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Dans cet article, l'auteure partage ses expériences de travail sur les questions environnementales, particulièrement sur celles qui concernent l'eau. Comme mère, comme membre d'un clan, comme membre des Premières Nations et comme professeure, l'auteure se sent responsable du partage de ses connaissances. Cette réflexion est basée sur son travail avec les aînées et les tenants du savoir traditionnel en Ontario, surtout de celui qui se rapporte à l'eau. L'information part de deux projets majeurs dans lesquels elle a été impliquée.
Water is a sacred thing. This is reflected in many traditional belieft, values, and practices.
-Ann Wilson, Anishnaabe Elder, Rainy River First Nation
For thousands of years, Aboriginal people have created and passed on knowledge resulting in sustainable relationships with all of Creation. Ann Wilson's words serve to remind us that we still have this knowledge and a responsibility to pass it on in order to maintain such relationships.
In the course of Aboriginal history in Canada, significant compromising of Aboriginal peoples' ability to make decisions based on traditional knowledge has only occurred within the last 150 years. Since that time, deliberate, systematic attempts to eradicate Aboriginal worldviews, philosophies, traditional knowledge and values have seriously undermined traditional forms of governance and related processes (Mercredi and Turpel; RCAP). Many First Nations, having suffered the oppressive forces of colonization, are now revitalizing their customs, values, and knowledge so as to re-establish a relationship with Creation based on their own traditions. This process forms an important part of the day-to-day as well as the political lives of First Nations peoples.
A key component of this revitalization is the recognition that the role of women in traditional Aboriginal societies has been one of the most impacted as a result of colonization processes. Aboriginal women have been ignored, and their knowledge and contributions to sustaining Creation have been devalued by colonial society (Clarkson, Morrissette and Régallet; Lawrence and Anderson). Aboriginal women now have to interact with a society which functions in a reductionist, compartmentalized ways and that also struggles to see how everything is related to the whole.
If Aboriginal women's contributions to sustainability do not currently have a place of honour in dominant western society, they are increasingly given this honour in Indigenous society as Aboriginal peoples and communities...