This book assembles 11 chapters by authors who explore mostly Mesoamerican and a few Andean territories. It combines academic practices with feminist activism regarding contemporary demands of justice, respect, and security for indigenous women. The articles have had a long maturation, as authors had the opportunity to meet several times during their writing. Articulated around postcolonial—and, I would add, indigenous—feminism, these are works that converse among themselves about four issues: a) global, national and local mediations of gender justice; b) tensions between struggles for justice and indigenous autonomy; c) voices and actions of indigenous women in the face of racism and dispossession; and d), methodological dimensions of a collaborative anthropology.
Sieder's collection argues that despite advances in mandates of gender justice as well as checks on violence under a model of juridical pluralism, these goals remain utopian and require a review of their legal, economic, political, and cultural contours. Contributing authors stress several issues. First, tensions exist between indigenous justice and recognition of women's rights, as well as between violence as a domestic construct and structural forms such as racism and dispossession. Second, women's political alliances must broaden in order to foster understanding of and actions against violence. Third, this agenda must connect more effectively with political protections of women's autonomy, but avoid traps such as clientelism and extractivism that tend to undermine justice. And, finally, struggles against gender violence must have local roots, thus bringing forth the multiplicity of violent acts (sexual, racial, patrimonial, domestic, communal, and political) that affects indigenous women's lives. In sum, while gender justice opens roads, the book argues that global rhetoric on human rights of women must be re-interpreted and invented through local cultural repertories when confronting the problematic realities of indigenous women in particular territories.
The book makes several contributions and I would like to highlight two of them. The book reviews processes of deliberation and political practices for a gender justice agenda. We are shown a valuable panorama of the struggles of women from original and indigenized peoples. These struggles, based on communality and diversity, open spaces for deliberation and political action at different levels: family, community, locality, region, nation, and globe. Mobilization, in monocultural or intercultural settings, allows the creation of an agenda which, in turn, incorporates indigenous women's interests in national constitutions, local regulations, and new global institutions.
It also reveals, however, how women's voices are thwarted, for example, by the lack of recognition of women judicial advocates or community police, or methods of dispossession that inhibit family and commons reproduction. But—and this cannot be overstressed—injustice launches, in turn, new deliberative moments and public denunciations. In my reading, debate and confrontation appear as an opportunity for women to reflect on themselves, lay the foundations of a global indigenous feminism, and deploy novel conversations about justice—for instance, local meanings of violence, access to material resources, communality and prevention of violence, and means to dispossess women. Successes and failures in women's activism also expose dangers that stem from, among other factors, the restriction of gender violence to domestic life, tensions with indigenous patriarchy, weaknesses in alliances among women, and political and public insecurity. Threats, too, can point to new issues about gender, feminism, and indigenous reproduction and their limits in the framework of capitalism.
The book also discusses the use of legal norms by indigenous women. The courts have been resources for indigenous women in different historical moments. The extensive literature on the subject in the Americas highlights three themes. First, women's access to courts was apparently intermediated by changing agents (among them lawyers, guardians, families, organizations, and unions). Second, women were well informed about political and economic issues that affected their lives. Third, justice was never expeditious or definitive: plaintiffs often repeated their complaints.
In the Andes during the first half of the twentieth century, the use of the courts parallels issues raised by this book: a variety of mechanisms of dispossession; a long history of violence never fully silenced; and acceptance of lower remuneration for indigenous women under the supposition that their work was less strenuous than that of either their male counterparts or non-indigenous women—an argument endorsed even by indigenous unions. The book adds three clashing contemporary tendencies: a) state recognition of indigenous justice and women's rights; b) deployment of global feminist practices and creation of global courts with extra-national prerogatives (for example, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights); and c) growing barriers to family and commons reproduction that affect women. These observations suggest the importance of this collection as well as the need to connect contemporary indigenous feminist views with women's historical processes.
