Pacific Peoples' Partnership

Connecting Indigenous and Pacific Peoples

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Pacific Stream: Community Narratives of Climate Change

May 12, 2017 by April Ingham

On May 16, 2017 we hosted Community Narratives of Climate Change, an interactive panel at the University of Victoria in Victoria, BC Canada. The livestream event featured voices of South Pacific Islanders on the relationships between climate change, community, displacement and indigenous knowledge. The panel was hosted by PPP board member Eli Enns. Panelists included Selwyn Toa (Vanuatu), Eugene Lee (Borneo) and Mikaele Maiava (Samoa).

With Pacific Islanders widely portrayed as the first climate refugees, our panelists unpacked the disconnect between community based and global narratives of climate change, and how the climate refugee narrative interacts with Indigenous identities and histories of Pacific Islanders.

After the livestream we spliced together some of the words which best captured the themes and ideas that were discussed throughout the panel. The video above captured these highlights.

You can watch the livestream in its entirety here.

Filed Under: Climate Change, Knowledge Exchange, South Pacific Tagged With: climate change, indigenous, knowledge exchange, livestream, pacific stream, south pacific

Featured Partner: MediaNet

May 12, 2017 by April Ingham

MediaNet is a non-profit organization in Victoria, helping artists create independent video and media art by providing access to the tools and facilities needed to practice their craft. Pacific Peoples’ Partnership is grateful to have such an innovative and talented partner in MediaNet over the last six years.

Since 1981, MediaNet has been supporting the creative visions of artists in British Columbia. MediaNet have supported multi-media programs at PPP including filming and photographing events, producing livestream events and providing workshops about media arts to PPP volunteers, interns and staff.

They have been of immeasurable help to PPP programs including at our annual One Wave Festival, at Pacific Voices Exchange and providing ongoing audio and visual support at Annual General Meetings.

MediaNet has helped PPP advance the public’s appreciation of South Pacific art by producing informative media content for the PPP website and social media channels. The latest MediaNet produced videos can be found on the PPP YouTube channel and the Sierra Club website.

PPP are tremendously thankful for the creative and high quality content MediaNet continues to provide PPP programs. The dedication and professionalism of their team should not be underestimated.

To learn more about MediaNet, visit their website.

Filed Under: Partners & Sponsors

Volunteer Shout Out – Andy Nystrom

May 12, 2017 by April Ingham

 

Pacific Peoples’ Partnership would cease to exist without the ongoing support and commitment of many amazing people. “PPP is especially grateful to our long time volunteer Andy Nystrom who has been with us since 2010,” says Executive Director, April Ingham. “In particular, since 2012 he has spent thousands of hours at the PPP office keeping our records and information straight and helping with research. Andy is a multi-talented volunteer rising to a variety of challenges.”

Among many things, Andy acts as an archivist for our Tok Blong Pasifik journal, maintaining inventories and scanning earlier issues. He has created an index of all articles and photos in every issues of Tok Blong Pasifik, as well as making all issues available online (including the first-ever issues from 1982). One could call him an enthusiast for the journal.

Andy manages the PPP donor database, keeps a spreadsheet on NGOs of the South Pacific and, throughout the years, has created pages of research on topics such as climate change in Fiji and Vanuatu.

“From my first day, Andy welcomed me into the organization. His determination and passion for community service, as well as his infectious enthusiasm, have brightened my time with Pacific Peoples’ Partnership.”

– Madeline Storey, Communications and IT Intern.

It would be an understatement to say that Andy is a precious and valuable member of the PPP team!

Filed Under: Staff & Volunteers

Stand For Truth with The Coalition to Preserve Truth

May 12, 2017 by April Ingham

By Siobhan Powlowski

The Coalition to Preserve Truth

The Coalition to Preserve Truth, which represents survivors and intergenerational survivors of the residential school system, has been granted leave to intervene in an upcoming Supreme Court of Canada case. Fontaine v. Attorney General of Canada will decide the future of the personal accounts of up to 38,000 residential school survivors. These testimonies were collected as part of the Independent Assessment Process (“IAP”), which was created by the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement (IRSSA) to handle thousands of claims of physical and sexual abuse suffered during residential schools. The IAP records are presently set to be destroyed in 15 years.

