wise women speak

there was an interesting event in nz last week:

“WISE WOMEN SPEAK,” an intergenerational - inter movement korero (forum) on the liberation of women and self determination featured Coni Ledesma, International Spokesperson of Makibaka: Patriotic Movement of New Women together with Ngapuhi leader Titewhai Harawira and activist lawyer Annette Sykes at the Auckland University, New Zealand, 10th November.

“In 1975 we marched to demand not one more acre of Maori land to be sold. Now more trade agreements are being negotiated above our heads without our participation,” activist lawyer Annette Sykes says as she points out that the capitalist neo-liberal agenda is the new form of colonization. Sykes challenged the participants, mostly students and young women to speak out and revive a strong women’s movement in defense of land, rights and self-determination. “With the Terrorism Suppression Act and Search and Surveillance Bill that allows installation of listening devices into our homes, the state’s actions are meant to silence us and tell us that it’s not right to demand land, rights and liberation.”

[...]

According to Ledesma, “It is important for women to find the correct analysis and understanding of the cause of oppression of women. Women's oppression is not a problem between men and women, but a matter of class oppression that began when classes in society emerged. The oppression of women will be fully eliminated, and the real liberation of women achieved when the system of exploitation and oppression of one human being by another will be abolished. Today, global monopoly capitalism operates on insatiable greed for profits at the expense of women, indigenous peoples and other marginalised sectors. Socialism will remove the conditions that have made women unequal to men.”

[...]

“One hundred years after the declaration of the first International Women’s Day, the International Women’s Alliance (IWA) was founded on 16th August 2010 in Montréal, Canada immediately after the successful Montreal International Women’s Conference attended by more than 350 participants from 32 countries. Faced with global concerns including indigenous struggles, developmental aggression, violence against women, racism, discrimination and genocide, resistance to wars and imperialist aggression, IWA aims to foster the creation and coordination of local, regional and international campaigns, to promote mutual support and the sharing of resistance strategies, and to mobilize women around the world in the struggle against imperialism, violence and capitalist globalization,” Ledesma shared with the forum participants.

Ledesma enjoined the women of Aotearoa to join the first assembly of the International Women’s Assembly in July 2011 in the Philippines.

photos can be seen here.

hat tip: marama davidson.