Chapter Seven
Practicing Indigenous Feminism: Resistance to Imperialism1
Makere Stewart-Harawira
The writing of this chapter has challenged me in a number of ways, not the least of which
has been to define for myself my own view of Indigenous feminism. The central question
of this book is whether or not Indigenous feminism is a legitimate position. And if so, the
corollary question is, what are they? What do they look like? What represents an
Indigenous feminist? Thus the first challenge for me has been to reflect on my own
positionality in relation to Indigenous feminism.
I preface this discussion with a brief explanation of terms. In this chapter I have
adopted the term „Indigenous‟ rather than „Aboriginal‟ because while the term aboriginal
is applied to all Indigenous peoples, in the context of North America it is most commonly
used to refer to First Nations, Metis and Inuit, all of whom make up the Indigenous
peoples of North America. I am an Indigenous person from Aotearoa New Zealand.
Although we would argue that we are far from homogenous as people, the generic term
most commonly applied since contact is Maori. I am also of northern Scots descent.
Hence I approach this chapter conscious of my dual heritage yet positioning myself as
neither hybrid nor of multiple subjectivities. I am simply both. Both descent lines were
once strongly matriarchal. Neither can be described thus today. Historical forms of
imperialism and colonialism have contributed to the rewriting of Indigenous histories and
the re-gendering of our societies.
Most generally today, I do not consciously engage in writing or speaking from a
feminist position. This is not due to any deliberate decision. I simply am what I am.
Indigenous woman, activist, grandmother. In earlier years my occasional foray into what
some might conceive as a Maori feminist stance was met with derision from my late
husband who claimed that such a position merely demonstrated my lack of „Maoriness‟.
This echoes a debate within Maori society whose roots begin in the re-inscribing of
gender roles within Maori society by white anthropologies and historians and which has
continued to disrupt the fabric of Maori society across many tribes and communities.
Despite the evidence that Maori women had powerful leadership roles in pre-contact
Maori society, (c.f. Mikaere 1999; Pere 1994;Yates-Smith 1998), in today‟s post-colonial
society (if today can be said to be „post-colonial), the historical role of Maori women is
frequently misinterpreted to be secondary to that of males, a point that is further taken up
elsewhere in this chapter.
The convictions that I hold are unquestionably shaped by my historical
consciousness. Central to this chapter and to my stance with regard to Indigenous
feminism is my conviction that both the project of decolonisation and that of human
survival and ultimately, peace for a world hovering on the brink of self-destruction
require, at the very least, the return of the feminine principle and in the process, right
balance and the compassionate mind, to the centre of our political ontologies. An
essentialist position? I hardly think so, as I will argue later.
As the title suggests, I have chosen to situate this chapter within the complexities
of the new forms of imperialism that characterize a world seemingly gone mad, and the
particular importance of Indigenous women in this situation. My thesis here is twofold:
firstly, that Indigenous women have a vital role to play in the realisation of alternative
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models of „being in the world‟ and secondly, that this represent a particularly poignant
paradox. On the one hand, Indigenous women are among the most deeply marginalised
groups in the world, most especially in „western‟ countries where, relative to others
groups, they are over-represented in the worst social indices of poverty, health,
unemployment and, as Amnesty International‟s report regarding Aboriginal women in
Canada highlights, homicide. Yet by virtue of their historical role in pre-colonial
Indigenous societies, large numbers of which were, as Paula Gunn Allen (1986) points
out, gynocentric, through their ability to reconcile the political and the spiritual,
Indigenous women have the power to facilitate a sea-change in the political ontologies of
governance.
The reconciliation between the political and the spiritual is the primary task in the
development of new and sustainable ways of compassionate co-existence on this planet.
The political and the spiritual are, as Linda Hogan (cited Allen 1986, 169) wrote, “the
two wings of one bird and that bird is the knowledge of the interconnectedness of
everything”. In locating myself in the tensions that this discussion invokes for me at a
personal level, I acknowledge the deeply political nature of the act of writing, as the
discussion on contemporary imperialism that follows, bears out. The important point that
these discussions preface is the urgency of the need for a new political ontology of
governance and spiritually-grounded, feminist –centred political ethics as one critical
response.
