themselves. Western feminisms may aptly identify the lack of acknowledgement of diverse
insecurities by the traditional security framework, but non-Western feminisms wage similar
arguments against Western feminisms themselves: "Western feminist scholarship cannot
avoid the challenge of situating itself and examining its role in . . . a global economic and
political framework” (Witt, 1999). Gayatri Spivak writes that indigenous and non-Western
feminism increasingly becomes marginalized within mainstream feminism (Spivak, 1999).
Thus gender analysis, from both the global North and South, highlights features of the
security dynamic which have been isolated, ignored, and made invisible because the realities
of gender and ”other” have not been acknowledged. This has been very much the case in
relation to indigenous approaches, and especially gendered indigenous approaches.
The 1995 Beijing Declaration of Indigenous Women exemplifies this well. Self-
described as those who continue to suffer multiple oppressions: “as Indigenous peoples, as
citizens of colonized and neo-colonial countries, as women, and as members of the poorer
classes of society,” (Beijing Declaration, 1995) they are well placed to give voice to the
concerns of the marginalized and least secure. Personal, economic, environmental,
community, and physical security become inevitably intertwined in their vision of what poses
a threat, to them, to their children, and to their children”s children. In response to the
increasingly dominant pressures of international trade, neo-colonialisation, and ”science”, the
Declaration explicitly acknowledges the potential and likelihood for “ethnocide and
genocide” by progressively eliminating biological and cultural resources, while continuing to
exacerbate conflict over lands and communities (ibid). The threats identified in the
Declaration include those that would be addressed by narrower conceptions of security, but
then go well beyond traditional security parameters, recognizing and acknowledging the
sources and origins of threats which are shared. Joyce Green and Cora Voyageur demonstrate
the dynamics of the non-dominant and insecure position of indigenous women in the
Canadian context, noting the multiple insecurities such as poverty, hunger, social and identity
marginalization, political isolation and domestic and societal violence faced by many
aboriginal Canadian women (Green and Voyageur, 1999). This is not the picture of Canada
that dominates the human security literature, but an invisible and unwanted view that, due to
the marginalization of aboriginal women, is all but too easy to ignore.
Indigenous perspectives
The relevance of the indigenous voices, and especially those that articulate the
gendered indigenous voices, is significant. These voices span the world over, transcend the
constructed boundaries of North/South, East/West, West/”other”, as these voices represent
Convention