Pacific Peoples’ Partnership is proud to have offered communications support to the Coalition to Preserve Truth, which is a broad alliance of Indigenous individuals, organizations and supporters. The Coalition recognizes the ongoing impact of intergenerational residential trauma in Indigenous communities and believes that the IAP records should be preserved while respecting individuals’ rights to privacy.

#StandForTruth Campaign

The Coalition has launched a #StandForTruth campaign to raise awareness about the pending destruction of the IAP documents. The Stand For Truth campaign has collected statements from Indigenous and non-Indigenous community members on the intergenerational impact of residential school trauma, as well as our collective responsibility as Canadians to safeguard truth. View the statements here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQm9B6LGh-0wCWQLnr0LTBw

The intergenerational effects of trauma on individuals, families and communities has been well studied. But the enormous personal trauma of residential school survivors, as well as the massive displacement of Indigenous children from their communities, has made it difficult for families of survivors to know the full extent of this trauma. As such, descendants of survivors often rely on second-hand accounts of residential schools, archives and historical records to understand the ongoing impact of residential schools.

The residential school record is already limited by systematic destruction of documents over the course of 160 years. Destruction of IAP records is arguably in line with a broader pattern of systematically erasing the truth of the residential school genocide. The permanent loss of tens of thousands of documents will further deny descendants of residential school survivors the opportunity to heal by removing their ability to develop a greater collective understanding of harms done to their communities. 

“The profound impacts of residential schools are still rippling through our communities today and will continue for generations to come. We need to ensure that future generations can access specific knowledge about what led to their broken communities, fragmented families and loss of language and culture.”

-Carey Newman, founder of the Coalition and creator of the iconic Witness Blanket.

It doesn’t just matter what the Supreme Court decides – how the Supreme Court reaches a decision matters as well. The current proposal for managing the IAP records does not take into account the place of Indigenous legal orders, which are better equipped than Canadian institutions to manage the individual stories of residential school survivors. Indigenous legal orders provide ample space to reframe the question to consider the cultural, moral and spiritual elements at play in this case.

Both destruction and preservation of the records is problematic in that neither fully returns ownership of these stories to communities and people. The black or white decision offered by the Supreme Court of Canada does not allow for more nuanced conversations aligned with collective values, i.e., what are our obligations to future generations? How can we provide for survivor needs in a way that they feel safe to keep the information for future generations?

Canada has a long history of making decisions about Indigenous, Metis and Inuit peoples, rather than with Indigenous, Metis and Inuit peoples. Indigenous communities across Canada have rich and robust resources for managing situations like these, and the Coalition hopes that the Supreme Court of Canada will make space for the questions to be reframed so that Indigenous Legal Orders can be brought into the decision-making.

The residential school system was genocide. As Canadians, we have a collective responsibility to remember, honor and protect the truth.

How You Can Help

The Coalition to Preserve Truth has until May 25th to raise $50,000 to intervene in the Supreme Court of Canada. Donations are gratefully accepted at gofundme.com/standfortruth.

The responsibility is on each and every one of us to ensure all Canadians know about the pending destruction of these records. Start a dialogue in your community, or consider filming a #StandForTruth video. Videos are accepted at deputy@archive.pacificpeoplespartnership.org.

For more information, visit standfortruth.ca

  

Filed Under: First Nations, Partners & Sponsors

Intern Reflections: Gender Programming at PPP and My Contributions

May 12, 2017 by April Ingham

 

By Madeline Storey

I began my journey with Pacific Peoples’ Partnership (PPP) at the end of 2016. Originally from Australia, I came to Victoria, BC to work in the non-profit sector. I was unbelievably lucky to find an internship with PPP, and even luckier to work with such a knowledgeable, helpful and welcoming team.

