INDIGENOUS WOMEN AND VIOLENCE INDIGENOUS WOMEN AND VIOLENCE Feminist Activist Research in Heightened States of Injustice EDITED BY LYNN STEPHEN & SHANNON SPEED The University of Arizona Press www .uapress .arizona .edu © 2021 by The Arizona Board of Regents All rights reserved. Published 2021 ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 8165- 4262- 8 (hardcover) ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 8165- 3945- 1 (paperback) Cover design by Leigh McDonald Typeset by Sara Thaxton in 10/14 Warnock Pro (text), Brandon Grotesque, and Iva WF (display) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Stephen, Lynn, editor. | Speed, Shannon, 1964– editor. Title: Indigenous women and violence : feminist activist research in heightened states of injustice / edited by Lynn Stephen and Shannon Speed. Description: Tucson : University of Arizona Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020036089 | ISBN 9780816542628 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780816539451 (paperback) Subjects: LCSH: Indigenous women—Violence against—United States. | Indigenous women— Violence against—Mexico. | Indigenous women—Violence against—Guatemala. | Indigenous women—Political activity—United States. | Indigenous women—Political activity—Mexico. | Indigenous women—Political activity—Guatemala. Classification: LCC HV6250.4.W65 I5318 2021 | DDC 362.88/55082097—dc23 LC record available at https:// lccn .loc .gov /2020036089 Printed in the United States of America ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48- 1992 (Permanence of Paper). CONTENTS Preface vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Indigenous Women and Violence 3 Shannon Speed and Lynn Stephen 1. Grief and an Indigenous Feminist’s Rage: The Embodied Field of Knowledge Production 26 Shannon Speed 2. Prison as a Colonial Enclave: Incarcerated Indigenous Women Resisting Multiple Violence 43 R. Aída Hernández Castillo 3. Women Defenders and the Fight for Gender Justice in Indigenous Territories 74 María Teresa Sierra 4. The Case of Sepur Zarco and the Challenge to the Colonial State 100 Irma A. Velásquez Nimatuj 5. Confronting Gendered Embodied Structures of Violence: Mam Indigenous Women Seeking Justice in Guatemala and the United States 125 Lynn Stephen vi Contents 6. Gender- Territorial Justice and the “War Against Life”: Anticolonial Road Maps in Mexico 157 Mariana Mora 7. Ethical Tribunals and Gendered Violence in Guatemala’s Armed Conflict 184 Morna Macleod 8. SOVERYEMPTY narrative DeneNdé poetics in walled homelands 209 Margo Tamez Epilogue: Indigenous Women and Violence in the Time of Coronavirus 243 Lynn Stephen and Shannon Speed Contributors 253 Index 259 PREFACE ll the authors in this volume completed the revisions to their chap- ters from their homes, as we all hunkered down to wait out the A global coronavirus pandemic. When we wrote our original intro- duction, we referred to violence against women as a global pandemic. We decided to take that out in light of the pandemic that framed the final steps in completing our book. It is time to put it back in. Today we write about the intertwined pandemics of gendered violence and coronavirus, as it becomes clear how inequalities of race, gender, ethnicity, place, and class converge to compound the vulnerabilities of so many in the pandemic and within the larger frame of settler logics. Right now, home may be the least safe place for many. The New York Times reports a sharp uptick in inci- dents of domestic violence globally, but Guatemala’s Con Criterio reports a decrease (both articles date from April 6, 2020). Why? If the only people who are operating are police, will you report to them as an Indigenous woman in Guatemala or elsewhere? If you are normally ignored because you speak an Indigenous language, why would you try to report violence in it? Who will come to help? And if you are confined to your home in a small village or an apartment in a large city, the people perpetuating violence and protecting those who do so may be even closer at hand to prevent and punish you with impunity. In the United States, where immigration raids have been normalized by the U.S. government, who do you report to? In detention and on the border, men, women, and children are being shut out viii Preface of health care, asylum, and basic necessities. States are complicit in these intersecting pandemics. Embodied violences may be converging in intimate spaces, but at the same time solidarity is unfolding between relatives, neighbors, and friends. In the community of our co- authors and colleagues each and every one confronts these intertwined pandemics in her own way, up close, through distance caring and learning, with communication, and in an insistence that these twin pandemics cannot be normalized. In a spirit of solidarity and lucha (struggle), we put forward this book, needed now more than ever, as a way of illustrating the interconnections of our bodies, our activism, our research, and our collective resolve for change. