Vol. 32 no. 3, 2010
To speak of indigenous feminisms would have been unthinkable twenty years ago. Nevertheless, beginning with the 1990’s we have seen the emergence of indigenous women’s movements in different Latin American countries that are struggling on different fronts. In many cases these indigenous women’s struggles for more just relations between men and women are based on definitions of personhood that transcend Western individualism. Their notion of equality identifies complementarity between genders as well as between humans and nature. It considers what constitutes a dignified life through a different understanding than liberal individualism of people’s relationship to property and to nature. This alternative perspective on women’s rights, which reclaims indigenous cosmovisions or indigenous epistemologies as spaces of resistance, are being transnationalized by a continental movement of indigenous women, most notably as part of an international network called Enlace Continental de Mujeres Indígenas (Indigenous Women’s Continental Alliance). In this article, the author reconstructs the political genealogies of these indigenous women and their struggles for justice.