Joy/Explorations, 2. Understanding Human Rights from Indigenous Women’s Perspectives

The movement of indigenous women in the Americas, through their organizations and political associations, has issued documents containing declarations, plans of action, demands, and proposals to rework the traditional concept of human rights. An analytical reading of some of these key texts has emerged from the main meetings during these last years. It is based both on their understanding of themselves as women in a context of gender relations and, at the same time, as belonging to a collectivity that encompasses communal values and practices. Within these notions of indigenous communities [pueblos originarios], women do not stand alone and neither do they perceive themselves as “individual subjects.” In the social space that they occupy, indigenous women are placed at the intersection of multiple identities: gender, race, ethnicity, and class. They contribute significantly to the reformulation of a new world that is more just, and that critically examines not only their role as poor, indigenous women, but also questions the role and power structures of the neoliberal state. They are gradually transforming the meanings of “human rights” within their own struggles as indigenous women. In the analysis that follows, I highlight the voices of organized indigenous women in the Americas by quoting extensively from key texts and interviews. There, it can be discovered how the internal logic of their speeches, while not always explicit, transforms the language of human rights and redefines it. In analyzing this redefinition, we find some main axes around which they formulate their struggle for social justice. Among them, we find a unique vision of the concept of gender; a defense of their indigenous spirituality; and a revision of responsibilities and rights within their communities.