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS riting and knowledge production are always dialogic and collec- tive endeavors, however much we labor alone at our computers. W Our acknowledgments begin with the many Indigenous women whom we have worked with and learned from over the course of our careers and our lives. We are also profoundly grateful for the deep and sustained dialogue with the contributors to this volume over the course of more than two decades. One colleague and friend who has been an integral part of our group throughout the years but was unable to participate in this volume is Rachel Sieder. She has shaped our thinking in so many important ways, and her presence in the volume is real even in the absence of a chapter. Many other brilliant thinkers joined us for some of these dialogues, including, but not limited to, Maylei Blackwell, Elisa Cruz, Juan Herrera, Mercedes Pisoni, Renya Ramirez, Larisa Ortiz Quintero, Odilia Romero, and Maureen White Eagle, and we appreciate the insights they shared. We have received significant support for our collaboration over the years, and we gratefully acknowledge a UC Mexus-CONACYT Collaborative Grant, a Faculty Initiative Grant from the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (LLILAS) at the University of Texas at Austin, a Ford-LASA Special Projects Grant, and a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Seminar Grant through Harvard University. We are also fortunate to have research support from our institutions, the University of Oregon and the University of Califor- nia, Los Angeles, which contributed to the preparation of this book. x Acknowledgments We thank Annalise Gardella for copyediting assistance, and Sylvia Escárcega and Joseph Berra for translation assistance. Our appreciation also goes to Brandon Larsen, our mapmaker. We also thank Allyson Carter, our editor at University of Arizona Press, for her patience, support, and belief in this book project. Our families have supported and sustained us throughout. Shannon has the great good fortune to be married to Joseph Berra, who provides her with lively intellectual engagement, practical daily support, and enduring love. She is also grateful for her talented and beautiful daughter, Camila de los Santos Speed; Camila’s partner, Noah Coltrane Coombs; and her step- sons, Josue and Moses Berra. Lynn’s marriage and decades- long relation- ship with Ellen Herman have provided her with daily support, ongoing love, intellectual encouragement, and nourishment of all kinds. Her two sons, José and Gabriel, have accompanied the journey of this book and grown into wonderful men with big hearts. She is so grateful to have them in her life. And she acknowledges her mother, Suzie, who has always supported and encouraged her, now in her daily life. Finally, we are grateful to each other, for the gifts of collaboration, intel- lectual enrichment, mutual solidarity, and sustained friendship. INDIGENOUS WOMEN AND VIOLENCE INTRODUCTION Indigenous Women and Violence Shannon Speed and Lynn Stephen his volume explores Indigenous women’s individual and collective struggles and those of their allies for justice and security in con- T texts framed by increasingly complex intersections of violence in the United States, Mexico, and Guatemala. The cases explored in each chapter illuminate how structural forms of settler power combine with recent jurid- ical frameworks, security policies, and economic forces to structure current expressions of violence in Indigenous women’s lives and the means they may use to resist them. A product of two decades of dialogue among the authors, the volume also reflects our shared efforts to understand the embodied expe- rience of collaborative field research in contexts of violence. As in much of the world, in the countries that are the focus of this book, gendered violence is widespread, virtually uncontrolled, and harmful to a huge swath of the population. For example, though Guatemala is a small nation, it has the fourth- highest femicide rate in the world: A woman is killed every twelve hours in Guatemala, and 7,272 femicides were recorded in the decade between November 2008 and November 2017 (Telesur 2017). In Mexico, 3,580 women were murdered in 2018 alone (Verza 2019). Indig- enous women, because of the racial and gendered oppression that struc- tures their lives, are rendered multiply vulnerable to such violence, yet they continually seek redress through the formal and informal venues that are 4 Shannon Speed and Lynn Stephen available to them, whether at local, national, or international levels. How- ever, the current context of erosion of collective and individual rights in these countries, combined with increasing forms of economic dispossession and the expanding role of security apparatuses, presents new challenges for Indigenous women seeking justice for intersectional violence. In short, the legal terrain for Indigenous women has been and is shifting, with a signifi- cant decrease in guarantees of collective and individual rights and potentially a decline in the available venues for legal redress. Gendered violence has always been a part of the genocidal and assim- ilationist projects of settler colonialism.