During my time with PPP, I learnt a great many things. Throughout my life, I’d heard about the beauty of the South Pacific, the islands and the people living there. Being close to Australia, I was familiar with the tourist narratives from places like Fiji, Hawai’i, Vanuatu and New Caledonia. What I didn’t know about were the devastating effects climate change is currently having in the region. Nor did I know about the prevalence of gender-based violence in South Pacific communities. I also wasn’t aware of how people outside the South Pacific homogenize the cultures and knowledge of the region.

During my role as Communications and IT Intern, I learned these things about the South Pacific, and am forever changed by them.

Exploring the roots of PPP

Tok Blong Pasifik

The PPP journal, Tok Blong Pasifik, has featured a rich variety of news and views on the Pacific since 1982. It’s been a key way the organization has connected with members and partners over the years. One of the first tasks during my internship was to upload 34 years worth of past issues of Tok Blong Pasifik onto the website. This meant I got to know the journal extremely well! With over thirty years worth of issues, it was a mammoth task, but I was able to explore the history of PPP through the process.

One issue of Tok Blong caught my attention immediately. In 1992, the year I was born, PPP made an issue on Gender and Development in the South Pacific. This is an entire publication dedicated to sharing women’s voices from the region. With an interest in gender and women’s empowerment, I was pleasantly surprised that PPP had produced an issue all about women in the early nineties!

Past Women’s Campaigns

Since its inception, PPP has been allies with communities of the South Pacific, particularly with women in the region. While conducting research into PPP’s past programs, I found many successful women’s campaigns PPP produced or co-produced in South Pacific communities.

1989 – 1992: Mairisin Meri Program: Training Papua New Guinea Village Health Workers.

This partnership aimed to increase local capacity to respond to medical emergencies. Local

women were trained in first aid and provided with a dependable supply of medicines, while local

men were trained to build quality hygiene facilities. Nutritional education was offered to communities.

1997-2001: Ecowoman: Women’s Leadership in Environmental Management (Fiji).

The Ecowoman project grew from the determination of Pacific women to promote sound, ecofriendly science at the grassroots level. Project leadership came from the South Pacific Action Committee for Human Ecology & Environment (SPACHEE), a collective of women in science and technology, representing traditional methods and modern approaches. Project communities sought help to get rid of water hyacinth and watercress choking local rivers, bogging boats, becoming safety hazards for swimming children and reducing their edible mussel harvest. Pilot projects explored weaving hyacinth into crafts, feeding it to livestock and marketing it as a vegetable. The CIDA-PPP project also funded a series of Ecowoman newsletters and the development work on a database of women with science and environment expertise.

1998 – 2003: WAINIMATE: Women’s Traditional Medicine Network (Fijian and Canadian

Communities).

Women’s Association for Natural Medicinal Therapy (WAINIMATE) was established by Fijian women in response to concerns about the loss of traditional medicine knowledge and medicinal plants in Fiji and other parts of the Pacific. Bearing many of the responsibilities of maintaining Pacific communities, women are often most directly affected by inappropriate development practices and structural adjustment decisions that threaten their families, health and environment. WAINIMATE established gardens within urban hospitals and rural health centers, and trained hundreds of nurses, doctors, dentists and health administrators in the identification, use and cultivation of plants. And, perhaps most importantly, WAINIMATE worked closely with Ministry staff to develop national legislation and a strategy platform, which officially and effectively integrated the provision of traditional medicine within the national health care strategy and delivery program.

2009-2012: Papua Land of Peace: Civil Society Leadership in Conflict Transformation (Manokwari, West Papua New Guinea).

The Indonesian provinces of Papua and West Papua, or Tanah Papua, compose a land of stunning natural beauty and rich, complex cultures. Yet everyday, Papuans face longstanding human rights abuses, economic disparity and environmental contamination of their lands. This initiative enabled knowledge sharing and best practices of community-based resource stewardship, cultural strengthening, human rights and gender equity. It fostered cooperation between Papuans and counterparts across the Pacific and Indonesia, and created opportunities for enhancing PPP’s knowledge of how best to support the aspirations of our partners and the communities they serve. This project harnesses rights-based approaches toward integrating capacity strengthening and education on sustainable livelihoods, Indigenous rights, HIV/AIDS prevention, and violence against women.

