SAVE THE DATE! Gendered Impacts: Indigenous Women speak about Resource Extraction, a KAIROS BC Symposium, October 13, 2015
“ In a lot of countries women are on the frontline of this resistance and logically so because they are the ones who know by heart and by their Indigenous knowledge how mining, for example, is going to impact on their food… Yet, their contributions are invisible.”
Joan Carling, a member of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, May 2014
Indigenous women from Canada to Latin America to the Philippines offer perspectives on resource extraction that are often not heard or understood when evaluating a project’s risks and benefits or when tracking the long term social and environmental impacts. Also, there is growing evidence that women are differently and disproportionately affected by the negative impacts of resource extraction including environmental contamination, gendered based violence and other social, health and environmental impacts.
The BC Symposium, Gendered Impacts: Indigenous Women speak about Resource Extraction will be an opportunity to hear directly from Indigenous women and organizations from Canada, the Philippines and Ecuador about the impact of resource extraction on their communities and to learn about their efforts to defend collective rights and the environment. It offers an opportunity to learn from research by Indigenous women and to begin to address the significant knowledge gaps in this area.
The symposium builds on KAIROS’ integrated work on Indigenous rights, resource extraction and gender justice. While KAIROS has historically worked for some time on these issues with partners in Canada and the global South, recently these have been brought together in the Woman of Courage program, with a focus on Indigenous women and collective rights. In May 2014, KAIROS together with Horizons of Friendship organized a delegation of eight Indigenous women from Canada, Central America and the Philippines to the 13th Session of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) in New York. In November 2014 KAIROS organized a symposium in Ottawa on the Gendered Impacts of Resource Extraction with many of the same organizations and women who are involved in planning the upcoming BC Symposium.
The symposium will take place on October 13, 2015 at the Vancouver Public Library. It will take place the day before the GEMM (the Global Energy Minerals and Markets) 2015 conference in Vancouver, scheduled from October 14-16, allowing presenters the opportunity to participate strategically in the conference, and to present findings and concerns to industry.
The BC Symposium will be an opportunity to deepen our knowledge and understanding of the findings to date, to increase awareness and engagement on these issues, and to develop common strategies and recommendations.
The symposium is being organized by KAIROS in partnership with a number of groups including First Nations Women Advocating for Responsible Mining (FNWARM) , Pauktuutit Inuit Women of Canada , Quebec Native Women/Femmes autochtones du Québec and the Wabanaki Confederacy
Details about program and speakers will be forthcoming.