Writing as Politics
Like many other Indigenous academic women, my writing is the primary vehicle for my
own participation in the global struggle to find a positive way forward out of the global
morass of despair and frustration, and to bring to birth a politics of hope that has specific
and particularistic relevance within a broad global ontology of being. The contradictions
inherent in this positioning are obvious. One of the issues it brings into focus is the pitfall
of essentialism and universalism. Another is the question of how I mediate the
complexities of the self that I bring to my writing?
Trinh-min-hah well articulates the struggle by feminist critics to bring reflexivity
to bear upon the mode of writing and speaking, so that it is no longer possible to write or
speak unthinkingly without being aware of the production of subjectivities that
accompanies such activities. Trinh refers to the “triple bind” of women writers of colour
which is that no matter what position she takes, she will eventually be “made to feel she
must choose from among three conflicting loyalties. Writer of color? Woman writer? Or
woman of color?”2 Maori3 woman academics also engage the dilemma of as whom do
we write, and for whom? (c.f. Smith, L.T. 1992; Pihama & Johnston 1994). For Maori,
the act of „writing back‟ is one of many important means for the recentring of Maori
ways of being and knowing as central. Thus writing as „Maori woman academic‟
becomes simultaneously an act of resistance and reclamation.
My own academic work is underpinned by what Gadamer (1998, 28) calls an
“historically effective consciousness”, a consciousness of the way that my own historical
understandings and traditions, combined with particular sets of belief systems and values,
shape both my interactions with the world and with others, and my interpretations. My
understandings of events both past and present are always subject to my own
conditionality. In my case, I write also as the daughter of a diasporic and ardently
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nationalist Scotsman with Highland Celtic roots. I come from two historical traditions in
which women were both knowledge holders and decision makers. Hence my
understandings and interpretations of the past, present and future are tempered by an
intentional re-membering, re-claiming, re-articulating which emerges from the political
and cultural circumstance of being and knowing as a Waitaha woman academic who is
also Celtic Scot, with a background of Maori activism, one who is simultaneously
mother, and grandmother and above all, a daughter of Papa-tua-nuku4.
Such a politics of course carries its own risk. As Trinh (1998, p. 21) states,
“writing constantly refers to writing and no writing can ever claim to be „free‟ of other
writings”. One of my objectives in writing The New Imperial Order (2005) was to argue
that traditional Indigenous ontological principles provide a framework and context for the
development of a socio/politico/economic ontology of the possible, whilst at the same
time endeavoring to avoid the pitfalls of essentialism and a romanticisation of the past
which presents Indigenous peoples as the non-violent, helpless victims of the marauding
West. As Trinh asks, “How do you inscribe difference without bursting into a series of
euphoric narcisstic accents of yourself and your own kind? Without indulging in a
marketable romanticism or a naïve whining about your own condition?” -- something
that I have struggled, I fear unsuccessfully, to avoid in my own writing. “Between the
twin chasms of navel-gazing and navel-erasing”, she pointedly remarks, “the ground is
narrow and slippery. None of us can pride ourselves on being sure-footed there” (Ibid,
21).
Nevertheless, this chapter is written from the perspective of one Indigenous
woman‟s endeavor to bear witness against the wanton violence that marks humanity‟s
headlong slide into the abyss of self-destruction in the twenty-first century, and to call for
a new model for „being in the world, a political ontology grounded in spirit. And because
it is my privilege to be the grandmother of six wonderful people, I further use this space
to call for the voice of the grandmothers to be powerfully raised against systems of being
that are founded in greed, consumption and corruption as they impel our world yet further
into the abyss of genocide and destruction, and to demonstrate in its place a political
ontology of compassion, love and spirit as the only possible remedy, the only way
forward. This is, I claim, the most urgent decolonization project today.
