Distinct Attention: Colonization's Impact on Indigenous Women and Girls
Distinct Attention: Colonization's Impact on Indigenous Women and Girls
Learning Goal: I can analyze the specific impacts of colonization on Indigenous women and girls globally and explain why their rights require distinct attention at the international level.
UNDRIP protects Indigenous peoples. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) protects women. Neither instrument, on its own, named what happens when colonization and gender strike the same person at once. Three cases show why that gap mattered, and why the United Nations finally moved to close it in 2022.
Canada's National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls delivered its final report, Reclaiming Power and Place, on June 3, 2019, after nearly three years and testimony from more than 2,380 family members, survivors, experts, and Knowledge Keepers. The report concluded that the violence Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit people face in Canada amounts to genocide, rooted in state actions and inactions going back to colonization. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accepted the finding. Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe publicly disagreed with it. The report issued 231 Calls for Justice. As of 2026, seven years later, only two are fully complete, 136 are underway, and 82 have not started. One piece moving forward is the Red Dress Alert, a system to notify the public when an Indigenous woman, girl, or Two-Spirit person goes missing, now piloting in Manitoba.
During Guatemala's 36-year civil war, the military held Q'eqchi' Maya women near the Sepur Zarco outpost and subjected them to systematic rape and sexual slavery from 1982 to 1988. In 2011, fifteen survivors, now known respectfully as the abuelas, or grandmothers, brought their case to Guatemala's highest courts. On March 2, 2016, a Guatemalan court convicted two former military officers, Esteelmer Reyes Girón and Heriberto Valdez Asij, of crimes against humanity, sentencing them to 120 and 240 years respectively. It was the first time any national court in the world had prosecuted wartime sexual slavery as an international crime. The ruling also ordered 18 reparation measures, including a health centre, school improvements, and scholarships for the women and their community.
In Australia, Bunuba woman June Oscar AO, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, led a different kind of response. Starting in 2017, her Wiyi Yani U Thangani, or Women's Voices, project spent a year travelling the country to hear directly from more than 2,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and girls about their own needs and solutions. In March 2024, that work became a permanent Wiyi Yani U Thangani Institute at the Australian National University, the first institute of its kind in Australia built around a First Nations gender lens. Instead of waiting for a government instrument to name the problem, the women named it themselves and built the institution to act on it.
Key Idea: On October 26, 2022, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women adopted General Recommendation No. 39, the first instrument tied to a binding treaty written specifically for Indigenous women and girls. It exists because a genocide finding, a landmark conviction, and a self-built institute all pointed to the same gap: general protections for "Indigenous peoples" and general protections for "women" kept missing the people living at the intersection of both.
National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. "Reclaiming Power and Place: The Final Report." mmiwg-ffada.ca
Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada. "Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and 2SLGBTQI+ People." rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca
UN Women. "Sepur Zarco Case: The Guatemalan Women Who Rose for Justice in a War-Torn Nation." unwomen.org
Australian Human Rights Commission. "Wiyi Yani U Thangani (Women's Voices)." humanrights.gov.au
Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. "General Recommendation No. 39 (2022) on the Rights of Indigenous Women and Girls." ohchr.org