The Panelists
The morning session of the “Scholar and Feminist” conference had addressed the question, “Why?: Feminist Analyses of the State of the World.” By the afternoon, the question had become, “How?: What Can We Do About It?” And so the afternoon session brought together four feminist activists whose work in a range of contexts and struggles repeatedly reminded the audience that feminist activism at the beginning of the twenty-first century addresses concerns extending far beyond traditional “women’s issues.” Globalization, neocolonialism, environmental degradation, incarceration and other forms of state violence and constraint, militarism, poverty – all are the objects of contemporary feminist analysis and activist response.
The participants in the “How?” panel were
- Winona LaDuke, the Green Party’s vice presidential candidate in the 2000 U.S. elections. LaDuke lives in the White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota and works on restoring the local land base and culture. In 1994, Time magazine named LaDuke one of America’s 50 most promising leaders under 40 years of age. She is the author of several books, including Last Standing Woman and All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life. She is currently at work on a writing project about the massacre site at Wounded Knee.
- Daphne Wysham, the coordinator and founder of the Sustainable Energy and Economic Network (SEEN). SEEN is a project of the Transnational Institute of Amsterdam and the Institute for Policy Studies, where Wysham is a fellow. Wysham has worked on environmental and development issues since 1985, focusing primarily on environmental issues as they affect people in the Southern hemisphere. Currently she focuses on equity and sustainability as they relate to international financial institutions, export credit agencies, fossil fuels, indigenous peoples, women, human rights, and climate change. Through SEEN, Wysham has coauthored numerous reports, including, Enron’s Pawns: How Public Institutions Bankrolled Enron’s Globalization Game, The World Bank and the G-7: Still Changing the Earth, and A Climate for Business. On the 50th anniversary of the World Bank, Wysham was the coauthor, with IPS director John Kavanaugh, of Beyond Bretton Woods: Alternatives to the Global Economic Order.
- Kate Rhee, the director of the Prison Moratorium Project, a multiracial group of young activists, community members, and formerly incarcerated people. The Moratorium Project works to stop prison expansion and mass incarceration, and is dedicated to reinvesting resources in the communities most affected by criminal justice policies, promoting educational programs, alternatives-to-incarceration initiatives, housing, and sustainable development.
- Cheri Honkala, the executive director of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, a multiracial organization of, by, and for poor and homeless people. Honkala was named among the 100 most powerful people in the region by the publicationThe Philadelphian. She played a leading role in the Economic Human Rights Campaign, the March of the Americas, and the first-ever summit of 100 antipoverty organizations.
Political exigencies and pressures were not only topics for discussion on the panel, they also affected the panel’s makeup, for Daphne Wysham was a gracious latecomer to the panel, a last-minute replacement for Annie Brisibe, the head of Niger Delta Women for Justice. Brisibe had been invited to speak on this panel, but was subsequently denied the visa that would have allowed her to enter the United States. Wysham offered testimony to the importance of Brisibe’s work and provided a framing context for understanding the U.S. government’s denial of Brisibe’s visa. Brisibe is “one of the most amazing women in the Niger Delta,” Wysham observed. “She was elected by her peers – most of whom were men – to be the head of the Ijaw Youth Council. The Ijaw are the largest ethnic minority in the Niger Delta, and it had never happened before . . . that they would include a woman in their discussions, much less elect her to be the head of their organization. So she has enormous respect in the Delta.” As many at the conference knew, the Niger Delta had been the site of a spectacular protest in the summer of 2002, when a group of several hundred women took over oil platforms in the region to protest the catastrophic environmental and economic effects of the extraction projects of multinational oil corporations there. As Wysham described it, “It was interesting to watch how things played out last year when the women . . . took over the oil platforms. What was alarming was that . . . the newspapers in Nigeria started to blame her [Annie], who was in Canada at the time, through innuendo, [saying] that groups in Canada were inciting these women to take over these oil platforms. And within a few days, the home of her sister and her family . . . was invaded by troops. And they beat up her family, with no evidence that she had anything to do with the protest, although perhaps she did. Is that a crime?” Wysham concluded, “So it’s no surprise to me that they’ve denied her a visa.”
