Knowing the other/other ways of knowing: Indigenous feminism,testimonial,and anti-globalization street discourse

Introduction

In this article, I explore the relationship between anti-globalization counter hegemonic discourse and recent Indigenous feminist alternative knowledge production. Although seemingly unrelated, the autoethnographic writing of some Indigenous feminists from Latin America questions the assumptions and presuppositions of Western development models and globalization, while asserting an identity as contemporary Native activist women. Drawing on ideas developed in the book Indigenous Feminist Narratives: I/We: Wo(men) of An(Other) Way, I reflect on parallels and counterpoints between the voices from the global street movement, “other” epistemologies (identified hereafter), postcolonial theory, and contemporary Indigenous feminist theorization. I intend to situate Indigenous feminism, defining and identifying the primary concerns, genres, and theoretical approaches they make recourse of in their writing. From a literature review, and discussion of how Indigenous feminists describe themselves and the critical response to their expression, the intertextuality between global discourses on counter-hegemonic anti-globalization will surface, allowing us to understand why Indigenous feminism does not fit neatly into any one disciplinary camp. The wide spectrum of contemporary issues aligned with global environmental sustainability, safeguarding cultural heritage, and socio-economic equality are tightly interwoven into the construction of individual identity as feminist Indigenous persons.

First I will describe and extrapolate on the problematics of the term Indigenous feminism; a seemingly elusive or contradictory term that leads to the consideration of identity through the lenses of gender and ethnicity in bifocal manner. Unlike previous constructions that tended to subordinate the relevance of the category of gender to the supremacy of tribal concerns, the emerging movement of Indigenous feminism is one that has transnational scope and foundational integrity in the equal privileging of these two terms. Recent publications define and frame the salient characteristics of Indigenous feminist thought and practice (Amireh, 2000); del Valle Escalante, 2009). My interest is honed on those from the Latin American geographic region and the problems associated with the dissemination of their alternative perspectives. Albeit a “nascent field of scholarly inquiry” (Suzack et al., 2010: 4), Indigenous feminism is garnering global attention from critics in gender studies and post-colonialism (Alvarez et al., 1998; Amireh, 2000; Bastian Duarte, 2012; Cumes and Monzón, 2006; Dulfano, 2015; Green, 2007; Hernandez Castillo, 2010; Ouellette, 2002; Smith, 2011). At the beginning of the century, the growing awareness of the existence of Latin American feminism focused primarily on the first wave of women activists who had participated in political change during the transition to democracy in the 1980s (Saporta Sternbach et al., 1992). That feminist movement included Native and non-Natives alike (Alvarez et al., 1993), with Quiché Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú ranking among those in the international spotlight, even though the non-Native voices predominated. By the early twenty-first century, critics broke out the heterogeneous approaches informing Latin American gender struggles vis-à-vis ethnicity and indigenity, cultural identity, sexuality, racism, nationalism, activist anthropology, geography, or anti-globalization. From that phase of classification and taxonomy germinated the corpus of contemporary criticism on Indigenous Latin American Feminism that remains sparse, at best, yet cross-disciplinary.

The curricular positioning of Indigenous feminism in the academy has been bandied about, and appropriated when convenient, by Gender studies, Latin American studies, Ethnic studies, Latin American cultural studies, Post-colonial studies, Philosophy, Political Science, Law, Sociology, Anthropology and others—never really finding a comfortable home. The question has become complicated because of the realignment of the two core components of “Indigeneity and Feminism” as equally weighted, and of commensurate value, with decolonization of the hierarchy of patriarchal authority. Moreover, the interrogation of the legitimacy of Western knowledge, as the singular and sole way of knowing, by Indigenous Knowledge (IK) and alternative knowledge producers, has also had repercussions for the way we frame Indigenous feminism in academia. Adding another vector of reorientation is the lack of uniformity around global feminism as the focus shifts to specific geographical regions, where already diverse linguistic and tribal affiliations come to bear on the analysis. The multicultural variants of the feminism of women of color who are Native further disrupts disciplinary boundaries to the point of destabilizing and decentering many accepted Western scholarly frames of reference. Thus no academic unit claims Indigenous feminism as its sole raison d’etre, which is not entirely negative, and opens fruitful doors to cross-disciplinary collaborations.

