Month: March 2020

Pacific islanders suffer from social issues of not being heard and have to fight so their culture, traditions and their languages can keep alive. Even though the movement of indigenous people is getting stronger around the world, it is a male dominant movement, women are not represented in those groups. In many of those Islands, half of the population is composed of females.

When I watched the movie ‘Vai’ I recognized a lot of social issues that we go through as being women, but more than that I felt empathy as she (representing 7 different pacific islanders women) suffered twice the discrimination just for being an indigenous woman. Vai, like many indigenous women, gave everything she could for her family, her people to see the fruits growing from that action. But we still see she committing the same actions as her mother, sending her daughter to New Zealand, even though she didn’t need it, she was taken away from her family and her friends.

Maybe that’s how many traditions started, through old generations that had their needs, they had to make sacrifices, repeating over few generations and somehow it ended up in a point that it became a ritual of passage. We see in most of the cultures the male gender is dominant over females and I think that’s how some actions are considered “traditions”, like mutilating female’s genitrices, became ‘acceptable’ over society. If a tradition infringes human rights, it causes pain in someone that can’t speak or choose to be part of it, it shouldn’t be considered a normal thing to do, it shouldn’t be a cultural tradition.

When at first, we were supposed to choose our strand in From Screen to Street Studio class, I was looking forward to Gender and Sexuality because it was something I felt connected with, but another group already took it so my group and I ended up with First nations. As being an international student and not having much knowledge about indigenous Australian history and pacific island culture I didn’t imagine that the messages the movies/documentary we would talk about were exactly the same I felt connected in the Gender and sexuality strand. Being a woman is challenging for all cultures but especially for indigenous women, for them being in a minority group, they suffer huge discrimination and are marginalized by society.

Not just in indigenous communities, as this happens in my country, Brazil, sexism is something very present and so do toxic masculinity. When they say men don’t cry, they can’t demonstrate their emotions and there are home activities that “are” entitled as women services/activities, men struggle with themselves as they are supposed to act in that way and I believe this is one of the reasons why domestic violence is still so present in their communities.

When you grow up with domestic violence at home and you see this happening in the neighborhood, and no one talks about it’s hard to contest and go against that as people think that is acceptable. This is what happened in the documentary Not Just Numbers (2019), Shirleen Campbell, the co-coordinator of the Tangentyere Women’s Family Safety Group (TWFSG), watch her mother and her two aunties die because of domestic violence and that makes her wake up and decide to take an action creating the TWFSG group, with the support of her elders and mentoring from Aboriginal rights campaigner Barbara Shaw.