Women’s movement skews gender issues in the North

SARA MINOGUE

In traditional Inuit society, gender is secondary to the value of human beings. Inuit, whether male or female, are viewed simply as people who perform the roles of either women or men.

But that’s not how western society has viewed the Inuit. The southern preoccupation with women’s rights has helped create the current gender imbalance by importing biased ideas of gender into a society that traditionally saw equal value in both male and female roles.

“Women have been empowered by many sources and we are at a point where we are seeing the effects of it,” said Eva Aariak during a recent discussion on gender imbalance.

She used women’s shelters as an example: “There is more emphasis there on helping the women than the men who are the problem in the first place.”

That problem is part of a series of oversights that Karla Jessen Williamson, a researcher from Greenland who now works for Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami in Ottawa, attributes to a misunderstanding of Inuit culture.

“There is a stereotype of the Inuit,” Williamson said. “People assume that Inuit are male dominated because of the hunting society… but that has never really been the case.”

Williamson recently traveled to her home community of Maniitsoq in southern Greenland to do some research for a master’s thesis she is pursuing with the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. She wanted to find out if traditional gender equality really existed, and how it is changing.

“The assumption is that Inuit women suffer as much as the western women, and doubly so because of the colonization. In reality, it’s exactly the opposite, where Arctic men are becoming disenfranchised, to use the kinds of words behind the empowering of women in western society.”

Williamson recently edited the chapter on gender issues in the Arctic Human Development Report, a 240-page research document unveiled in Iceland last fall.

“People were very struck by the fact that I was addressing men, not women,” Williamson said.

The introduction to the chapter points out “the importance of acknowledging indigenous men’s disenfranchisement,” and subsequent essays discuss the high rate of suicide and unemployment for males.

The chapter concludes:

“There is a need to analyze men’s changing roles in society and how this affects social problems such as suicide and violence towards others. Violence against women has been identified as a significant problem in the Arctic and has been attributed in part to male loss of identity and self-worth, societal tension as well as issues of power and control.”

But this type of discussion is rare. Instead, people outside the Arctic are still more likely to overlook the plight of men in a world where they are assumed to be more powerful than women.

Williamson cites several modern institutions that, “blindfolded by western feminist thinking,” have directly challenged the traditional Inuit male role, in a way that would not be likely to occur for women.

“The International Whaling Commission speaks very directly to the whales,” Williamson says. “And these, as far as the Inuit are concerned, are the domain of men. When there is a restriction on that, that’s an international act of criminalizing Inuit men.”

The European Union Seal Skin Directive of 1983 and the U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 had a similar effect, Williamson says.

The effects of these kinds of policies are increasingly evident in communities across the Arctic.

“The suicide rate is the strongest, strongest indicator of what’s happening with men,” Williamson said.

She hopes to take part in a conference proposed by Judith Kleinfeld, a professor of psychology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, in order to address the stereotypes of Arctic peoples that lead to skewed social policy.

“If this issue is not addressed, there’s going to be an enormous amount of social unrest because this is not right. We cannot go on losing our men. We cannot go on losing lives. We cannot go on having unrest in homes. And we cannot go on continuing to have low self-esteemed men. We can’t. That’s not healthy.”