On the other hand, beyond the ivory tower, Indigenous feminism as an intellectual, political, social activist concept is one that aims to challenge patriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism, and imperialism, and finds resonance in many contemporary debates. A literature review of the corpus of works authored on and by Indigenous feminism in Latin America elicits various points of convergence around the timely topics of environmental stewardship, activist anthropology, sustainable socio-economic development, alternative epistemologies, mitigation of exploitation, violence and abuse, as well as counter hegemonic anti-globalization protest. The voices of Indigenous feminists rising up tend to discuss gender/tribal and tribal gendered identity in attempts to define and delineate what it means to them. Their postulations are not just a matter of rearranging social power hierarchies to include women at the top, but a radical and alternative challenge to the structural sources of gender domination in capitalist, globalized society. Therefore they understand keenly the fact that their gender and ethnicity is always functioning in relation to other realms of oppression including epistemological and physical violence; psychological colonization of the mind; state, corporate and development aggression; racism; poverty; non-native linguistic exclusivity; environmental destruction; and a lack of health and food security. This web of entanglement in which they perceive their identity, agency and consciousness of self is spurred in part by contagion from global discourses on current predicaments. What this means in academic and public settings is that Indigenous feminist intellectuals posit and echo a wide spectrum of concerns aired by social and political dissidents in a discourse of resistance to the colonialism, racism, economic exploitation, and unsustainable development incarnate in the dominant Western paradigms, but they do so through a gendered, Native prism.

Literature review of criticism on Indigenous feminism

In this section, I would like to highlight the most recent critical response to Indigenous feminism in Latin America, primarily stemming from Humanities scholars. Aida Hernández Castillo’s article, “The Emergence of Indigenous Feminism in Latin America” (2010), outlines the spaces of resistance being reclaimed, as well as the Indigenous feminist epistemologies that draw from Native culture, yet prioritize gender. Analyzing the repressive patriarchal aspects of their ancestral traditions, she posits the manner in which Indigenous feminists do not dismiss their Native roots, rather negotiate conflict and difference. In fact, they embrace their cultural connections to nature, land, family, and spirituality as fundamental tenets of their modes of interaction in the world. Indigenous feminism draws on deep cultural roots employing a holistic approach to ethnic and gender identity.

Ángela Bastian Duarte (2012)—as was standard practice in feminist criticism of the region—begins her study with the reiteration of the central role feminism played in the political landscape of the late twentieth century in Latin America. Significantly, though, she differentiates the diversity of the latest feminist movement, specifically giving inaugural attention to Indigenous as well as lesbian feminism. Both are teetering on the margins of the Latin American movement because of their thorny relationship with hegemonic liberal feminism. Hernández Castillo et al. in Dissident Women underscored the tension that was born as Indigenous feminists fought to “bridge the gap between an Indigenous movement that refuses to acknowledge its sexism and a feminist movement that cannot see its ethnocentricity” (2006: 58). Similarly Andrea Smith (2011) notes that for Native women in North America using the label of “feminist” condemned one to being labeled “White.” So the demarcation of Native or Indigenous feminism from mainstream liberal feminism is particularly acute, and fraught with reciprocal tensions.

The volume of critical essays, Indigenous Women and Feminism: Politics, Activism, Culture (2010), conceptualized transnational Native feminist cultural and political practice, emphasizing the “critical importance of emerging [global] Indigenous feminist endeavors” (Suzack et al., 2010: 4) and the multiplicity of locations, disciplinary approaches, and objectives. Here was a preliminary mapping out of the scope of activities that constitute what is now recognized as a heterogeneous Native feminist movement around the globe.

Through the lens of literary post-colonial studies, Indigenous Feminist Narratives I/We: Wo(men) of an(Other) Way (Dulfano, 2015) analyzes the representation of Indigenous women in Latin American canonical writing since the conquest. Tracing the disparaging depictions, and subsequent renaissance of Indigenous women’s agency in Latin American letters, the volume fleshes out stereotypes associated with her as interpreter/traitor; exotic Amazonian jungle denizen; abject, exploited domestic servant; or other vacuous derogatory signs disseminated by patriarchal forces from outside and within the Indigenous world to signify her. After establishing the most common misrepresentations that have shaped our cultural imaginary about Native women from colonial times through the 1970s, the focus turns to the important link that exists between Indigenous women’s writing and testimonial literature in the late twentieth century. Testimonial purveyed a literary space for the mediated voice of Indigenous woman to reveal her worldview, the political repression against Indigenous people, economic exploitation, and her socio-cultural history as a native. Out of that literary form has emerged the self-articulated autoethnography in the current era, which exhibits a deep cross-fertilization between literary analysis, anthropology, socio-economic science, sustainability, politics, gender studies, and linguistics.

