Women’s participation in decision making - Environmental and Human Security in the Arctic - page 206

concept. It is this integrative aspect that recognizes the interconnected nature
of all facets of life in achieving a sense of security, which could help us see
beyond the perennial juxtaposition of Indigenous women's human rights ver-
sus the group rights of the peoples to which they belong. Human security was
initially defined as freedom from danger, poverty and apprehension, but both
in theory and in practice today it encompasses political, economic, health and
environmental concerns. In opposition to the language of rights, in which
an individual's rights are either respected or not, human security invites us
to think of the embodied and situational experience of feeling more or less
'secure' - a spectrum as opposed to absolute possession or dispossession. Also,
this more faithfully reflects the concrete issues of felt security or insecurity
which are closer to the everyday lived experience of individuals in communi-
ties. This stands in contrast to an abstract concept of being a rights-bearer
and what that entails. Thus, the vocabulary of human security may be a more
empowering one as it could provide the tools for individuals and/or peoples to
make assessments on the state of human security in their home territories and
to generate local solutions.
Indigenous political process and colonial political
systems
Literature on political development in the NWT and in Nunavut, Canada,
focuses largely on emerging political institutions, and the 'indigenization'
of systems predicated on Western political institutions. In particular, this
has taken the form of the inclusion of 'TK' (Traditional Knowledge), 'TEK'
(Traditional Ecological Knowledge) and 'IQ' (Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit),
which has received much attention by scholars as a groundbreaking and
appropriate way for Indigenous values, ways and practices to be 'integrated'
with Western institutions. It is argued that this 'integration' is essential to
proper governmental administration of programmes, and political articula-
tion between Indigenous institutions and those of dominant society . 4 Sadly,
nothing could be further from the truth. Since the inception of the original
Government of the Northwest Territories (GNWT) Traditional Knowledge
Policy in the early 1990s, and proven by literature detailing problems of
integrating TK and 'scientific' knowledge in the context of co-management
institutions created by land claim institutions (for example, see Morrow and
Hensel 1992; Cruikshank 1998; Nadasdy 1999, 2004), it is evident that
efforts of hybridization of culturally based governance practices is nothing
more than a replay of colonial dominant-subordinate relations characteriz-
ing the political development of the NWT and Nunavut generally. Part of
the reason is that the only political institutions recognized in the North by
Canada (and, importantly, by its funding policies) as being legitimate are the
ones sanctioned through the laws of non-Indigenous governments, namely
the territorial and federal ones. This section of the chapter attempts to