Women’s participation in decision making - Environmental and Human Security in the Arctic - page 213

speak for the people. They must recognize that Indigenous peoples practise
expansive political cultural ways, in contrast to Western norms. Therefore,
requests for additional funding for community consultation and longer time-
lines to enable communities to conduct consultation and decision-making
processes on their own terms must be heeded. What is labelled as 'consulta-
tion' by colonial systems, thereby signalling a lesser form of democratic power
than 'decision-making', forms a central political practice of many Indigenous
peoples. This is because it is the foundation for consensus building within
Indigenous communities. As detailed by Irlbacher-Fox (2002) elsewhere, the
Canadian government's continued ignorance of the reality for political con-
sensus building as an essential practice of Indigenous political institutions
results in an inherent instability in the negotiation and creation of self-gov-
ernment and land claim agreements. Put plainly, Indigenous communities do
not operate politically similarly to non-Indigenous ones; everyone in the com-
munity has a say and people are generally unwilling to delegate their voice
and opinion to one person through a majority vote held every four years.
In the following sections, we continue to discuss the questions of par-
ticipation and institutional appropriateness outlined above, but focus solely
on Nunavut as a more detailed case study and explore two concrete mod-
els designed to increase the participation of Inuit women in the politics of
Nunavut. One model, outlined by Elana Wilson Rowe immediately below,
was actually proposed and voted upon in 1997, and the debate surrounding
the proposal highlights some of the difficulties in rights-based institutional
reform, particularly as related to bringing Inuit women into formal territo-
rial-level politics. In the next section, Jackie Price explores her own model of
institutional reform and illustrates an approach to increase the participation
of Inuit women in politics that emphasizes the need to bring the consultation
process in line with traditional Inuit governance, rather than attempting to
bring Inuit women in line with Western politics and institutions.
Addressing the political access of Inuit women in
Nunavut: a case study of the gender parity proposal
On 1 April 1999, one-fifth of Canada's landmass became Nunavut, a new
Arctic territory in which 85 per cent of the population of 28,000 is Inuit. 11
The gender parity proposal, 12 d iscussed prior to the territory's official estab-
lishment, was an attempt to address the under-participation of Inuit women
in formal politics by guaranteeing gender parity in the Nunavut Legislative
Assembly through an electoral system in which two representatives would be
chosen: one man and one woman. To locate the debate, the politics that led
to the establishment of Nunavut are sketched out briefly, focusing specifi-
cally on how changes in leadership and power structures affected the political
participation of women. Looking closely at the gender parity debate, which
extended from the proposal's inception in 1994 to a public plebiscite in