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equality in the Council’s Sustainable Development Action Plan, the Norwegian chairmanship
removed both women and indigenous people from its priorities. The Council does still include the
domains of gender equality and indigenous people in its Human Dimension (or Human
Development) portfolio, but it was not until 2011 that Carl Bildt, the foreign minister of Sweden
during the beginning of the Swedish chairmanship of the Council, recognized the importance of the
equality issue. At that time, he stated that the Arctic is ‘first and foremost a home to the people who
live there,’ that the Swedish chairmanship intended to ‘make it a high priority to involve indigenous
peoples in the work of the Arctic Council and promote their interests in matters of
intergovernmental relevance,’ and that ‘attention will also be given to gender equality’ (Bildt 2011).
Despite the finding that ‘these issues had been prominently mentioned in [the Swedish
Chairmanship’s] originally proposed agenda for action,’ there is no evidence of any such attention
during the Swedish chairmanship, with the exception of a day of open seminars at the May 2013
Minister Meeting in Kiruna, during which the Chairmanship was forwarded to Canada. The day of
seminars ended with a panel on gender equality in the late afternoon (Nord 2013) in which the
authors of this paper participated.
Much has been said about the importance of the involvement of women and indigenous peoples at
all levels of governance (Sloan 2004). There is growing consensus that when women are largely
absent or merely hold high positions more as ‘window dressing’ than as autonomous elected
officials, governments tend to downplay or ignore the gender impact of legal and fiscal issues.
Similar effects are seen in relation to indigenous issues. Indigenous women’s interests in community
membership, land use, habitat and environmental protection, economic development, and new
forms of geographic and economic displacement tend to be subsumed within the views articulated
by official entities like government ministers and representative indigenous individuals who
themselves may gain position more through their relationships with governments than because they
are community leaders. Although women often play stronger roles in community-level politics,
ethnic identities are often given precedence over gender representation. At the same time, however,
gender is