Women's absence, women's power: indigenous women and negotiations with mining companies in Australia and Canada

Abstract

This article documents the agency of indigenous women in negotiations surrounding major resource projects on indigenous lands. The dominant view in the academic and activist literature is that indigenous women are excluded from negotiations, which helps explain their failure to share in project benefits. The author's experience as a negotiator for indigenous communities in Australia and his research in Canada reveals a different picture, indicating that indigenous women often play a central role in negotiations. The article seeks to explain the inconsistency between the findings reported here and much of the literature, in terms of a broader tendency in the latter to downplay the agency of women in relation to mining; and its failure to adequately recognize the multiple and complex ways in which indigenous women can influence negotiations, and the role of specific cultural, institutional and political contexts in shaping women's participation.

Keywords:

• Indigenous peoples
• women in politics
• Aboriginal
• power
• land rights
• mining

Notes

1. The same applies to the only book-length study of economic development by an indigenous woman scholar I have been able to identify: Wuttunee 2004, pp. 96, 144.

2. Some indigenous people, it must be recognized, do not accept that such an accommodation between indigenous and mining interests is possible.

3. The term ‘traditional owners’ is used in Australia to describe those indigenous people who have primary affiliations with, and responsibility for, areas of land and water and the cultural and spiritual sites they contain.

4. LIA chief negotiator for Voisey's Bay IBA, interview with the author, Nain, March 2009.

5. Nunatsiavut Government, Voisey's Bay implementation coordinator, interviews with the author, Goose Bay, April 2005 and March 2009.

6. Gelganyem Trust and Kilkayi Trust 2008, p. 4; Tasiujatsoak Trust trustees, interview with the author, Nain, March 2009.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ciaran O'Faircheallaigh

CIARAN O'FAIRCHEALLAIGH is Professor in the Department of Politics and Public Policy at Griffith University.