Other critical studies have traced the inroads of Latin American Indigenous feminism in philosophy (Schutte, 1994) or in the arts (Mithlo, 2009). Rodríguez (2010) undertakes an analysis of the inaccurate representation of the subaltern female (read Inca) in canonical work by the quintessential seventeenth century mestizo El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. Johansson (2008) wrote one of the first doctoral dissertations on the figure of Indigenous woman in four indigenist novels. Many others have assiduously deconstructed the gendered and ethnic identity of Malinche, iconic mother of the Mexican bastard mestizo race (Castillo, 1977; Cypess 1991; Dulfano (2010); Godayol, 2012). Detwiler et al. (2014), Maier and Dulfano (2004), and Shea (1993) and a multitude of critics who weighed in on testimonio literature invariably touch on the figure of Menchú and other Indigenous female narrators of the genre. Archuleta (2006) and Mihesuah (2003) in North America have initiated the discussion about the relationship between Native feminist theorization, curriculum, and the academy, among other lines of thought. Noting the dates of publications and the panorama of studies emanating from disciplines as disparate as art history, history, education, or linguistics (codex analysis and language revitalization), literature or anthropology (ethnography), it is not surprising that Indigenous feminism has pinged about from discipline to discipline.

Testimonial genre

What are the literary origins of contemporary Indigenous feminist writing? One key source of their self-expression is found in testimonial literature, a heterogeneous genre from the 1980s made famous by the iconic, controversial book I, Rigoberta Menchú (Menchú and Burgos-Debray, 1984) , a firsthand oral accounting. Tape-recorded and compiled by an anthropologist in Paris, it was a narrative, saturated with urgency, about the Guatemalan civil war atrocities, threaded together with an exiled Indigenous woman’s life story/culture, and an ethnographic description of other Indigenous peoples of the highland mountainous region. Originally the Cuban publishing house Casa de Las Americas dubbed testimonio in the 1960s as part of their literary prize contest concerned with “historiography and international politics in their relation to culture” (Smorkaloff, 1997: 131), thus launching its study in those fields. In Woman as Witness: Essays on Testimonial Literature by Latin American Women (Maier and Dulfano, 2004) the interrogation of testimonial literature “foregrounded testimonios written by women from the region [Latin America]” (Davies, 2004: 855). “Testimonial: Present Predicaments and Future Forays” (Dulfano, 2004) a chapter in Woman as Witness spoke in part to the viability of such a literary category and the narrative legitimacy of its principal Indigenous talking head Menchú—which had been brought into question in the controversy surrounding her book. Detwiler and Breckenridge hail Woman as Witness as one of three noteworthy critical responses to the testimonio debate that finally brought the focus on “ways in which women and testimonio, gender and genre, fit exceedingly well together… and testimonio has not and should not fade away” (2012: 2). In many testimonios “by”/about Indigenous women, anthropological ethnography had crossed over from social scientific descriptions of customs to reveal the political abuses of authoritarian forces in the predominantly military right-wing regimes of the Cold War era around Latin America. This led scholars to undertake literary analyses of many of these texts for the first time.

Originally testimonio was a narrative that challenged oppressive power structures and served as what Adrianne Aron saw as a “therapeutic tool in the treatment of people who suffered psychological trauma under state terrorism” (1992: 175). It was an eyewitness rendition by women principally, who spoke as representatives of a group of “peasants or political victims of terrorist governments” (Bueno, 2000: 116), often through educated mediators. Several examples of the orthodox formula mark the conventionally accepted Latin American canon of 1970s–1980s, voiced principally by Indigenous women: Menchú’s I, Rigoberta Menchú (1983) denouncing the genocide of the Indigenous during the Guatemalan civil war; Domitila de Chungara’s (1978) Let Me Speak on abuses of Indigenous workers in the Bolivian mines and society, or the other quintessential example, The Night of Tlatelolco (1971), by journalist Elena Poniatowska about the cover-up of the 1968 government massacre of civilians in Mexico. These texts were mostly taught in anthropology classes, journalism, history, political science, and upper-division Spanish literature classes.

