They demand that the States recognize the authority and competency of their communities in the handling of their lands, territories, and resources.

They pledge to be part of the solution to the food crisis that will consequently result in climate change.

Unanimously, the indigenous women of the world declared that if States did not restore the control that the women had over their land, territories, and resources, it would not only put the communities’ lives in danger, but all of humanity as well.

Through the “Lima Declaration,” endorsed by almost 200 female leaders from Africa, the Pacific, Europe, Asia, Latin America, North America, and Russia, they declared that their role in the preservation of biodiversity and ancestral wisdom of nature is a key piece in order to challenge the impacts of climate change.

“In this moment of serious crisis and impending, irreversible loss of biological diversity, indigenous women emphasize the obligation of the States to protect the territories of indigenous communities,” they demanded.

The declaration, released today, was prepared in the framework of the World Conference of Indigenous Women that met in Lima, Peru, attended by indigenous women from around the globe.

Resources like water, energy, and biodiversity, that contain fundamental economic and strategic value for countries, are located primarily in indigenous territories. This represents a risk for the lives of the communities, especially indigenous women.

A recent study produced by CEPAL shows that in Latin American the growth of mining, forestry, and other industries has resulted in the displacement of millions of indigenous women from their ancestral territories to urban areas.

Nevertheless, this does not mean a change in their life conditions. On the contrary, they already make up part of the most vulnerable populations, having been exposed to various forms of violence such as racism, exploitation of labor, and sexual trafficking.

“Indigenous women experience, in relation to our land, the same pain and effects caused by physical abuse and excessive exploitation,” they asserted in this declaration. Moreover, they warned that they are prepared to defend their communities’ lands, water, and resources with their lives.

The leaders demanded that the states recognize the authority and competency that indigenous communities hold over their lands, territories, and resources. They demanded that all development projects that affect their lives should be made with free, prior, and informed consent of their communities.

Moreover, they indicated that any policy or social program about health, education, or any that focuses on the well being of indigenous women should be carried out with their direct, full, and effective participation. “Nothing about us, without us. Everything about us, with us,” is the protest they adopt in this declaration.

This document, coupled with a plan of action, will be presented in different moments and mechanisms of the United Nations systems focused on the right of women and indigenous communities. The World Conference of Indigenous Communities will be held in 2014 in New York City.

At said conference, they will ask to guarantee the full and effective participation of indigenous women, above all the wise elderly and the young, and that the results of the findings prioritize the concerns of indigenous women.

Source: http://en.mujerindigena.com/indigenous-women-of-the-world-warn-that-they-will-give-their-lives-to-defend-their-lands/

Indigenous women around the world suffer from various forms of violence, from child marriage and domestic violence to loss of the land that sustains them and their families, according to participants at the World Conference of Indigenous Women held October 28 to 30 in Lima, Peru.

“We speak with the same voice. We have the same problems across the world,” said Agnes Leina, executive director of Il'laramatak Community Concerns, which works to empower girls and women in traditional herder communities in Kenya.

As corporations move in to build roads, open mines and obtain rights to water sources, especially in northern Kenya, “We are being pushed from our land, and the people most affected are the women and children,” she told reporters on the last day of the conference.

Indigenous women also have less access to health care and education, she said. Women often must walk miles to the nearest health center. Those who are seriously ill may die along the way, and pregnant women sometimes give birth before they reach a health-care facility, she said.

Women in those communities “are largely illiterate, so the cycle of poverty goes round and round,” she said.

In Latin America, which is home to more than 23 million indigenous women of more than 670 peoples, maternal mortality and teenage pregnancy rates are higher among indigenous than non-indigenous women, according to a new study published by the U.N. Economic Council for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

The region has made some progress in education, with more indigenous girls completing primary school, but far fewer girls than boys continue to high school or beyond, said Fabiana del Popolo of ECLAC.

“We indigenous women want to stop being invisible and become visible,” said Tarcila Rivera Zea, a Quechua woman from Peru who heads Chirapaq, an indigenous advocacy organization that helped organize the Lima event. Using data from national censuses, as the Latin America study did, women can propose policy changes to benefit themselves and their families, she said.

Some women seek change within their own communities. Elsa Cárdenas, a Quechua woman from the southern Peruvian highlands, called for a change in her community’s rules that would give women voice and vote in assemblies, which are currently open only to men, single women and widows.

In other cases, problems must be tackled on a global scale.

Canada’s northernmost reaches are suffering “extreme impacts” from global climate change, said Ruth Massie, grand chief of the Council of First Yukon Nations.

“We see the effects in our animals, birds and plants,” she said. “Migration routes of our animals have changed, our birds are fewer, our plants are affected by pollutants in the water, which we never had before.”

Those changes add to the toll on health, as people’s diets shift more toward processed foods, she said.

Despite the shared problems, there are hopeful signs in some countries. Myrna Cunningham, of the Center for Autonomy and Development of Indigenous Peoples (CADPI) in Nicaragua, said that 30 percent of her country’s land is now recognized as indigenous territory, although some communities still struggle to gain control over their territory.

That, she said, is a sign that “things can change, and women have a key role to play in that change.”

At the event, which was designed as a lead-up to the 2014 U.N. World Conference on Indigenous Peoples, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, director of Tebtebba, an indigenous policy and education organization in the Philippines, urged a greater decision-making role for indigenous women.

