Gender Justice and Feminist Politics: Decolonizing Collaborative Research

Abstract

The most prominent social effects of the drug war in Mexico are the criminalization of poverty and increased rates of feminicide. Feminist academics and community leaders have been developing and working hand in hand to find the most appropriate methods to document gender-based violence and feminicide to shed light on the impunity that hides the systemic dismissal of women’s lives. This essay presents a critical analysis of my own positionality as a feminist and academic ally in building a collaborative research alliance with indigenous women leaders who are politically engaged in the production of knowledge from an intersectional perspective that adequately reflects the matrix of violence that affects the lives of indigenous women in urban and rural areas. This process has been fruitful and promising, although it has also entailed challenges and contradictions arising from disparate meanings of gender justice and the lack of encounter of feminist/indigenous politics of resistance.

1. Introduction

We as indigenous women do not feel represented in these statistics (feminicide national statistics).

(Patricia Torres Sandoval, CONAMI, Mexico City, 2017)

We need to revert the power-relations, learn to listen to each other and ask ourselves what we are looking for when we occupy spaces of collaboration with the academy…!

(Norma Don Juan, CONAMI, Mexico City, 2023)

This essay begins with a reflective narrative about my positionality as an academic and feminist ally of indigenous women’s movements in Mexico in the search for social and gender justice. Starting from the assumption that there are many challenges and contradictions that tarnish collaborative relationships between indigenous leaders and academics (Smith Tuhiwai 2012), I delve into my experience as an academic in the pursuit of a partnership with the National Coordinator of Indigenous Women of Mexico (CONAMI). I critically enquire about my location at the intersection of two activisms: one that seeks to amplify the call for the urgent elimination of gender violence and feminicide in Mexico, and a second that fights for the advancement of indigenous peoples’ struggles for the recognition of their rights to self-determination. Both activisms entail strategies, practices, ethical commitments, and conceptual thinking that do not necessarily meet (Crenshaw 1991).1 In both activisms, my identity as a non-indigenous academic woman places me in a privileged position to lead research initiatives and pursue social/gender justice agendas. Very often, my privilege -unintentionally- contribute to a silence of other voices.

In 2016, I approached indigenous leaders from CONAMI to initiate a dialogue about possible avenues of collaboration on issues and strategic agendas important to them. CONAMI is a national network of indigenous women’s organizations from different regions of Mexico founded in 1997. The leaders of CONAMI are committed to fighting for a life free of violence for indigenous women and girls as well as their peoples. Over several decades, they have accumulated significant political influence that has allowed them to advocate a wide range of issues and public policies that affect the well-being of indigenous peoples in Mexico, as well as women and girls. Their advocacy work is crucial to the advancement and achievement of social and gender justice for indigenous women at the national and local levels.

I began collaborating with CONAMI by providing funds and technical support for the implementation of actions and the strengthening of the capacities of the Commission for the Eradication of Violence(s) and Defense of Territory. This collaboration eventually evolved into a research relationship that has resulted in a fruitful—albeit complex—process of knowledge production on gender-based violence and its intersectional connections with other types of discriminations. CONAMI’s activist stand and definition of violence differs significantly from the Western definition of gender-based violence. The feminist concept of gender violence places the main axis of dominance on gender inequality, which indigenous women contest by incorporating and shedding light on other systems of oppressions that together harm racialized social groups. The complexity of the violence that affects indigenous communities is at the core of CONAMI’s knowledge production, a challenge that they are committed to disentangle and address.

The process of building a collaborative alliance with indigenous leaders in Mexico has been shaped by contradictions and challenges derived from the disparate positionalities, intentions, and capacities that separate academics and indigenous people (Leyva and Speed 2008). On the one hand, social organizations seek to achieve their political and strategic objectives through very particular actions and agendas for the recognition of their peoples’ rights; on the other, academics pursue the intellectual exploration of ideas that seek to transform reality. The point of agreement on how to proceed is not built in a vacuum, as there is a history of grievances. Indigenous leaders have suffered the epistemic violence of Western science and its modernization project that has done so much damage to indigenous communities (Smith Tuhiwai 2012).

I was trained as an anthropologist in Mexico. Anthropology is a discipline that has contributed to the consolidation of state institutions pertaining to the support of indigenous people’s development (Warman et al. 1970). In terms of knowledge production, anthropologists are recognized as a legitimate voice in representing and describing the Mexican Indigeneity: indigenous cultures, languages, traditions, customary laws, and social struggles (Villoro 1996). In particular, indigenous women’s rights have been a salient theme for scholarship of non-indigenous anthropologists (Sieder 2017). This scholar production is prolific and deeply committed to forging an expert knowledge on indigenous women’s social and political contributions to the well-being of their communities as well as to the political aspiration of autonomy and defence of territories and natural resources. Feminist anthropologists have been cautious in incorporating the analysis of intracommunity gender violence, as they are aware that at the national level, there is racist prejudice against indigenous communities and culture. The indigenous community and its internal customary law are considered for the Western eye as a site of women’s mistreatment and gender violence (Herr 2020). Consciously or not, feminist anthropologists have contributed to diverting racist assumptions about indigenous culture that justify interventionist policies into the community governance while they carefully observe and ponder the community’s internal power relations in their analysis (Sierra 2004).

