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From
Address to the
Feminist Family Values Forum
by Mililani Trask
One
of the major issues that we addressed in
our Declaration was the expansion of militarism.
Militarism is a tool of oppression, a tool
that is used against women, and there is
a relationship that we see in the global
arena with our indigenous eye, between militarism
and rape and sexual slaverythe sexual trafficking
of indigenous women. Military regimes have
used rape as a mechanism to subvert indigenous
cultures. Rape is not only a crime that
occurs on the streets of the United States;
rape is a vehicle of militarism. We must
also understand and appreciate the relationship
between militarism and the dramatic increase
in AIDS and HIV, which is occurring globally
in indigenous communities. This is because
military forces, whether Americans in Okinawa
or others elsewhere in the world, are usually
males whose needs to satisfy their sexual
drive are indiscriminate. We need to know
how this impacts the spread of AIDS and
HIV in our world communities. While many
express concern about AIDS and HIV in the
context of personal health and prevention,
few seem to address with any integrity the
relationship between militarism and the
spread of AIDS globally. We must address
this issue if we are going to stop the AIDS-HIV
epidemic.
Because
of these failures by the program of action
issued by the United Nations, the Indigenous
Women's global Declaration further set forth
their own platform of demands. The first
is to recognize and respect our right to
self-determination as women; we are not
just the mothers of children, we are also
the mothers of nations. We need to enunciate
our agenda by asserting our right to self-determination.
Our rights are defined in the International
Covenant of Civil and Political Rights
as follows:
"The
right of self-determination is the right
of all peoples, not just men, but all peoples,
to determine our political status, and by
virtue of this right, to structure our own
political futures; to determine and define
how we wish to develop our economies, how
we wish to utilize our land, and how we
wish to create economic programs in our
community and structure health care programs.
This is the right of self-determination.
It is an international human right, and
it is time that we enunciate our right as
women in terms of international legal standards
that for too long have only been applied
to white males from the dominant society."
Secondly,
we demanded that the nations of the world
recognize and respect our right to our territories,
lands, and natural resources, and our right
for self-development, education and health,
in ways that are culturally appropriate
to our people. Because we are vitally concerned
with developing community-based economic
programs and addressing critical health
needs, we acknowledge and understand, as
women from indigenous societies, that these
programs must be culturally appropriate.
You cannot take health programs that have
been developed in New York down to Haiti,
impose them upon the community, then wonder
why the programs fail. In order to address
the health needs of the women from South
Africa, or women from the Philippines, you
must first acknowledge those cultures by
putting the health program in the appropriate
cultural context, if such programs are going
to be effective.
The
third area we examined was environmental
toxicity, and the other side of that ugly
little coin--environmental racism. A bad
habit of the transnational and G-7 nations
is consuming our resources, creating toxic
byproducts, then bringing those toxic byproducts
back to the lands of indigenous peoples.
The
women of Hawaii have the highest rate of
breast cancer in the world because in Hawaii,
for years, there was toxic dumping of DDT,
long after America outlawed the use of DDT
on the continent. It was prohibited only
in the continental United States. Why? To
make sure that American companies would
have open markets in Cuba, the Philippines,
and Hawaii, to dump it on our lands. So
DDT is in our water system. You might think
that the highest rate of breast cancer would
be somewhere else in the Third World, but
it's not. It's in Hawaii. Toxic dumping,
the mining of uranium, and other such demonic
practices have a necessary consequence,
and that is environmental racism. Where
are toxic dumps and nuclear rods being stored?
Why are they only on American Indian land,
or in the communities of black people and
Spanish-speaking Americans? There is a new
term we need to learn: "environmental racism."
It is one facet of racism.
A fourth area that we debated in Beijing
had to do with our rights to cultural and
intellectual property, and our rights to
control the biological diversity of our
territories. The Creator has given us a
great blessing, the diversity of the earth,
and the diversity of all of the life forms
of the earth. This is our cultural heritage.
All indigenous women know that we're placed
here to be guardians of the sacred Earth,
our mother. We are her daughters; that is
our calling, that is our place. We know
this from the time of our birth, and even
before, in our mother's womb. We are indigenous.
When we are born, that is when we are called
American. Nationality is only a sign based
on the geography of where we are born, but
before that time, in our mother's womb,
we are indigenous women.
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