Indigenous Women Leaders, Empowerment and Self-Determination in the Context of Gold-Mining in Guyana

Good and effective leadership is critical for all self-determining people and is a means of ensuring socio-economic, cultural, civil and political rights and development of a country and society. This is also true for Indigenous communities, as a means of protecting their traditional ways of life and exercising their right to self-determination. It is also of particular importance in the context of the extraction of natural resources, such as gold. Gold-mining can have a myriad of both positive and negative impacts on the health, socio-economic, spiritual and cultural conditions and rights of Indigenous communities and the environment in which they live.

Due to historic power imbalances Indigenous communities around the world have experienced due to extractive activities undertaken by mining companies and miners, the right to free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) has been developed to redress this imbalance and give Indigenous peoples the right to be consulted when extraction takes place on their land and to enable them to withhold their consent to these activities. The right to FPIC has been developed in a number of leading international caselaw and discussed by a number of scholars. What has not received enough attention by both the caselaw nor academia, is the critical role Indigenous leaders play in the process. Further still, there has been little examination of Indigenous women leaders in this as well as the participation of Indigenous women in FPIC.

This thesis redresses this imbalance by looking at Indigenous women leaders or Toshaos, as they are referred to in Guyana under the Amerindian Act 2006, in this context. This research has important implications for operationalising FPIC in Guyana and beyond. It demonstrates that women are distinctive in their leadership style, due to their pragmatism and focus on community development. It seeks for the international Indigenous and non-Indigenous ally legal and scholarly community to consider actors within Indigenous communities who are central to decision-making, especially the role Indigenous leaders play in operationalising FPIC in practice and upholding community rights. It also introduces nuance into the debate about Indigenous peoples and extractivism. It does not seek to essentialise all Indigenous communities as those anti-extraction, especially communities like Guyana where Amerindians have practised their own traditional artisanal forms of gold-mining rights which are recognised and protected under the law in Guyana. It seeks fairer extractive practices which benefits Indigenous communities who want to pursue extraction and reap the developmental benefits of it. It also shines a light on Indigenous women as coproducers, miners, geologists and decision-makers in this sector and gives voice to their perspectives on mining. It proposes that investing in Indigenous women leaders benefits the Indigenous community as a whole. In other words, and in the support of many Indigenous feminist scholars, investing in the individual self-determination rights of Indigenous women, benefits the collective self-determination rights of the community as a whole.