Native leader lands prominent role in women’s advocacy
Nomination marks first time aboriginal woman will head advisory body to province
MONTREAL— It may be stating the obvious, but Eva Ottawa doesn’t shy away from a challenge. This quality will serve her well in her newest role.
At the age of 45, she has already served seven years as grand chief of northern Quebec’s Atikamekw First Nation. Before that, she was a constitutional negotiator with the provincial and federal governments for her community, which is about 300 kilometres north of Montreal.
Now, she is settling into her post as president of Quebec’s Conseil du Statut de la Femme, an arm’s-length government agency that promotes and defends the rights of women in the province.
The nomination is the first time an aboriginal woman has been named to head an advisory body to the Quebec government.
The timing was lost on no one — certainly not on Ottawa.
“It was a nice surprise to be asked to fill a mandate like this in such an important post,” she said in an interview with the Star. “But it’s also a great opportunity to see a door opening to be able to bring my contribution and to be able to bring together our two nations.”
There is a considerable gulf to bridge.
About a year ago, the Quebec public was hit with a Radio-Canada documentary in which several aboriginal women in the remote Quebec mining town of Val d’Or alleged they had been routinely harassed, intimidated and sexually abused by provincial police officers.
The allegations reverberate to this day, as Montreal police conduct an investigation into the provincial force. According to a recent report citing anonymous sources, there have been 75 police-brutality complaints from both aboriginal men and women.
The Quebec government has been criticized for not calling a provincial public inquiry into the matter, but decreed that it would instead offer full investigative powers to the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women, should its commissioners decide to delve into the issue in Quebec.
The issue seems unlikely to escape the inquiry’s radar, given that one of its commissioners, Michèle Audette, is a former president of Quebec Native Women, a provincial advocacy group.
Ottawa said the Val d’Or investigation is a high priority for her in her official capacity. As an indigenous woman, she is not particularly surprised by the allegations.
“We heard people talk about it, but as women, we feel a bit disillusioned. We don’t know where to turn to be able to express everything we’re experiencing,” she said.
This is the perspective that Ottawa brings to one of the most valued and widely cited of Quebec’s provincial advisory bodies — that of a segment of the population that is doubly discriminated against, based on sex as well as race.
Less than two months into the job and just having scheduled her first round of introductory media interviews, Ottawa is finding that the heat of the spotlight is swooping closer.
In the past week, Université Laval in Quebec City and the province’s Liberal government have come under fire for their hands-off reaction to reports of a series of sexual assaults that are alleged to have occurred in student residences.
At an on-campus vigil this week to denounce the acts, one young woman rose to allege that she had been raped by a Liberal member of Quebec’s National Assembly, resulting in the ousting of Montreal’s Gerry Sklavounos — who maintains his innocence — from the governing party’s caucus.
The events have put sexual consent, gender inequality and the role of government onto the front pages in the province, and made Ottawa an instantly relevant figure, even if she is still busy mastering the various files and issues her new office is working on.
Ottawa issued a statement after the university sex assaults urging the province to launch a sexual-assault and exploitation strategy backed with significant and stable funding. She has not commented on Sklavounos’s resignation, which occurred after the interview with the Star had been completed.
For the daughter of two teachers, one with a degree in sociology and in law, the solution to such troubling and often traumatic matters lies in education.
It’s a theme that carries over from her predecessor, Julie Miville-Dechêne, who ended her term with a province-wide school tour teaching students about sexual consent and deputizing Quebec rapper Koriass and Marilyse Hamelin, a journalist and feminist blogger, to pass the message on to boys and girls before they begin having sex.
Ottawa is also preparing to present the findings of a review of Quebec’s educational material meant to ensure they contain appropriate and equal gender representations.
Without scooping her report, she said: “There are problems and recommendations coming out of it. We see that there is work to do at that level.”
But Ottawa says she welcomes the hard work and challenges ahead, as well as the opportunities to advance the lot of her people — both the women and the indigenous.
“It comes with challenges, but that’s okay,” she said. “I’m a woman of challenges, a woman of action.”