Aboriginal - Girls Action Foundation

words, their own life, community, and family, on a well balanced and cared for journey to
a destination that is safe.
When I look at leadership from this angle, lead-HER-ship, I begin to see that Aboriginal
women’s leadership is important because it is the woman that helps guide her family
and community to a safe destination by providing a harmonistic balance and gentle
care to herself, her family and her community. Additionally, it can be seen that from
this perspective, Aboriginal women have been providing leadership for years. They
have been raising their families in a healthy manner, and helping to provide for a healthy
community. Without Aboriginal women’s leadership, it would be hard for a community
to be maintained. It is with an Aboriginal woman’s harmonistic balance and gentle care
in maintaining her own self to raise a healthy family, which in turns makes for a healthy
community that Aboriginal people thrive in. Therefore, Aboriginal women’s leadership is
essential to a healthy community, a healthy family, and a healthy self.
Unfortunately, Aboriginal women’s leadership and their roles have been undermined
because of the effects of colonialism. These effects of colonialism happen in a historical
context. In Canada, the arrival of European settlers and their effects of enforcing their
patriarchal views have displaced Aboriginal women out of their important roles as
mothers, wives and women in their own community. This displacement happened
when the Canadian government forcefully obtained Aboriginal children, placed them in
residential schools away from their parents because they considered Aboriginal parents
to be ineffective. Also, the Christian Church’s insistence on enforcing patriarchal views
onto Aboriginal communities has displaced Aboriginal women as wives because of this
removal of their children. Aboriginal women were not considered the strong, central
figures that Aboriginal people and their culture considered their women to be.
Aboriginal women have been removed from their roles as strong women in their
community with the creation of the Indian Act. The Act has undermined Aboriginal
women when it removed their status once they married a non-Aboriginal person.
Only recently did Bill C-31 come into effect, wherein the bill provided the guidelines
for reinstating an Aboriginal woman’s identity that was lost once she married a non-
Aboriginal man. Also, the Indian Act did not protect an Aboriginal woman’s right to
her own matrimonial property. Organizations and First Nations are realizing this lack of
70 Naomi Sayers