Distinguished Visitor
Women's Studies
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Distinguished Visitor in
Women's Studies 2009

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NETTIE WIEBE


Click here to download Nettie's complete biography.


"Often among women you find such strong integrated views around justice, equality, familial life and social equality. . . There is a call here to make some changes, and we women are the ones who are called to make those changes."

Continuing the tradition of family farming, Nettie Wiebe sows her seed in the rich soil of Canada’s prairie West. For almost thirty years on the Wiebe-Robbins farm in Laura, Saskatchewan, an agricultural community not far from Saskatoon, Nettie, husband Jim and their four children have produced organic crops including grains, oil seeds and pulse crops, and raised organic beef.



Born in Warman, Saskatchewan in 1949, Wiebe grew up in a large Mennonite family, the twelfth of fifteen children. Her parents, first-generation Canadians, were hard-working, community-minded farmers. Wiebe recalls: “The farm I grew up on was almost a village! We did a lot of things together ─ we sang and played sports and, of course, worked and worked on that farm together.” Except for a few years of study abroad, Wiebe has never missed a harvest, and she has always drawn great strength from her Mennonite and agricultural roots.

As a young woman in the mid-1970s, Wiebe’s political consciousness was raised when a uranium company, Eldorado, together with the provincial government, proposed the building of a uranium refinery near Warman. “We, the residents, were just appalled at the possibility that we would have such an industry intruding into what was a good agricultural area of family farms close to the South Saskatchewan River,” Wiebe remembers. Further to its devastating effects on farming, the reality that uranium production might fuel the nuclear weapons industry incensed the local community with its Mennonite tradition of passivism. Grassroots education and organizing rallied the agricultural community who took a firm stance against the project and eventually Eldorado’s plan was abandoned. “For me,” claims Wiebe, “that was a real lesson in how as an individual, as a lone voice, you both feel and often are powerless ─ but as a collective, when you work with each other and together for something, you can be politically very effective, surprisingly effective.”

Wiebe continued her activism in farm organizations, serving as the National Farmers Union Women’s President from 1988 to 1994 and as its first female President and CEO from 1995 to 1998. Entering into leadership of the NFU, Wiebe knew that agriculture and its institutions have long-standing patriarchal traditions in both land ownership and practice; but she also recognized that her agrarian feminist predecessors had made their mark on Canada’s West, insisting on full membership and participation in farm organizations, and that the NFU, in turn, acknowledged the principle of gender equality. Although often the only woman at agriculture industry meetings, “I was always there with the security of knowing that I had been duly elected by my own organization to represent the family farm,” Wiebe recalls. “And I always felt completely confident doing that, knowing that on these family farms women are key to the survival of and the work of the farm.”

Wiebe has long been committed to federal politics and considers this a key venue by which to affect needed change. The New Democratic Party candidate for the riding of Saskatoon-Rosetown-Biggar, Wiebe firmly believes “the needs of . . . people sitting at kitchen tables should come before the needs of those sitting around corporate board room tables.” She sees a good “fit” between her personal beliefs and the NDP platform, noting that “as a person who values democracy and equality and as an advocate for women's rights, ecological care and social justice, the New Democratic Party was clearly the party whose policy and processes were the best fit for me.”

Her work as a farmer, NFU representative, and NDP candidate intersect meaningfully with Wiebe’s academic career. A student of philosophy, Wiebe earned degrees at the University of Saskatchewan and the University of Calgary, where she received her doctorate in 1983. At present, Wiebe is Professor of Church and Society at St. Andrew’s College, University of Saskatchewan, where she teaches in the areas of ethics, ecology and social justice. Wiebe believes that “environmentalism and spirituality and political activism are in one place, they have to hold together, they have to be integrated in order to be meaningful and to move us forward.”