At this point, I want to digress momentarily to address the accusations of
essentialism that will undoubtedly be levelled at my arguments, in particular those based
on a post-structuralist approach to feminism. Post-modernist and post-structuralist
arguments are frequently invoked, most notably by white Anglo-American feminists, as
justifications of the claim that the task of debunking justifications for women‟s
oppression through her linking with nature is undermined by representations that link
women and nature. These linkings are seen as functioning, to quote Alaimo (1997) to
foreclose “the possibilities for agency” [by women] by “concealing the signification of
„woman‟”. Alaimo draws here on Judith Butler‟s argument that the “immobilized,”
“paralysed” referent of the category “woman” hampers feminist agency, and the
“constant rifting” over the term “woman” is itself the “ungrounded ground of feminist
theory”(Butler 1992, cited in Alaimo 1997).
I am bothered by post-modern, post-structuralist, post-colonial arguments of this
nature. Here the category of „female‟ is deconstructed to the point where there are no
longer categories of race, class and ethnicity but a nebulous state in which, as Grande
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(2004) suggests, the domain of the individual has superseded the arena of political
struggle. In this arena of post-everything feminism, „woman‟ and „feminist‟ exist as
either endlessly abstract potentialities that encompasses the oppressed as well as the
oppressor, so that there is no longer a space for the oppressed. I wonder about the effect
of such approaches. If the goal of feminist politics is “to make visible the complexities of
identity that have been made invisible by dominant discourses deeply invested in a
knowable subject” (Butler, cited Grande, 2004, p. 136), then it seems to me that these
formulations represent yet another invisibilizing of the specific experiences of Indigenous
women within the feminist democratic project.
In response to post-structuralist projects which ignore and thus conceal the effects
of power and economics and instead inscribe difference as the new totalizing discourse,
Third World feminist Eisenstein (2004, 183) writes “Feminisms, especially of the West in
the US, must be ready to speak against the cultural and economic domination of their
home country that creates such impossible pain and sadness to people at home, as well as
elsewhere”. Eisenstein calls for a radicalization of feminism in which differences are
neither “silenced in some hierarchically privileged order…, or set up oppositionally
against each other” (Ibid, 187). An inclusive feminism is one that will not only recognise
difference but seeks to disrupt privileging impact of the unequal structures of power.
Whilst I concur with the view that deeply embedded discourses of the inter-
linking of Woman and Nature have frequently invoked both as passive victim I am
concerned about the effects of indigenous delinking of these categories. One is that the
delinking of Indigenous from Nature, and by definition also the land, is in danger of
undercutting the claims on which Indigenous peoples the world over base their claims to
self-determination, that of place in relationship to the land. This relationship is one of the
cornerstones by which peoples are identified as „Indigenous‟. In response to accusations
that the linking of land and women functions to re-inscribe Indigenous women as passive
and subordinate, I argue that this evidences the ongoing inscribing of colonial
interpretations onto Indigenous societies.
Unlike the societies of the colonizing countries, women and land were held in the
highest regard in Indigenous societies. It is the case that some traditional Indigenous
languages contain many textual keys that ascribe the feminine to the earth. One such key
within Maori language is the term „Papatuanuku’, Earth Mother. Another is „whenua’,
which means both land and placenta. There are multiple well-known references to land as
the sustainer and provider of life. Ko te ukaipo, te whenua. Ko te whenua, te ukaipo.
Literally, „the earth is my breastmilk‟, interpreted as „the land is my nourisher and
sustainer‟.
By no means do such sayings signify Maori women as historically passive or
subordinate. For many Maori women, and I include here Rangimarie Te Uriki Rose Pere,
Sana Murray and Del Wihongi as representative of strong, contemporary Maori women
leaders and activists for whom our link to Papatuanuku, Earth Mother, is a source of our
strength, and for whom this linking far from implies a weak-kneed, milly-molly-mandy
view of the nature and role of Maori women as passive. On the contrary. Despite the
colonizing mythologies of early anthropologists and historians and in contradiction to oft-
repeated arguments today promulgated today primarily by Maori men, Maori women in
at least some parts of Aotearoa New Zealand fought alongside the men and paddled the
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war canoes. They were warriors and they were healers. They were spiritual leaders and
political leaders. They were advisers and they were politicians.