“We are the ones who carry the burdens of making our families survive and sustaining the ecosystem,” she said. “Our message to the United Nations, governments and corporations is that they should work with us and not against us, because we have solutions to many of the environmental, social, economic and cultural crises that (the world faces) today.”

Source: http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/11/02/world-conference-indigenous-women-urges-speaking-same-voice-152039

Over two hundred women from Africa, the Arctic, Asia, Latin America, North America, the Pacific, and Russia are gathering in Lima, Peru from October 28th to 30th during the World Conference of Indigenous Women. They are demand the greater prominence of Indigenous women at every level of decision-making and calling upon governments to dedicate funding to attend to the specific needs of Indigenous women.  

Source: http://www.culturalsurvival.org/news/indigenous-women-gather-world-conference-indigneous-women-lima-peru

As with most of the Molo indigenous people, from when she was a little girl Aleta Baun was taught that plants have their own souls and spirits so they should be protected.

“The Molo people have a spiritual connection to the land and believe that everything is connected,” Mama Aleta, as she is known, said.

She added that they symbolized land as flesh, water as blood, rocks as bones and forests as veins and hair.

“If we are separated from any one of these natural elements, or if any of the elements are destroyed, they start to die and lose their identity. So we find it very important to protect the land,” the woman who grew up in a farming family said.

Mama Aleta is one of the winners of the Goldman Environmental Prize. She received the 2013 Recipient for Islands and Island Nations. The prize supports individuals struggling to win environmental victories against the odds and inspires ordinary people to take extraordinary actions to protect the environment.

The Goldman Environmental Prize was created in 1989 by civic leaders and philanthropist Richard N. Goldman and his wife, Rhoda H. Goldman.

She received the prize for her efforts in organizing hundreds of local villagers to peacefully occupy marble mining sites in “weaving protests”. Using the strategy,  Mama Aleta stopped the destruction of sacred forestland in Molo.

Not many people know Molo. The area is located in the southern part of Mutis Mountain Sanctuary, Timor Tengah Selatan, East Nusa Tenggara (NTT). It is a resource-rich area with marble, manganese, gold, oil, gas and many other commodities.

Molo is also different from other parts of NTT that have arid land as the area is highly fertile and thick with heavy primary forest. It also has a prominent role as a water-catchment area with at least three watersheds and 13 rivers flowing from the mountains to irrigate many areas in Timor Tengah Selatan.

The rich resources of Molo have tempted outsiders to come to exploit and this has brought problems to the indigenous people who have protected the area for many generations.

In the 1980s, the district government issued permits to mining companies to cut marble stone from the mountains in Molo territory. Local government officials did so illegally without consulting local villagers, whom they regarded as obstacles to development programs. As deforestation and mining took hold, landslides became commonplace, polluting the waters and bringing great hardship to the villagers living downstream.

Mama Aleta said that in the beginning of 1996, she observed the mining companies clearing trees and rock in their mountains.

“Three years after that, three women and I decided to do something to stop the mining. We felt the only way to get support was to go from house to house and village to village and reach as many people as possible with our message,” she recalled.

It was not easy because the homes and villages were remote and those women walked sometimes six hours between villages. However Mama Aleta persisted in her efforts for the sake of Molo’s forests.

“We convinced people to join us by reminding them of our cultural belief that we cannot survive without all the elements of nature,” Mama Aleta, whose mother died while she was still little, said.

“We also emphasized to women that the forest provides the dyes for our weaving, which is a very important part of our lives. That inspired us to showcase our weaving in the form of a peaceful protest starting in 2006,” she added.

Of course her efforts created more problems. Mama Aleta became a target for the mining interests and local authorities as they put a price on her head. After surviving a particularly close assassination attempt, Mama Aleta went into hiding in the forest with her baby. Several other villagers were repeatedly arrested and badly beaten.

Despite the violent intimidation, Mama Aleta grew the movement to include hundreds of villagers. It culminated in a weaving occupation where 150 women spent a year sitting on the marble rocks at the quarry, quietly weaving their traditional fabrics in protest.

In the Molo culture, women are expected to be homemakers and tend to their families.

“But when we began our protest, women realized that they could do more — take a stand and be heard. Women are also the recognized landowners in the Molo culture, and this reawakened in those women who hadn’t been actively speaking out a desire to protect their land,” Mama Aleta said.

The Molo people also believed it was important to have the women on the frontlines of the protests and to act as the negotiators because they are the ones who use the forest, for food, medicine and dyes, to survive, and therefore were the most passionate about the cause.

“The men were fully supportive of us, but did not position themselves at the forefront of the campaign because they would have likely had clashes or conflicts with the mining companies and been the target of
attacks,” she added.

While the women protested at the quarry, the men provided domestic support at home, cooking, cleaning and caring for the children.

In the face of the villagers’ peaceful and sustained presence, marble quarrying became an increasingly untenable endeavor for the companies involved. Public awareness of the weaving occupation grew, and Indonesian government officials took notice. By 2010, the mining companies, reacting to the pressure, halted work at all four sites within the Molo territories and abandoned their operations.

Mama Aleta is now working with the Molo people and other indigenous communities in the area to map their territory. The goal is to claim their land and ensure it is protected by law, and to conserve and reforest the area that was destroyed by the mining operations.

“We especially want to conserve the upstream region of our territory because it is a watershed for the entire island. We are considering a joint title for our three communities and placing the land under collective ownership of the communities,” she said.