Justice Embodied Bearing the future to protect the Earth

This article really makes you think.


Justice Embodied
Bearing the future to protect the Earth
by _Sandra Cuffe
The Dominion - http://www.dominion paper.ca

Image from: vibrakeys.com
(http://www.dominion paper.ca/ images/3906)
VANCOUVER—A boy found his younger brother’s body hanging in the basement.
Another mine passed the environmental review process. More women are going
missing and are murdered. The search for a nuclear waste site continues.
Stories told by the media are presented as a series of disconnected
incidents and issues. Most governments, federal or otherwise, work in a similar
framework of disconnection, whether to determine jurisdiction or to deflect
accountability. Public discussion often separates reality into compartments.
The discourse of many groups and campaigns working on environmental and
climate issues explicitly rejects this disconnected perspective. However, that
same discourse has been questioned for its failure to make many other
connections that Indigenous peoples, women and others have been pointing out
for decades.
“Once you go to a birth, you know how connected you are to the earth, and
to all creation around us,” says Neddie Thompson, a traditional midwife from
Akwesasne, in Kanienkehaka (Mohawk) territory. “It’s the women who give
birth to all of our children...to take care of this land.”
“As an Indigenous feminist, one of the links I, as well as many Indigenous
women across the world, see is between reproductive health and
environmental justice. Simultaneously I am angry about the lack of recognition of this
link within most environmental discourse,” wrote Cree/Norwegian Indigenous
feminist Erin Konsmo. Also a student, she added that “[it’s] insulting to
hear in environmental classes that the idea of any form of sustainability
is a new concept.”
The declaration from the International Indigenous Women’s Environmental and
Reproductive Health Symposium held last year in California states that “
[sovereignty] and autonomy in relation to our lands, territories and
resources are intricately connected to sovereignty and autonomy in relation to our
bodies, minds and spirits.”

You can read the rest of the story at: (http://www.dominion paper.ca/ articles/ 3897#)