The damaging effect of colonisation on Maori women, which is most strongly
evidenced in the exclusion of Maori women from the treaty settlement process and
today‟s forms of tribal governance, is the basis for a Treaty claim lodged with the
Waitangi Tribunal in 1993.5 This claim, led by a group of dynamic Maori women
activists, asserts the powerful leadership role of Maori women in pre-contact societies
while seeking redress from the Crown (Henare 1994). The exclusion of Maori women
from the treaty settlement process gained further momentum in the 1980s when the shift
to a neoliberal treaty settlement process in response to the challenge to the state‟s
privatisation agenda by senior Maori males during the 1980s, saw the emergence of a
new breed of Maori male entrepreneurs, two of whom were awarded knighthoods for
their negotiating acumen (Seuffert 2002). In her analysis of the silencing of Maori
women, Seuffert points out that this process mirrored the reconstruction of the national
identity from one of caring community identity to the highly individualist, self-sufficient
competitor in the global marketplace. These new Maori male entrepreneurs represented
the new, „civilized‟ Maori, one who was thoroughly incorporated into the global
economy.
Almost without exception, Maori women have remained on the margins. In the
context of corporatized post-settlement enterprises deals and the global economic
imperative of imperialism, the on-going sale of Maori land (some of which is leased
back) by some male-dominated corporate tribal trust boards is an impelling reason for
arguing that the decolonizing of Maori society requires, at the very least, a recognition of
and return to the role and function of Maori women within political and spiritual
leadership. Yet this claim is not likely to have an easy passage. I turn here to the main
context for this discussion, the imperative for responding to the new forms of global
imperialism.
Imperialist Terrorism in Our Time
There is no longer any denial of the fact that today we are witnessing a new configuration
of imperialism that has global ambitions. In the New Imperial Order I identified two
competing and parallel conceptualizations of empire in the literature, one seen in the
identification by senior state diplomat Robert Cooper, of the European Community as a
postmodern empire; the other seen most strongly in the activities of the neoconservative
cabal currently dominating the George Bush Junior administration of the US
Government. In the case of Cooper, his solution to what he refers to as a global crisis
precipitated by the harboring of agents of terror in „premodern‟ or „barbaric states‟ is
„postmodern imperialism‟ represented by what he calls a “new configuration of states”
(1998, 42). Accordingly, for Cooper the European Union (EU) is „the most developed
example of a postmodern system”, its twin principles being transnational co-operation
and openness pertaining largely to issues of order and security (ibid, 10-18). In this „more
highly developed‟ form of state, the defense of regional borders against the nationalisms
of „less developed‟ states is paramount. Its chief characteristics are mutual interference in
traditionally domestic affairs coupled with mutual surveillance; the breaking down of the
distinction between domestic and foreign affairs; the growing irrelevance of borders; and
the rejection of force for dispute-solving. In stark contrast to the concept of collective
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rights which characterize Indigenous peoples‟ political, social and economic formations
and aspirations, the putative end-product of this process was given as “the freedom of the
individual; first protected by the state and later protected from the state” (2003, 76).
Since the conclusion of that writing, a second imperialist state model with similar
hallmarks has emerged. It is identifiable in the Council for Foreign Relation‟s (CFR)
proposal for a North American Community of which the new Security and Prosperity
Partnership of North America (SPP) publicly announced through the media in March
2005, is the precursor. The catchwords for this new postmodern state endeavor are again
security and economic prosperity. The SSP international framework for trilateral and
bilateral cooperation between Canada, the US and Mexico is designed to strengthen
North American competitiveness particularly in the face of increasing economic
competition from China, India and the EU. The twin agendas of national security and
economic prosperity are supported by three key principles: “improved security from
external threats to North America; strengthened internal measures; and bolstered
economic growth for the region as a whole, particularly in the face of increased global
competition”(Ackleson & Kastner 2005). The CFR, however, has a wider-reaching
agenda, that of establishing a North American Community by 2010. Recommendations
for achieving this include: a common security perimeter; a dispute tribunal; a review of
previously excluded sectors of NAFTA; a North American energy strategy; the
restructure and reform of Mexico‟s public finances; the full development of Mexico‟s
energy resources, and a North American inter-parliamentary group (Council for Foreign
Relations, 2005). The inherent characteristic is capitalism‟s twin logics of expansion and
accumulation.
