Ottawa, March 24, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Indigenous women leaders, human-rights advocates, government officials, and other experts from across the Western Hemisphere will take part in a two-day online, international Summit of the Americas on Violence Against Indigenous Women (MMIWG) that is being hosted by the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC) on March 29 and 30. The goal is to create an action-oriented outcome document.
People from North and South America who want to put a stop to the deaths and disappearances, which a Canadian inquiry determined to be a genocide, will share their best practices to keep Indigenous women, girls, and gender-diverse people safe.
Confirmed speakers include Luis Almagro, the Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS); Antonia Urrejola Noguera, the OAS Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples; Brenda Hill, the Director of Technical Assistance and Training for the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center in the United States; Tara Wadhwa, Director of Policy for TikTok USA; Carolyn Bennett, the Canadian Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations; Marion Buller, the former chair of Canada’s National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, Amanda Tascon Panchi, Department of Women and Gender, Indigenous Organization of Antioquia, Laura Hernández Pérez, Nahua Puebla -Colectivo Yehcoa Um, México and many other representatives from countries across North and South America.
Topics to be discussed will include the impacts of COVID-19 on Indigenous women; best practices for ending the violence; the importance of traditional healing; the role of the United Nations and the OAS along with the role of governments, business, and media in providing solutions and ending violence. There will also be panel discussions on prisons and the overrepresentation of Indigenous people. A number of panels have also been set-aside for community leaders and grass-roots women to bring forward Indigenous-led solutions.
A full agenda will be posted Thursday on the Summit website which is available at this link: https://www.nwac.ca/summit-of-the-americas/. The event will be simultaneously translated into French, Spanish and English.
There is room for 1,000 registered participants to take part in live the Summit, and the number of confirmed registrations is fast approaching that number. NWAC is setting aside 25 spaces for journalists. A livestream of the Summit will also be available on the NWAC’s Facebook page.
Journalists will not be permitted to ask questions during the event. But we will attempt to facilitate one-on-one interviews with individual speakers, as requests come in. For more information or to reserve one of the 25 media spots, please send an email with your name, title and news affiliation to Gloria Galloway at gloria@gloriagalloway.com
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