In her current work as a feminist activist and scholar, Wiebe confronts the pressing and overlapping issues of environmental sustainability and food culture and security. For Wiebe, the solutions to these contemporary crises are simultaneously grassroots and global, and women play essential roles in their mediation. In Wiebe’s view, the grassroots role that women play as cultural transmitters is key to the maintenance of a viable food culture. In our highly industrialized economy where our food undergoes such intense processing and commodification that it is hardly recognizable as food anymore, Wiebe observes that “still, in this context, when we gather around an important occasion, it is still often around food. And that’s important because it’s women who put that together.”

At the global level, where government policies favouring transnational corporations and agribusiness have eroded the economy of the family farm, Wiebe works to expose the need for the marginalized, including women, peasant and family farmers, to have a voice. Wiebe is an active member of Via Campesina, a world-wide organization founded in 1993, which works to develop solidarity and unity among small farmer organizations in their struggle for fair trade, the preservation of natural resources, and sustainable agricultural production. Via Campesina’s motto, Globalize the struggle, globalize the hope, exemplifies Wiebe’s belief that, together, women and men committed to social justice, can affect change.

Wiebe’s work as an agrarian feminist activist, environmental ethicist and scholar is a beacon of hope for women, for farm families, and for those committed to the future of our planet. Wiebe’s passion for change is rooted in hope.

Sources:
Telephone interview with Nettie Wiebe, 12/06/2009
La Via Campesina website, http://viacampesina.org/main_en/ , 6/12/2009
“New Democrats launch 2008 Saskatchewan Federal Platform”, accessed at http://www.srbndp.ca/, 07/11/2009
Theresa Wolfwood, “Nettie Wiebe: Agrarian Feminist”, accessed at http://www.bbcf.ca/_articles/2007/wiebe/wiebe.htm , 4/29/2009

On hope:
“Hope is that possibility that the imaginable is your outcome. I can always imagine and work for a better world. Hope without activism is empty. Hope without activism atrophies into delusion. Hope, grounded in action and in collective momentum, gives us the possibility of not only envisaging but moving towards a better world – against the current.”

On women and food culture:
“Food culture has been kept alive by women, and that connection between food and family and relationship and the community and celebration has been very much women’s work.”
“It has always seemed to me that women, in many ways, are the keepers of culture, and certainly of food cultures, which are what literally, and in many ways spiritually, sustain us. They are our connection to each other and to our natural world, and that’s mostly been the domain of women.”
“It is women who put the ‘culture’ in ‘agriculture’.” On the under-representation of women in government:
“Don’t for a minute think that this represents the abilities and the possibilities of women. It doesn’t. We are clearly on every discernable front, we are as competent and as capable and more energetic often in terms of our leadership possibilities.”

On her involvement in politics:
“I have been an active participant in partisan politics all of my adult life. In a democracy, partisan politics is a direct – and sometimes the most effective – means of shaping the public policy that affects almost everything we are able to do.” On Women’s Studies:
“The wonderful thing about Women’s Studies is that it pays careful and real attention to all of those subtle social /political /economic structures which inform women’s lives.”

On her mother’s influence:
“My mother was a very grounded person. If you can imagine, she had 15 children, and we were a big, lively household, and I never heard her in all that time raise her voice. And that has always stuck with me – that you always respect and speak carefully and peacefully to others, no matter what the ruckus; that your stance is always one of respect and love.”

On her inspiration:
“On a personal level I find myself energized and strengthened by the garden I keep, the family I cook for, the friends I work with and the energy of the movement of which I am a part.”

On the Mennonite tradition of peace:
“I come from very traditional, old-colony Mennonite roots and they were deeply passivist. That seems to me both the most courageous and still the most hopeful stance to take in a world where violence is so destructive and so pervasive. That seems to me for human survival still the most hopeful stance to take, one of non-engagement in military and violent endeavors. That is still where I, in my best moments, long to be.”

On her involvement with Via Campesina:
“The motto of Via Campesina is ‘Globalize the struggle, globalize the hope’, and I think that’s been very effective. It’s been, for me, an amazing experience to be part of such a movement.”