As Samir Amin wrote, “capitalism has always been …by nature, a polarizing
system‟…the concurrent construction of dominant centers and dominated peripheries,
and their reproduction deepening in each stage‟ (Amin 2004, 1). In the current phase of
US imperialism, the Monroe Doctrine is expanded to encompass not just the entire globe
but space as well. The unequivocal objective of American empire in the 21st century is
explicit in the 2002 US National Security Strategy document. Throughout the entire
world there is one only economic and political system that is viable, it declares, and that
is the American model of liberal democracy and free enterprise. And this model would
henceforth be promoted and defended through the unilateral use of force, pre-emptively if
necessary.
Lest there should be any doubt, the link between the imposition of „endless war‟
in the Middle East by western powers and the intention of the US to assert ownership and
domination over the world‟s largest sources of energy resources is unequivocally laid out
in Brezizinski‟s The Grand Chessboard, published in 1997. The escalating violent civil
war that has encompassed Iraq in the face of the West‟s intervention on behalf of
„freedom and democracy‟ and which is in danger of becoming the downfall of both the
British and American elected state heads, is but a harbinger of things to come.
In a world in which militarism and endless warfare have become the signifiers for
a civilization in which westernization is the legitimizing ideology for what can only be
described as a bloodbath, in which the disfigurement and murder of young children, the
wanton and deliberate murder of civilians fleeing in obedience to orders for their
attackers, deliberate targeted attacks on hospitals and places of worship, the deliberate
murder of UN peacekeepers, the destruction of thousands of years of knowledge and
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historical records as in the case of Afghanistan and Iraq, and other horrific the casualties
of war, are sanctioned as a geopolitical strategy to exert domination over the Middle East.
In the case of Israel‟s unholy US-sponsored war of terror on Lebanon, Chossudovsky
(2006) notes that the inauguration of the worlds largest strategic pipeline, one which will
channel to Western markets over a million barrels of oil, was inaugurated on the same
day and “at the very outset as the onset of the Israeli sponsored bombings of Lebanon”,
July 13, 2006. Today most of the world stands in silent complicity as the US-Israel
alliance ensures that no other power will emerge to challenge US supremacy in that
region by razing cities and villages, shooting down fleeing women and children and
bombing helpless children sheltering in terror in underground basements.
Hardt and Negri‟s argument that one of the defining characteristics of Empire is
crisis and decline (2000, 386) is some cause for hope. That the American version of neo-
imperialism is in decline can hardly be in doubt. The world watches in increasing
cynicsm as US foreign policies unravel;, as its Straussian politics of fear become
increasingly hollow and the polemics of its elected president lurch further into
incredulity; as trillions of dollars of US debt skyrockets and US health and welfare
policies sink to the lowest in the western world; and as the rest of the world becomes
increasingly exhausted or alternatively, incensed, by its strident insistence on bombing
„undemocratic‟ countries and those unwilling to align with its policies of destruction, into
submission. Yet we stand by whilst America and now Britain readies itself for the next
phase of the escalating „war on terrorism‟, this time in Iran. Next, Syria.
The obvious question that begs to be asked is this: if global domination supported
by militarism, and the alignment of economic policies with security including over the
energy resources is required for dominance, if all this is not the answer to the world‟s ills,
then what are the alternatives? And, for the purposes of this chapter, how does this
connect with Indigenous women? As a preface to my response to this question, I return
briefly to the historical impact of imperialism on Indigenous women.
