The ‘Indigenous Women’ behind the ‘Other’ Beijing Declaration

• Main Author: Schramm, Bérénice K
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford University PressOxford 2023
• Subjects: anishina*; inuit
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198868453.003.0024; https://academic.oup.com/book/chapter-pdf/57973750/oso-9780198868453-chapter-24.pdf

Abstract A few days before the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action were unanimously adopted by the 189 countries gathered in 1995 at the Fourth UN Women Conference, a hundred Indigenous women attending the parallel NGO Forum issued their own Declaration. With this ‘Other’ Declaration, its collective authors painted a raw portrait of our world: a place where the land is simultaneously the sacred origin of everything yet remains exploited and many of its inhabitants oppressed—Indigenous peoples more than any others perhaps. The Beijing Declaration of Indigenous Women can therefore be appraised as one piece of the (so far) un-obtained radical legacy of this period, including all that it could have engendered if realized. It can further be read as the outcome of an exercise in world-making and institutional portraiture on the part of Indigenous women: with it, they painted themselves as global actors to be reckoned with. Through Anishinaabe activist Winona LaDuke’s and Inuit activist Mary Sillett’s writings relating their experience in Beijing, the reader is thus provided with a unique window into this overlooked (world/self-)portraiture whose relevance for better global governance is still unparalleled.