ABSTRACT
Women’s lives and stories are an essential piece of our unwritten history. These stories of resilience, reciprocity, rebuilding and relations are reflected in Cree values and concepts such as âhkêmayowwak (“resiliency” or “persistence”), wahkotahwin (“we are all family or share relations”) and wichitowin (“we take care of each other”). In North America today, as in other regions of the world, women are rebuilding from a devastating history of colonialism, resuming their traditional positions of influence and power, building on ancient wisdom and sharper analysis that has an identified colonialism. This chapter describes some of the historical forces that Indigenous women in North America have overcome and how they are leading the struggle for the liberation of nations. It examines the concept of “storying” and how it is useful as a time-honoured communication system of maintaining cultural strengths and histories. This chapter is partly my story and partly framed as an academic paper referring to gender literature. The chapter also examines the role of feminism and women-centered organizing and its relationship to gender. While the work focuses on female gender in the Indigenous worldview, the concept of multiple genders exists; and, while focusing mostly on issues and some of the writing of Indigenous women-centered gender, it also includes information on gay, lesbian and transgender issues. Finally, the chapter ends by describing the many ways that women are reclaiming power and transforming communities, including their participation at the United Nations meeting on Women in Beijing, China, in 1995.