Imperialism, war and the marginalization of women
The impact of historical forms of imperialism on women and in particular, women in
Third World countries has been well recounted. (c.f. Eizenstein 2004). The impact of
colonialism has also been well articulated. Maori feminist scholarship has well
documented the re-ordering of the gender relationship of balance and reciprocity that
characterized Maori social structures, the demoting of the status of Maori women and the
undermining of their considerable power as a direct result of colonialism in Aotearoa
New Zealand (c.f. Irwin (1992), Johnston & Pihama (1994), Pere, 1990; Yates-Smith
1998).
Maori mythology acknowledges the powerful role of atua wahine, or Maori
goddesses, within Maori cosmology including the ability of Maori women to control the
forces of the universe (Yates-Smith 1998). Although the force of that power is still
invoked in ritual practices today, these practices are often misunderstood and the power
that they contain thus hidden. It is commonplace for non-Indigenous women to decry
what they see as the subordination of Maori women in ritual practices through sheer lack
of understanding of the power and meaning of the practices that they observe. Wikitoria
August‟s work (2005) uncovers some of the ways that such misunderstandings have been
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applied. She demonstrates that what has been seen as the historical exclusion of Maori
women from certain spaces during particular times such as menstruation or pregnancy is
instead an acknowledgement of their sacredness and importance. In earlier work, Ani
Mikaere (1999) argued that notions of unclean, impure and cast out were introduced for
consistency with the bible and have no foundation at all in traditional Maori society.
Earlier feminist post-positivist critiques of androcentric models in social and
material sciences emphasized the relationship between the domination of women and the
domination of nature (e.g. Merchant 1980; Griffen 1978, Starhawk 1982, 1998, 2004;
Daly 1990, 2006; Waring 1984, 1996). The major role played by Christian Church in
perpetuating patriarchal ideologies of dominance has been well documented. In the early
centuries of Christianity, ancient belief systems and religions that celebrated the Mother
Goddess and the fecundity of Earth Mother became incorporated into the Marian
doctrines of the Catholic Church. The Celtic Church also became known for its
celebration of Nature and for the ecclesiastical leadership of women. Despite the
Church‟s attempts to discredit doctrines such as the St John tradition of the love of
creation and the essential goodness of humanity, the influence of Celtic spirituality
continued, at least in pockets, well into eighth and ninth centuries. Ultimately, however,
the dominance of patriarchal ideologies led to the dogmas responsible for the
marginalization and oppression of both women and Nature. By the mid-sixteenth century,
Marian doctrines and the recognition of Earth as the Primal Mother had been driven out
of European religious and spiritual practice by the patriarchal austerity of the Calvinist
Reformation (Rozak 1999).
As Christianity and capitalism spread throughout the world, recognition of the
sacred and political roles of Indigenous women was one of the greatest casualties. Yet
many Indigenous women have continued to exercise significant political and spiritual
leadership. Outstanding Maori women such as the late Irihapeti Murchie, Dame Whina
Cooper and Dame Mira Szazy come immediately to mind. Indigenous women are in the
forefront of the multi-fronted battle to save the remnants of biodiversity and have waged
holy war in the hallowed halls of the World Trade Organisation to prevent and reverse
the profiteering and plundering of Indigenous fauna. Here I pay tribute to the work and
contemporary leadership of Indigenous women such as Vandana Shiva of India, Del
Wihongi, Sana Murray and Aroha Mead of Aotearoa New Zealand and Winona La Duke,
Ojibwe of the US, to name but a tiny handful of the numerous Indigenous women whose
leadership provides outstanding role models today.
