International Women’s Day as we know it grew out of early 20th century action to promote women’s rights and suffrage. After that, its popularity waned. But feminist activism of the 1960s and UN sponsorship of the day in 1975 revitalized it as an occasion to promote women’s rights around the globe.
We need to remember gender justice activism as more than a single movement, as many intertwined movements across many communities. It’s easy to forget how dynamic and evolving these movements have been. We are particularly thankful today to intersectional feminist thought-leaders for addressing how the diversity of our experiences both converge and diverge. They see justice for one as intrinsically tied to justice for all, and nothing less will do.
In this vein, we’re interviewing Dr. Dawn Lavell Harvard, Ph.D., on her take on what it means to Indigenize International Women’s Day. Indigenization as a process of naturalizing Indigenous knowledge to transform spaces, places, and hearts. “The goal is not to replace Western knowledge with Indigenous knowledge,” says Pulling Together: A Guide for Curriculum Developers, “... Indigenization can be understood as weaving or braiding together two distinct knowledge systems so that learners can come to understand and appreciate both.”
Dr. Harvard is a proud member of the Wikwemikong First Nation, the first Aboriginal Trudeau Scholar, and has worked to advance the rights of Aboriginal women as the President of the Ontario Native Women’s Association since she was first elected in 2003. She is Director for First Peoples House of Learning at Trent University and was President of the Native Women’s Association of Canada. She is mother of three girls. Following in the footsteps of her mother Jeannette Corbiere Lavell, a noted advocate for Indigenous women’s rights, Dawn has been working toward the empowerment of Aboriginal women and their families ever since joining the Board of the Ontario Native Women Association as a youth director in 1994. She is also a co-editor of the original volume on Indigenous Mothering, “Until Our Hearts Are on the Ground: Aboriginal Mothering, Oppression, Resistance and Rebirth,” and has released a book along with Kim Anderson, “Mothers of the Nations.” Recently, Dawn co-edited a book with Jennifer Brant, entitled “Forever Loved:  Exposing the Hidden Crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada.”
Relevant links: Pulling Together: A Guide for Curriculum Developers (Antoine, A., Mason, R., Mason, R., Palahicky, S. & Rodriguez de France, C., 2018), First Peoples House of Learning at Trent University
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