Last Week’s presentations were really interesting, it covered important topics and did it with professionalism. I did not assist to many conferencs in my life but those are for sure two of the best ones.
The first conference about the climate changes and its effects on Women was really something I’ve never heard about. Everyone knows that climate changes have an effect on population but the fact that it has even more effect on Women was something that I didn’t know. The conference also covered the atrocities made to Indigenous Women. she talked about The pipelines project that goes through indigenous territory, that destroys their environment and does not give them access to the benefits of a such project.It raised awareness amongs us the public, and sensibilized a lot of people for a noble cause. Those populations are ostracized, they are victims of hundreds of years of colonialism and assimilation.
The speaker really put an emphasis on how Indigenous women and Indigenous population and general have been impoverished and how this poverty lead to all the problems that they encounter nowadays. The parrelel that she made allowed me to put an example on what Kimmel wrote in the text ” Fathers and Fathering” when he pointed out that ” there is substantial evidence that children raised in impoverished circumstances are not only at greater risk of abuse, but also at risk of psychological maladjustement in a number of domains ” (Kimmel 187-188). This quote is directly illustratred by the example of the sisters in the religious school were the precarious conditions stopped them for developping her full potential and, at the end, never realize their value and ending manipulated and forced to do things. Every new generations is doomed and nearly always condemned to a poor future. Unfortunately, every new generation, for now, grows in a situation as bad and as precarious as the older generations due to Canadian’s politics and their decision to exploit them.
The second conference was about a subject that I knew much better. The question of the religion and the hate and racism towards the religious people especially women is more mediatized and has sparked more debates. The speaker, Nadia Naqvi, gave a good and precise image and definition of what it is to be a muslim in society where racism is present. The life of a muslim woman wearing the hijab is full of micro aggression, deliberate or not. Nadia and Laity Fary Ndiaye are openly against the Bill 21 as it restrain religious people, especially muslim women to pursue their career and live in harmony with their religions. This bill forces them to choose between professional success and the religious and personnal fullfilment. Nadia’s speech highlighted the discriminations agaisnt muslim communities and how her family suffered from all that, especially after 2001. Laity Fary Ndiaye has put the emphasis of the difficulty of being a muslim women in our society but also how being a woman of color added a new level of difficulty to the process. She said that one of the way to interfere with these racist conditions was to be united between discriminated women and discriminated communities in general.
What Nadia Naqvi and Laity Fary Ndiaye showed is that immigrants and people for a different religion than the religion of the majority will be put aside as they do not benefit from the privilege of the majority and therefore, are not in position to effectively defend their rights and revendications. This make a good parralel with Kimmel’s writting ” Mens at work” where he states that majority of the people exploited in society and in the work fields are the one coming from the minorities since it is the majority group that has the power over the standards and decisions.
In conclusion, The conference about indigenous women and the effect of climate changes on women taught me how inequalities, in numerous situation, affected women even more than men even if it is not evident to see at first sight. And the conference about the Bill 21 made me think about the repercussion of discriminatory laws on religious communities and especially women of those communities.
Lovers and Fighters | Section 22 