The re-inscribing of women as weaker and inferior to men has longer historical
antecedents, however, than is generally recognized. Rianne Eisler‟s work demonstrates
that the overthrow of gynocentric societies by patriarchally driven models has historic
origins which extend far back into pre-recorded history. Her work has relevance today. In
her book The Chalice, The Blade. Our History, Our Future (1995) originally published in
1987, Eisler drew on historic and pre-historic data to demonstrate a correlation between
societal models in which the masculine and feminine principles were equally valued and
which were based on what she termed „partnership‟ models of social organization and
societies in which the masculine principle was dominant and which was reflected in a
„dominator‟ model of social relationships and organization. Although in all cases societal
models were in many respects widely divergent, there were distinctive shared
characteristics. Societies that were based on the partnership model gave birth to new
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material and technological advances which were used for purposes that celebrated life.
On the other hand, societies based on the dominator model, as is the case today, were
characterized by the use of technology for purposes of domination, including the taking
of life. The central thesis of Eisler‟s work is that, allowing for periods of massive
regression, these two models of social organization follow very different paths of cultural
evolution.
Eisler, like other evolutionary change theorists (c.f. Wallerstein 1998), sees
evolution as being punctuated by moments of „critical systems branching or bifurcation‟,
points at which „critical transformation can occur‟ (Eisler 1995, xxii). In arguing that the
dominator model of social organization is at least in part responsible for the increasing
global crisis, her contention is that we are now at a critical point of bifurcation in which
there is immense possibility for evolutionary transformation and for the development of a
new global ethic (Ibid, 203). I follow Eisler with respect to this moment as one of critical
bifurcation. In the wake of the most recent damning report on global climate change and
on the eve before the anticipated declaration of a nuclear war on a non-nuclear country,
Iran,6 we are perilously close to the point of no return. To return to the point about
decolonization, I am convinced that the most critical decolonization agenda goes beyond
the reclaiming of Indigenous self-determination to the reclaiming of the whole globe
from the grip of insanity fuelled by ruthless greed and ambition.
Alternative Politics
The most fundamental principle in the search for a new political ontology for „being
together in the world‟ is the relationship between „self‟ and „other‟. The work of
developing alternative models of governance which are centred on our interrelationships
with one another has been addressed by a number of feminist scholars. Some of these
take an eco-centred approach (c.f. Warren 1991). Feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye in
her work entitled „In and Out of Harm‟s way: Arrogance and Love‟ (1983), emphasises
the importance of the „loving eye‟ which she describes as „not an invasive, coercive eye
which annexes others to itself, but one which “knows the complexity of the other as
something which will forever present new things to be known” (cited Warren, 1991, 28),
and McAfee (2000, 125) suggests that we are coming into a time when it is possible to
create a new imaginary in place of the politics of triumphing over the other, a politics
instead, of „inclining toward‟. I am reminded of our late and much-loved Waitaha
matriarch who consistently exhorted us to recognise the „other‟ as also ourself, a concept
that I struggled against at the time, enmeshed as I was in tribal struggles over land
settlements. Yet surely, in the deepest meaning, she was right. As I now understand her
words, this means at the very least to honor the sacredness inherent in all things and all
beings, to recognize the truth of our inherent interconnectedness, and to act in the world
and towards each other, appropriately. „All my relations‟.
Iris Marion Young emphasised the contribution of the Iroquois system of
federalism towards the „project of rethinking democracy in a post-colonial age‟ (Young
2000). The crucial point that Young overlooked was the strongly matriarchal nature of
Iroquois societies in which the Council of Matrons was the dominant executive body that
determined and instituted general policies. Accordingly, Allen writes, it was the matrons
who were the ceremonial centre of the system and also the prime policy makers (Allen
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1993, 592). This demonstrates that historically, as also within Maori societies, spirituality
and politics were inseparably bound together. It also demonstrates the centrality of the
grandmothers in the political structures of many traditional Indigenous societies.
Standing at the Juncture
It seems logical to extrapolate from that to the role of contemporary grandmothers in this
„transformational timespace‟, as Wallerstein (1998) names it. It is the case that millions
of Indigenous women and grandmothers today are not only over-burdened but suffer the
most horrendous forms of oppression, and the statistics and reports from countries across
the globe bear witness to the tiniest tip of the ice-berg. However some of us are in
positions of privilege. We are policy-makers, academics, community activists and home-
makers, while others of us are dispersed around the globe. It is to those of us in positions
of relative privilege that I speak as we stand at the intersection of the politics of the local,
represented by our families, communities, cities and of the global, the terrain of empire
and capitalism.
