Thank you. Meegwetch.
My name is Anita Olsen Harper. I'm Anishinabe from the Lac Seul First Nation in northwestern Ontario.
Our opening statement on addressing the issues of front-line assistance and violence prevention proposes the following proactive thoughts. These are split into two broad categories: education and prevention.
Education needs to be offered to children, youth, women and men, and parents. The goal of this type of education is to break the cycles of violence in the home and the community. The study of how western-based gender roles made inroads into first nations life is important for youth to learn. It is never too early to start learning this history: start in kindergarten and don't finish until the last grade.
Gender history can help native youth recognize and unlearn harmful male-female expectations and stereotypes. It helps reverse the production of gender that makes male privilege and female submission appear natural, rather than it being deliberately created and specifically nurtured.
As well, this type of teaching helps students understand the matriarchal systems by which many first nations were governed in times past. A community-based, school-based approach to education can involve the entire community, and particularly target young parents on how to be involved in their children's anti-violence education. Parents must also be taught by example, and themselves teach by example. This is an intergenerational approach to teaching.
The deterioration of healthy relationships between men and women and boys and girls is largely rooted in eurocentric gender values and placements. In older first nations societies, men and women had different but complementary gender roles and responsibilities. These were based on respect and honour. Children and youth were educated to fulfill their places and responsibilities toward peaceful living in society.
Youth involvement is vital to anti-violence learning and being accountable for one's own activities. It takes only one person to produce a violent household. Consequently, unlike most contemporary first nations populations, social problems were held in check by specific protocols and ways of doing that left youth free to fulfill their individual human potentials as active, contributing tribal members.
The accomplishment of gender is perpetuated by cultural beliefs about underlying and essential differences between women and men and the establishing of social structures that support these beliefs. It is indeed very important to teach about gender violence in schools. One academic stated that "My research over the past two decades on peer-to-peer sexual harassment has confirmed that schools may well be the training grounds for domestic violence through the practice of and permission for sexual harassment".
While such insights may be too intense for very young children, they can still be involved in identifying the gender prescriptions in media, with which they are undoubtedly already very familiar.
Foundational curricula can be established to explore various western-based expressions that ground the inferiority and subjugation of women in cultural norms. Students can be taught how to detect these normative portrayals. The values, ideals, and suggestive prods that emerge from popular gendered representations that are meant for children and youth should be seriously examined and questioned. Skilled instructors can teach parents how to initiate and further students' discourse and lead to the realization that such idealized and patterned gender arrangements can readily enable bullying and violence against women and girls.
Teaching first nations-specific gender discrimination could include a study of the legal categorizations of an "Indian" as defined by the Indian Act. Creative and imaginative teachers can help youth, male and female, locate themselves within federal legislation. They can develop curriculum that is interesting and involves students personally through a study of their placement within the Indian registry. Knowing one's identity strengthens individuals and helps them seek proper ways of non-violent self-expression.
From a broader perspective, such discussion can help students realize the violence of the Indian Act, and also the resilience of the first nations in withstanding the extermination efforts that are embedded therein. Specifically, Bill C-31 is a worthy area of study, including the history of its development by women who were actively opposed by governments and national native organizations because of internalized sexist discrimination against them.
Schools, communities, and parental protocols must complement one another so that maximum effectiveness of anti-gender bullying, anti-harassment, and anti-violence policies is achieved. There is evidence that sexist behaviours and attitudes are so much a part of the ethos of schools that they actually go unnoticed; they have become normalized.
Number two, prevention programs are needed. More parenting programs that help all parents with violence-free households are needed. There must be strict laws on abuse. The community must take a stand. Leadership must be an example and advocate for violence-free living. Leaders need to be healthy and violence-free themselves in order to support the families in their communities.
More male-based programs for boys, youth, and men are needed. Teach how to create safe spaces for genders to develop, starting in the classroom. Have a full week on a family violence prevention campaign, for example.
Prevention programs must include actual hands-on activities that include real-life case studies. They must involve workshops with elders, community leaders, and experts in the areas of health, justice, and sports. For example, teach how domestic violence negatively impacts on sports involvement.
The whole community must offer support for everyone else in the community: for the victims, for perpetrators, for youth, for elders, and for shelter staff. As appropriate, circles for discussion should be used among groups of women, women and men, and for families. Gatherings specifically for women on specific topics would work also. This format should be extended to men.
Community members who may not have a special community leadership profile, such as youth and elders—grassroots people—need opportunities for empowerment. Everyone needs opportunities to find and express their own voices for their own wants and needs in their own lives. An array of healing and teaching techniques would be needed for this, conducted by competent facilitators.
People need to go back to their own cultural teachings and stories, especially of their origins of creation. They need to know their own traditions and have strong, resilient foundations to protect them from the bad things that will for sure happen in their lives.
Prevention includes awareness-raising activities and being cognizant of public safety.
Finally, prevention work must always address systemic oppression, since it is the foundation of internal oppression. Oppression breeds violence: violence against the most vulnerable, who are the women and the children of aboriginal communities.
Meegwetch.