This year’s international Women’s week covered interesting and controversial topics such as Bill 21, islamophobia, violence against women and the government’s aid/hindrance on these issues. The class attended two different seminars: a panel talking about the fight of indigenous women and a panel talking about their fights against islamophobia as Muslim women. We learned the pain and the disadvantages that these women have to go through on a daily basis.
As I was not present for the first seminar, I did some research on the issues of the pipeline project controversy and the effects of the climate change on women via the web. First of all, the pipeline projects through indigenous lands requires for the government and companies to get approval of the indigenous communities to move forward and build on their land. The thing is that getting that approval from the communities is tricky and companies get approval from band councils and not hereditary chiefs that leads to numerous appeals and disputes over the projects. Cynthia Callison, a negotiator for agreements between the government and indigenous communities, said that “[…] projects have gone ahead despite the fact that not all Indigenous communities affected by the projects have given their consent. The consequences of building these pipelines are the destruction of the ancestral and traditional land of indigenous communities and the numerous terrible effects on the environment. Second of all, the climate change affects women more severely than it affects men because they don’t have the same resources as them. Women are most likely to be poor from disasters and environmental changes because of the lack of resources to adapt. From the information gathered from chatelaine.com, In a 25-year survey in India’s Andhya Pradesh, 44 percent of respondents who slid into poverty cited weather events as a cause.
The second seminar was focused on Islamophobia and Bill 21. We had a panel of two speakers: Nadia Naqvi and Laïty Fary Ndiaye, two Muslim women that were heavily touched by this bill. The seminar started with the experiences of Nadia and her hard experiences with Islamophobia starting as early as childhood with teachers telling her to “Go back home” and the frightening experience that her family experienced when a random stranger beat her father simply because of his religion and the way that he looked. Not just that but also with 9/11, countless Muslim men and women were struggling to get Visas to numerous countries such as Canada because the country that they were coming from was a Muslim country (Nadia’s husband had to wait 3 years when normally it takes 8 months). We learned that Bill 21 had an effect on her because she was a teacher at a school in the public sector and that it meant that she couldn’t advance with her career and had to stay where she was simply because she was wearing an hijab and Bill 21 didn’t allow representatives of the government (police officers, teachers, etc.) to wear religious symbols to preserve the laicity of the province. We also learn more from Laïty who an activist for Muslim women and she is shared some of her experiences as a non-visible Muslim because she decided not to wear a hijab. She talked about her experiences with friends and other people criticizing Muslims in front of her and not knowing that she, in fact, is a Muslim herself. We learned about the experiences that these women have to go through on the daily basis from directly getting abused physically to hearing someone talk badly of the religion.
To conclude, I learned a lot attending the seminar and doing research online about these issues and I am grateful to learn from these women and be part of the annual International Women’s week. Personally, I believe in that everyone should be treated equally no matter what creed, race, religion, sexual orientation or gender they have or are and hearing the stories from these women made me want to see a change in our society today. Finally, I understood in depth how much women go through on a daily basis (even worse for Muslim women & women of different race) and really helped me improve on myself by changing the way I think and act towards other people in the future.
Sources
https://www.chatelaine.com/news/gas-oil-pipelines-in-canada/
https://www.chatelaine.com/news/women-shoulder-the-burden-of-climate-change/
Lovers and Fighters | Section 22 