2013-2015: Indigenous-led HIV Transmission Prevention Strategy (Tanah, Papua).

In partnership with Persatuan Terbatas Peduli Sehat – Association for Community Healthcare, University of Auckland and the University of Calgary, and with support from the Canada Institute of Health Research, this program involved culturally-informed HIV prevention education and the reduced risk of mother to child transmission of HIV/AIDS.

2013-2015: Enterprising West Papuan Women Initiative (West Papua Province, Indonesia).

In partnership with the Institute for Research, Analysis and Development of Legal Aid, and with  support from Lush Canada and private donors, this program fostered livelihood opportunities for women, promoted gender equality, enhanced the role of women in leadership positions, and involved the construction of cooperative centres in Arowi and Mansinam for job skills training and to assist women facing domestic violence. These cooperatives serve a network of over 2,000 West Papuan women.

My contributions

With PPP’s long history of amazing gender programs and initiatives, I was excited to contribute to the gender and gender-sensitive programs at the organization. I soon found out that all programming at PPP are gender-sensitive. As an organization, taking a gender-based approach to other strategic areas, such as climate resilience and knowledge sharing, is imperative because vulnerable groups such as women and children are more at risk to the effects of climate change and often don’t have a role in decision-making in male-dominated communities.

Two of my most favorite projects on gender at PPP were a women’s campaign I ran in March and a newsletter article I wrote for February’s Pasifik Currents, PPP’s newsletter, which was published by Huffington Post Canada.

#PacificWomen Campaign

The #PacificWomen campaign was launched in honor of International Women’ Day (March 8th) and Women’s History Month in Australia, the UK and US during March, 2017. I put out a call on social media and through PPP’s network to collect stories from resilient, tenacious and courageous women from the Pacific. The stories we received were more than I had imagined! We were able to celebrate women from American Samoa, Hawai’i, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, Canada and Australia during the campaign.

Persistence was a common theme which ran through the stories. Unfortunately, there are multiple barriers to success for women in remote communities of the Pacific, such as distance (geographical isolation), access to resources, static gender-roles in communities and lack of access to education. My hope in producing this campaign was to highlight amazing women who succeeded in their lives even when there are greater odds stacked against them.

Gender Articles

For PPP’s February 2017 Pasifik Currents, I was tasked with writing an article about gender. As gender equality is a passion of mine, I decided to research and write about women in the South Pacific. I ended up reading countless articles about international development, community structures, colonialism and more.

While taking all these things into consideration, I ended up writing about the ‘Gaps Between Gender Policy and Community Experiences in the South Pacific’. Through writing this article, I tried to articulate the intersecting challenges of being a woman in the South Pacific.

To my delight, my article was picked up by a Huffington Post Canada blog – ‘The Reality of Gender and Community in the South Pacific’. Often, women’s’ experiences in the South Pacific are ignored. My goal in having this article published was to draw more attention to their experiences. Luckily enough, I was given the platform to do so. I hope that moving forward, Pacific women are able to share their stories themselves.

I feel that women supporting women is of great importance. Working with April, Siobhan and Pawa at PPP, I felt supported and guided through my internship. I was able to work with all these ladies on multiple projects and have learned so much from them.

My time with PPP has taught me so much about the South Pacific, climate resilience, knowledge sharing and has allowed me to gain a new perspective on gender equality. I’m forever grateful for the experiences I’ve had with the organization and the amazing people I’ve been able to work with.

Filed Under: Gender and Women

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For 45 years, Pacific Peoples’ Partnership has supported the aspirations of South Pacific Islanders and Indigenous peoples for peace, environmental sustainability, social justice and community development.

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