Eva Bueno augments the list with reference to the non-canonical Child of the Dark (1960), by Carolina de Jesus, a Brazilian who “was a voice speaking against the evils of favelas (shanty-towns) and on behalf of favelados (the people who live in favelas)” (2000: 116). This text anticipates the shift of focus of testimonio toward being a mouthpiece for the disenfranchised poor of the world. Technically, the target of de Jesus’s denunciation (poverty/globalization) would exclude her book from the traditional genre’s scope as much as her race or the evocation of her sexual identity, but Bueno makes a compelling argument to the contrary. De Jesus’s book is precursor the twenty-first century testimonios which transcend and redefine subject matter, format, and authorship, by surpassing known limitations and taking advantage of porous disciplinary boundaries. As a seminal literary style of writing, testimonio of the last century allowed Indigenous feminists’ thoughts to be accessible to international audiences. On the other hand, the asymmetrical balance it created between educated mediator of the narrative and illiterate, voiceless Indigenous subject would have to be transformed as it evolved.

Another factor that influenced the course of the evolution and modification of testimonio occurred when the international debate erupted on the possibility of objective, unbiased subaltern agency and subjectivity because of the accusation of falsification by anthropologist David Stoll against Menchú. Additionally the legitimacy of her Nobel Peace Prize was scrutinized. Her case problematized point of view, subjectivity, authenticity, authorship, and the “engagement/entanglement” of researchers, with repercussions in many fields. The question Gatryi Spivak had already asked: “Can the Subaltern speak?” (1993) was a central concern. With the Menchú controversy, one internationally acclaimed example was interrogated, commencing the transformation, and opening a new chapter for Indigenous women to speak for themselves about global concerns and their views on self-determination without mediation.

Cross pollination with global polemics and discourse

In this section I discuss the salient arguments and common targets of protest identified by the global street movement with which Indigenous feminism dialogues and concurs. The main concern of Indigenous women in their writing is to articulate a sense of who they are, their views on equality and sovereignty within an identity as emancipated decolonized tribal gendered subject. Nonetheless their discourse is informed by, and informs, global debates arising around the geopolitics of globalization, hegemonic models of “development,” and the disparities of health and economic security for the world’s poor. An awareness of the larger context stemming from across global issues with which Indigenous feminism is in dialogue is essential. A point of departure for grounding the conceptual critique of globalization they espouse is delineated in the book Mundo S.A. (2002) translated roughly as World, LLC (Galeano et al., 2002). The collection of articles in Mundo summarizes the platform advocated by the eclectic anti-globalization street movements who are opposed to the hypermarketing of our lives, the erasure or marginalization of many socioeconomic, racial and ethnic groups, and the unchecked exploitation of public goods within the current capitalist system. The authors—public intellectuals—”outed” the failures of the Western normative development model of the late twentieth century. They also identified the disparate elements constituting the Street or antiglobalization movement, whose objective is to reclaim control from corporative monopolies and deregulated industries; protect public goods and the environment; foster policies for health and food security; establish fair employment practices, and transform our social architecture into an equitable, sustainable social order.

Echoing this counter-hegemonic discourse, another leading public intellectual whose writing resonates with Indigenous feminists is Boaventura Sousa Santos (“Epistemologies of the South”, 2014). In referring to alternative knowledge of the South he champions the kinds of changes sought for a transformed civilization, “not in terms of production, rather mentality, sociability, ways of being and living together” (2014: 14). Additionally various titles in the global consciousness stream point to a “different world as possible” (McNally, 2006), or non-Western “Other campaigns” (Noam Chomsky et al., 2010) that are associated with Indigenous resistance movements to globalization. In contrast, the mainstream media, leaders from “developed” nations, and global financial institutions tend to aver that there is only one legitimate way to “know” and foment development. Disenfranchised groups and vociferous public intellectuals in response denounce the social injustices of the current system and simultaneously assert their particular identity and alternative knowledge systems. Indigenous women’s voices speak out on this front in unison with the aforementioned examples.

