Resistance of Indigenous Women Stretches from North to South

Resistance of the the Barro Blanco hydroelectric dam.
Source: ESCRIBANA, CONAMUIP & Telesurtv.net

Across the Americas, the plight of Native people, and women in particular, continues to be ignored.

From North to South, the systematic state discrimination against women excludes their participation in politics, discourages their participation in movements through the threat of violence, and belittles not only their political demands but also their very lives.

1,200 indigenous women have been murdered or disappeared in the last 30 years in Canada, but the government still refuses to launch a national investigation. In Mexico, 7 indigenous women are killed every day and 400 more were disappeared in the central state, just in 2014. Guatemala and El Salvador have the highest rates of femicide in the world, and women are still struggling to gain justice from the atrocities that occurred during the regions’ civil wars. But women are refusing to be disappeared, targeted, murdered and attacked. They are rising up, organizing, educating and expanding their search for justice outside their immediate communities.

Indigenous women’s resistance -rooted in community, future generations, and ancestral struggles for land and livelihood – is a feminist resistance, but it is also fundamentally anti-capitalist and anti-imperial, demanding respect and protection of not only women’s bodies, but also of land, water, mother earth, culture and community. 

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