Women’s participation in decision making - Environmental and Human Security in the Arctic - page 205

individualist liberal rights specifically for women, but rather a restoration
of the Indigenous decision-making processes and political institutions that
have been undermined by constant colonial interference (Alfred 1999). It
must be recognized that colonialism has rendered issues of human security
for Indigenous women inextricably intertwined with the questions of self-
determination and freedom which transcend gender lines. Colonialism has
attacked the very basis of Indigenous cultural practices, which underpin the
equality and freedom of Indigenous women vis-à-vis Indigenous men and
non-Indigenous people. In the words of one Indigenous feminist, anti-colo-
nial perspectives encompass 'a theory and movement that wants to fight all
forms of oppression, including racism and colonialism … we could see it as a
struggle for unity among all oppressed men and women' (Sunseri 2000:144).
This approach, which articulates the necessity to interrogate broader
social and political processes bent on the destruction and de-legitimization of
Indigenous cultural and political practices, guides the following discussion of
the implications of two colonial political systems for human security in the
Arctic, with respect to Indigenous women and peoples generally.
Western political theorists are now also working to think beyond the
individual versus group rights discourse that characterizes much of political
theory's approach to Indigenous claims. Bern and Dodds propose that the
individual versus group rights paradigm conceals that there may be
a diversity of interests within a group that are not so much opposed to
one another as they are to all aspects of the rich complexity of a shared
way of life. As such, it is not a case of an oppressed subgroup's interests
against the interests of the wider group, but rather an array of partially
overlapping but different interests that together form the full array of
group interests.
(2000:169)
In the same volume, Ivison et al . (2000:11) propose that moving beyond
this dichotomy requires abandoning the idea that rights are universal and
unchanging, and call for an understanding of the historicity of rights, human
rights discourse, and their implementation mechanisms and institutions.
However, they do not propose to abandon
the language of rights completely … [but rather] the moderation of our
desire to translate every claim into one that can be classified as an indi-
vidual or group right … A postcolonial political theory needs to focus as
much on these processes as it does on the language(s) of rights.
Perhaps the concept of human security is another way of overcoming the
group versus individual rights debate. As the United Nations Development
Programme notes, human security is an 'integrative' as opposed to a 'defensive'