At the Vancouver International AIDS Conference last month, some of the sessions echoed 2014’s Melbourne International AIDS Conference by beginning with a powerful acknowledgment of the ancestral owners of the land on which the event was being held and their current descendants. In Vancouver these are the Coast Salish People, Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh, to whom their Northwestern Pacific territory is better known as part of ‘Turtle Island’.
What is rarely recognised however, let alone acknowledged, are the enormous rights violations that these and all indigenous peoples – especially women - face around the world in relation to our health, our well-being and HIV. At the Melbourne AIDS conference, where the official conference Declaration was entitled “Nobody Left Behind”, we had, for the fourth time, an Indigenous People’s Zone where we sought to address some of the issues we face.
No such civil society zone existed at the more science focused Vancouver AIDS conference last month. Nonetheless we sought to make our presence felt there also.