Of the rising tide of “Other” discourses of counterbalance, the text Lo que dijo la calle [What the Street Said] (Garin, 2011) by a female Argentine librarian (non Native) heralded the Street as harbinger and key protagonist of the twenty-first century. As a literary scholar, my interest in this manuscript was threefold: first, for its identification and analysis of the nascent global protagonist—the Street—that was beginning to appear in Latin American literary works and physical reality. Second, for pinpointing the emerging thematic focus on the condemnation of global fraudulent banking, and corporate and governmental misconduct in the local example of Argentina. Third, for its singular testimonial style that was an amalgamation of literary forms, utterances, speech acts, and exegesis recounted by an enmeshed female narrator, who was participant and observer all in one. Charles Hale mentions, in relation to the cultural politics of identity in Latin America in the late twentieth century, one area that has become continually problematized is that of “the entanglement of the analyst’s lens and topic of study”(1997: 569). Indeed the cultural seemed political and the political appeared to be cultural for Latin American social and gender movements as Alvarez et al. suggest in their 1998 book. Unravelling this complex interaction between protagonist and investigator, and theory and praxis, often upheld as separate, was vital. The elimination or diffusion of known boundaries became catalyst for new forms of protest and expression. The burgeoning fields of inquiry of participatory development and activist anthropology that combined academic scholarship with social activism portended a metamorphosis in the intellectual and material realms. The transformation was playing out in many branches of knowledge beyond the contentious literary genre of testimonio, and Indigenous women were vociferous and active in their engagement.

Unlike the classic testimonios, Garin’s palimpsest collage of literary forms and voices had the same urgency, but a distinct modus operandi and focus for its indictment. Where previously in Menchú’s testimony the mediator, a white literate anthropologist, arranged, transcribed, and transformed a marginal “illiterate” Indigenous exiled woman’s political and cultural accounting for Western consumption in the international market, here a member of the collective protagonist labelled the “Street” assembled this firsthand collage of enunciations of remonstration. The text exemplified what Benedict Anderson (1983) called “horizontal comradeship,” where distinct entities coalesced and found a common voice.

Who was this new turn-of-the-century protagonist called the Street? Naomi Klein characterizes the Street movement as lacking a common driving revolutionary philosophy such as Marxism, ecosocialism, or anarchism (2002: 178), and yet it is able to amass a consensus of micromovements engaged in the creation of a democratic base out of unions, neighborhood associations, farmers, pueblos, anarchist collectives, and/or Indigenous governance organisms (p. 170). The eclectic, embryonic I/We-individual/collective narrator advances an alternative discourse and operational system to counter the socially, politically, and economically disastrous modernist project.

The naysayers of globalization came from an ample array of backgrounds. Intellectuals within Western institutions, even Nobel Prize-winning economists like Columbia University’s Joseph Stiglitz’s Globalization and Its Discontent (2002) or Harvard professor, Indian Laureate on welfare economics (1998) Amartya Sen’s intellectual platform gained traction. Furthermore, a distinct cohort began to resound in the academic journals, such as LASA Forum (2005), termed “alternative knowledge producers.” In Latin America, public intellectuals joined the ranks of the outspoken critics of the system with counter-hegemonic ideas for altering the course of global affairs. Socialism and communism had been discredited, yet many were articulating “Other” alternatives to the broken, unjust capitalist model that was rapidly contaminating the environment and promoting the unsustainable interests of a few exclusive elites.

Simultaneously the debate challenging the monopolistic authority of Western critical thought, and related control and dissemination of knowledge production surfaced. The implication of public intellectuals shifting knowledge beyond the ivory tower, and a corresponding thrust in post-colonial studies toward the decolonization of the mind of colonized and colonizer (Nandy, 1983) had tangible consequences. Aware of the insidious nature of neocolonialism to fuel a disparaging and derogatory imaginary of the colonized subject, Indigenous feminists were examining the inner workings of colonialism in psychological and physical terms in relation to their lives. Counter-hegemonic discourse questioned the current inequities of the system. The goal was to decolonize individuals and the global collective through the levelling of the Western/Northern intellectual apparatus. Contemporary Indigenous feminists were striving to insert self-enunciated alternative cosmovisions and solutions into the hegemonic debate on globalization, development, and self-determination. Equally dynamic was their representation of a gendered-ethnic-transnational identity. Drawing on Donna Harraway‘s conviction that “we articulate and therefore are,” (2004: 106) the subaltern subject regards her devoir as one of expressing her agenda and charge, informed by Native knowledge, to the hegemonic class from a gendered perspective. They conceptualize and figuratively deconstructe the epistemologies of violence (Cusicanqui, 2014) inherent in many forms of representation that result in the perpetuation of exclusion.

Global discourse aired counter-hegemonic conceptions of inclusivity, pluriculturalism, gender equity, and self-determination rallying in concert with paradigms of alternative sustainable economic, social, and political order. These models rethought what development meant for all the stakeholders and players in the global debate, who should be privy to the benefits of development across classes, ethnicities, and genders, and how to reconfigure and redistribute power and agency. Like participatory development theory, the question raised is “Who has the rights to know what?” and “Who is saying what for whom?”

