Communications and Resources

Understanding the gender/ing of people, places, and dynamics is essential to how we tell stories. This is why an intersectional gender lens is critical to our communications when working with indigenous peoples and forest peoples to address issues that concern them.

Self-representation is an essential part of self-determination. Too often indigenous peoples, forest peoples and women are represented by and for others, rather than for themselves and their communities in ways that are determined and directed by them. There is power in representation, and women, indigenous peoples and forest peoples are reclaiming their power over how they represent themselves, in stories, images, audiovisuals, research, media, and international policy spaces.

Our Gender Programme aims to amplify indigenous and forest women’s self-representation through their stories of their contributions to their collective land rights movements, community governance, and self-determination.

We seek to create space to support indigenous women and forest women in challenging mainstream and negative representations and encouraging self-representations that affirm agency, dignity and rights to lands.

The work towards these aims includes:

• highlighting indigenous women and forest women’s voices, stories, and contributions to their collective territorial rights through the creation of communications materials and training;
• building alliances with indigenous, forest and women’s networks for communications
• enhancing engagement of global audiences with gender justice as it relates to land rights and environmental justice
• Co-creating articles, videos, briefings and research papers that highlight gender justice in land rights movements, indigenous and forest women’s role in biodiversity conservation, land rights struggles, and their role as knowledge keepers and leaders.
• Hosting the ‘Shifting the Narrative’ workshop series, which uses an intersectional gender lens to shed light on how communications can be used as a tool for justice through truth telling, visibility, and representation. Each workshop was facilitated by communications and creative practitioners working in the field of indigenous peoples’ rights and gender.