At this moment in time, the global has become represented by a new Imperialism
with an old name – that of Greed. Imperialism‟s objective is total, ultimate power over
every natural resource and over each and every human life. It is exercised through data
mining, iris scanning, and digital chips. Its power is deployed internationally through the
military machine. This power is maintained by the racialization of the Other as terrorist,
measured by racial profiling, and by the surveillance and disciplining of domestic citizens
deemed to a hindrance to the politico-economic wellbeing of the state acting on behalf of
the global financial/military/ complex. This power is experienced in the military
dominance over space, land, and sea by an imperial power and by the subjugation of
democratic freedoms and citizenship rights to economic interests. This power is exercised
in the return to a previously illegitimate doctrine of pre-emptive strike. Most certainly, it
is demonstrated in the view of the treasures of the universe as resources to be
commodified, mined and controlled, and in the representation of children‟s deaths as
collateral damage in war.
There are, however, alternatives, and there are interventions to be made. If we are
in truth in a moment of tremendous bifurcation, then some of those alternatives and
interventions must be made by us, by the Indigenous women of the world, the
grandmothers of the world. On another occasion I wrote,
As a race of beings, we have lost touch with the sacred. We have lost touch
with the deep spiritual essence of our „being‟ness. We need to reclaim our own
histories; we need to reclaim our true reality. As more and more women are
doing. More and more women are remembering that there was a time when the
societies of human beings that lived on this planet our home, were much more
matriarchal in nature, when the values by which existence was ordered were
based on a spirituality which connected us to Mother Earth, to each other and
to the universe. Those histories are today being rediscovered, being brought
forth. Indigenous women, Celtic women, the healers and the gatherers in
whom the genetic memory is stored, all women everywhere are re-membering,
re-envisioning, re-weaving, re-turning the ancient knowledge, the ancient
10
epistemologies towards the re-construction of a different political and
economic paradigm for co-existence (Harawira 1999).
That this is our most urgent role, our most critical responsibility is for me, inarguable.
Indigenous women who are in positions of privilege are called upon to vigorously refute
capitalism‟s excesses and greed; to refuse the dominator politics of power-over; to refuse
to give up our sons and daughters, our children and grandchildren to the warmongering
that is now called democracy, to reject the greed that is now called freedom; and to stand
firmly in the intersection of the politics of local and global. It is from that intersection
that we must decolonize the local and transform the global. As Indigenous women
warriors, we are called to re-weave the fabric of being in the world into a new spiritually-
grounded and feminine-oriented political framework and process of „being together in the
world‟. In that process, we are invited to deeply embrace the Other, who is after all, the
Elders teach us, Ourself. This, I argue, is the urgent decolonizing project of Indigenous
feminism today.
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1
Some of the material in this section previously appeared in Stewart-Harawira, M. (2005). The New
Imperial Order. Indigenous Responses to Globalization. New Zealand & Australia: Huia Books; London:
Zed Books.
2
Ibid.
13
3
„Maori‟ is a generic term that was developed post-contact and applied to all Indigenous tribes of Aotearoa
New Zealand.
4
Trans. Earth Mother
5
The Waitangi Tribunal is a Crown body established to hear Maori grievances stemming from violations of
the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi signed between the leaders of some Maori sub-tribes and the British Crown.
6
The likelihood of an imminent nuclear strike against Iran by Israel supported by the US, is demonstrated
in numerous articles and commentaries and evidenced by the buildup of US warships in the Mediterranean.
Amongst other things, it has given rise to an urgent letter signed by 24 senior physicists which urges the US
Congress to forbid nuclear strikes on non-nuclear countries can be found at:
http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/22physicists07.asphttp://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/22p
hysicists07.asp.
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