Indigenous women autoethnographers

What follows is a brief discussion of a few examples of writing by contemporary Indigenous intellectuals that adhere to the aforementioned multidisciplinary and intertextual content. The first by Kichwa scholar Luz María de la Torre Amaguana prefigures the unprecedented blending of a professional, social-scientific approach with a personal narrative to depict the trajectory of an Indigenous woman who overcomes oppression through education, opportunity, fortitude, and perseverance. “What does it mean to be an Indigenous woman in contemporary times” (De la Torre Amaguana, 2010, 2015) is an auto-ethnographic theorization of what the designation and appellation of “Indigenous woman” signifies. This text has been studied in foreign language upper division literature, gender, ethnic studies, economics, and anthropology classes. She wages a critique of the Occidental modernist project of globalization from the viewpoint of an Indigenous woman. Her earlier co-authored book Reciprocity in the Andean World [Reciprocity in the Andean World] (De la Torre and Sandoval, 2004) is a semitestimonial essay that opens with the call for a conscious and concerted internalization of the concept of Ecuadorian cultural diversity and interculturality, one already legitimized structurally through constitutional rights. Their proposed model reiterates Amartya Sen’s (1999, 2003) stipulation that growth, well being, and quality of life are intrinsic, inviolable measures of development and progress that should be made available to every man and woman. Although written from a local perspective in Otavalo Ecuador based on her cultural history, intellectual framework, and expertise, reverberations of these ideas are sounding on many continents among diverse peoples. The seeds of this thinking are sown from the fundamental need to reclaim axiomatic human values, such as equality, justice, solidarity, reciprocity, and mutual respect that have gone by the wayside with Western development.

Indigenous feminists are also finding outlets in university or other presses, like activist Rosa Isolde Reuque Paillalef’s personal testimonial as a Mapuche woman in Chile (When a Flower is Born, 2002). Her editor, Florencia Mallon, has also published a post-colonial theoretically oriented criticism Decolonizing Native Histories (2012). Finally, the portrait and historical subject that emanates from Q’uiché Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatuj’s dissertation chapter, “Memory/Memoir, Challenges and Anthropology,” (Nimatuj Velásquez 2008, 2015) is one that contends with pressures vying for resources and recognition in her life as Indigenous woman. The narrative describes the complexity of trying to juggle the numerous responsibilities of research, activism, and personal versus professional identity. As an activist anthropologist at the University of Texas her dissertation on the twenty-first century coffee crisis includes an autoethnography as introductory chapter, the content of which is being studied in anthropology, literature, economics, gender/ethnic studies, and other disciplines.

Indigenous feminist discourse, shaped by an historical, colonized imaginary, is in dialogue with past, present and future. Excavating their past, they draw on germane concepts from their cultural heritage and ancestral knowledge, such as the concept of buen vivir [life in harmony] or reciprocidad [reciprocity]. ¹ In the present, Indigenous feminist writers craft ethnographic narratives or poetry, denouncing aspects of the inequitable, discriminatory modernist blueprint for development and sustainability. Writing compelling narratives of contemporary identity, they are delineating the specificities of their local, gendered, and ethnic circumstances within the broader context of globalization, promoting a universal “human” sustainable world order. They do not speak in isolation nor view their existence that way. “The link between political economy and culture remains crucial to any form of feminist theorizing” (Mohanty, 2003: 509). The commonality shared, and solidarity arising among these Native women is “an anti-capitalist, transnational feminist practice” (Mohanty, 2003: 509).

In conclusion, these public intellectuals assert a gendered sense of self for persons hitherto effaced as female and Indigenous. Their writing exemplifies a feminist twenty-first century Indigenous “identity politics” defined as “identity political formations [that] typically aim to secure the political freedom of a specific constituency marginalized within its larger context. Members of that constituency assert or reclaim ways of understanding their distinctiveness that challenge dominant oppressive characterizations, with the goal of greater self-determination” (Heyes, 2012). Where and how this discourse of identity politics is disseminated is a formidable challenge, for without dissemination words remain frozen in time. Do we teach and publish on these narratives in English, Spanish, Kichwa, Navajo, etc.? Will these find a voice and critique in academic journals of education, literary studies, legal studies, anthropology and development or other disciplines? The questions of who says what about whom, how, and where (?) are still very much in the air. The goal of this article is to show how complex that taxonomy or classification, pigeon-holing or exegesis can be when we conceptualize “Indigenous feminism” today.