11 per cent of the total and well below the national average. Until Monday, when Canupawakpa Dakota Nation elected veteran indigenous leader Viola Eastman as chief, the number was even thinner.

What’s particularly galling, in an odd way, is those seven represent some of the most talented chiefs in the province. Imagine what Manitoba could be if there were more chiefs like them, more like Francine Meeches, longtime chief of Swan Lake First Nation. She’s a tiny, wiry powerhouse, a bit intimidating in her sternness and one of the architects of that reserve’s remarkable economic development. She’s bluntly upbraided fellow First Nations leaders for misspending and corruption. Now, she’s among the Treaty 1 chiefs involved in the deal to buy the Kapyong Barracks from the federal government.

Or, take War Lake’s Betsy Kennedy, the longest-serving female chief in the province. When asked to describe her, people I spoke with used the word “revered.” Kennedy has navigated the complex negotiations with Manitoba Hydro over the Keeyask dam. She’s earned a reputation as one of the most progressive chiefs when it comes to transparency, accountability and community engagement. And, as she told a Commons committee two years ago, she handles conflict with aplomb.

“I get more people being upset and yelling at me, and they know, but they know also that I won’t get mad or upset,” she told MPs on the status of women committee in 2014. “It’s a way of allowing them to vent, because they won’t do that to my councillors who are male, or I don’t notice male chiefs being spoken to in that manner.”

Traditional indigenous society has often been described as egalitarian, in some cultures even matriarchal. But Voyageur says the Indian Act is one reason among many that few women run or get elected chief. Until 1951, the Indian Act decreed that only men could vote in band elections — just one, perhaps not even the most egregious, example of the controlling, infantilizing colonial rules imposed on indigenous people that marginalized women the most. The Indian Act and all of its mechanisms sought to keep women out of the public sphere, consigned to the realm of children, kitchen and church even more than non-indigenous society did, argues Voyageur.

Sheila North Wilson, the first female grand chief of the north’s Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak, said Indian agents wanted only to deal with the men of a particular band. Even though women were still consulted, were still the delegaters and organizers and advisers who wielded significant power behind the scenes, it was men who were slotted into leadership roles early on. That pattern persists.

“All along, it’s been women that have been active in the background,” said North Wilson, who sees signs of progress. “In the community, we know who they are.”

Manitoba is about to celebrate the 100th anniversary of (some) women winning the vote. And the country is soon to begin an inquiry into violence against indigenous women and girls, an inquiry that’s sure to expose the worst effects of a virulent combination of misogyny and racism on the daily lives of aboriginal women.

There may be no better time to encourage the remarkable cadre of women working in the background to step forward and take their place as chiefs.

maryagnes.welch@freepress.mb.ca