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Q&A: “Aboriginal Women Need to Lead from the Front”

Stephen de Tarczynski interviews MEGAN DAVIS, first indigenous Australian woman to be elected to a United Nations body

MELBOURNE, Australia, May 27 2010 (IPS) - At the beginning of 2011, Australian Aboriginal woman Megan Davis will join a select group of indigenous experts from around the world.

The group will form the next instalment of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII), the U.N.’s main advisory body on indigenous matters which first met in 2002.

The UNPFII, whose advisory function is transmitted through the U.N.’s Economic and Social Council, is mandated to discuss a range of issues pertaining to the world’s 300 million-plus indigenous people, based on World Bank data. These include development, the environment, health, education, culture and human rights.

Davis, the director of the Indigenous Law Centre at the University of New South Wales, was elected to the 16-member UNPFII during April’s session of the Forum, along with the likes of Finland’s Eva Biaudet, the Congo’s Simon William M’Viboudoulou and Mirna Cunningham from Nicaragua. Their term runs until December 2013.

Members of the UNPFII are initially nominated by governments or by indigenous organisations and then must be elected to the Forum.

Davis, whose professional interests include indigenous peoples and democracy, women’s legal issues and international human rights law, is the first Aboriginal Australian to be nominated by the government for a United Nations role.

She spoke with IPS via telephone from Sydney.

Q: Firstly, congratulations on being elected to the UNPFII. What do you plan to bring to the Forum? A: I think one of the aspects of the Forum’s mandate that enables any one member to really bring their own expertise and interests to it is the third aspect of the mandate, which permits you to prepare and disseminate information on indigenous issues.

Under that aspect I would like to do more work around Aboriginal women and gender issues pertaining to violence as well other issues such as leadership opportunities that women have.

I think this is a great opportunity to be able to progress to an international level some of the work that I’ve already been doing on Aboriginal women in Australia.

Q: Is it significant that you’re the first Indigenous Australian woman to be elected to the Forum? A: I think what’s really important about that is that the federal government actually nominated a woman and nominated somebody on the basis of merit. I think that in Aboriginal affairs, Aboriginal women have been overlooked a lot, and I think there’s been a very recent, contemporary discussion in Aboriginal communities and broader communities about the way in which men dominate important leadership positions in Australia.

That was a really important development for the Australian Government to choose a woman to be nominated to this position, so to that extent it is [significant] because for young Aboriginal girls coming through, it’s important to have female role models in positions such as at the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.

There’s a lot of narrative in communities about Aboriginal women being leaders behind the scenes and leaders in communities, but I think Aboriginal women also need to be leading from the front as well and to hold positions of real power and real decision making roles.

Q: Do you see other indigenous peoples around the world also facing this issue? A: I think it’s a mainstream problem and we know that women aren’t well represented in many of our parliaments, both at federal and state levels across the country. And we know from a lot of the literature that it does occur in a lot of the western liberal democracies in the world.

If you have a look at the Aboriginal women’s literature, it’s very clear that there’s a paucity of Aboriginal women’s leadership in a lot of important decision making roles right around the world.

Q: How do we judge the efficacy of the Forum itself? How will work done at the Forum impact the everyday lives of the world’s indigenous people? A: I think that’s a really important question, and there are two things I’d say about the Forum. The first thing is that it is primarily an advisory body to the Economic and Social Council and if I was to be really cursory about what it does, then what it does is help the United Nations. Its mandate is totally focused at improving the way the United Nations, its programmes and agencies, deal with indigenous issues. The second aspect of its work is to raise awareness within the U.N. system, so really the bulk of the Forum’s work is intra-United Nations.

[The UNPFII] is not like the Working Group on Indigenous Populations – that no longer exists – that had really substantive impacts on Aboriginal people’s lives because ultimately its work led to the development of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

There was a clear domestic consequence of that kind of advocacy. I think you see it less with the Forum, and I think that it’s important that Aboriginal communities realise that but also that the Forum is honest too about what it can achieve within its limited mandate.

[But] I would like to aim some of the work squarely back at the international human rights committees and get some greater elaboration and direction on how Aboriginal people should be able to enjoy particular human rights within their own domestic states.