Unlike what is described above, the liberal and mainstreaming feminism movement in Mexico is deeply committed to fighting for women’s equal rights, access to justice, and the eradication of gender violence (Lagarde y de los Rios 2008; Espinosa Damián 2009). The central focus of the feminist struggle is the elimination of women’s oppressions, which are materialized in economic, social, sexual, political, and labour realms. The defence of women’s autonomy to take decision over their bodies and personal life is placed over other patriarchal expectation and social commitment/contracts. It can be said that in the fight for gender equality, the feminist subject of liberation is crafted in such a way that appears isolated from the communities to which she belongs (Herr 2020; Mora 2022).

Felipe Calderón’s war against drug trafficking led to the militarization of the country and unleashed a war against poor women. (Intersecta/DATA CIVICA/Equis/CEE 2021; Hernandez 2019). Feminists of all sorts have grown deeply concerned with the rampant violence that expanded like a weed across the whole country. The rapid deterioration of the social fabric at the local level has made it imperative to understand what is happening through all methods of knowledge production (Figueroa 2019). The feminicide rates of working-class and indigenous women and girls have skyrocketed since 2007 (ONU Mujeres/INMujeres/CONAVIM 2020). One of the tools identified by local-based feminist movements for documenting specifically feminicide cases in Ciudad Juarez was the gathering of press news and families’ calls of the search for the disappearance of their loved ones. This initial artisanal database making evolved little by little into sophisticated quantitative methods to gather indicators of gender violence (Wright 2017; Merry 2017). By using statistics, feminists aim to represent—and quantify—the impact of patriarchal violence on communities, especially when state institutions place very little interest in preventing gender violence. I deeply admire those efforts, but I must mention too that national feminist organizations’ quest against feminicidal violence is blind to the intersectional identities of the victims, such as indigenous women or another racialized women, such as Mexican afro-women (Garcia de Moral et al. 2023; Alcocer Perulero 2013).

As I have already mentioned, in 2016, I began a collaborative research relationship with CONAMI, to strengthen its initiatives and strategies to fight against gender-based violence and to document the complex matrix of structural violence(s) that affects indigenous peoples as whole. In pursuing this task, I became aware of indigenous women leaders’ concerns around the increasing criminal violence that inflicts damage in rural communities and quietly erodes the social fabric that ensures the reproduction of life. The indigenous women’s multidimensional experience with violence is completed underestimated and misunderstood by state-led social delivery agencies (Del Jurado and Don Juan 2019). Better methods of awareness raising, gathering contextualized information, and mobilizing effective messages are needed.

Thus, the knowledge produced in partnership is crucial for fighting against gender injustice and the racism that inflicts pain on indigenous women and their peoples. I am grateful to be part of an important space of collaboration with indigenous women leaders, as we come to share a common concern, though, it is must to be said, we engage in this relational collaboration inspired by different internationalities and capacities. My relationship with CONAMI is political and personal. It is my interest to be attentive of their advocacy work and receptive about any kind of decisions they take. Since we began this journey, they have grown to be better positioned for demanding time for strategizing and processing data at their own pace and goals. I also have growth intrigued by the power of quantitative data in the narrative of anti-feminicide politics. How can I manage to forge a meaningful and useful collaboration with my colleagues and indigenous women leaders? What is my role in this quest? How can I place my voice in a manner that facilitates channels of understanding? How do I properly deconstruct the categories and conceptualization that we are using to understand feminicide? How is it possible to develop a better understating of feminicide from an intersectional and decolonial perspective?

In order to respond, I will introduce five sections that address the questions from different stands: (1) the initiative of CONAMI to fight against gender violence called Community Gender Alert, (2) some referential notes about a project called indigenous data sovereignty, (3) analysis of social and gender politics of change, (4) decolonial analytical exploratory debate around the place of mestizo academics and their privilege in racial hierarchies in Mexico, and (5) finalizing with some thoughts on indigenous women’s claim to have control over the production of knowledge about them and their peoples.

2. CONAMI and the Community Gender Alert Initiative

CONAMI is a political network of indigenous women leaders that emerged in August 1997 to bring together women who play a leading role at the local level in community struggles for self-determination and autonomy. CONAMI emerged as an organization committed to the defence of indigenous women’s human rights closely interconnected with the collective rights of indigenous peoples. CONAMI inherits the teachings of different generations of women leaders, who have advocated for public policies that adequately address the needs of indigenous communities in terms of health, prevention of gender-based violence, access to social services, and infrastructure (Blackwell 2023; Vences Estudillo 2023).

Over the decades, and especially since the beginning of the so-called war on drugs unleashed by President Felipe Calderón in 2007, CONAMI has clearly embraced the defence of social peace, denouncing the criminal and military violence that plagues indigenous communities, and in particular the patriarchal violence that affects indigenous women and girls. It soon became clear that a new type of violence had arrived in rural communities—different from intimate-partner violence—and it was linked to the drug-trafficking economy, illicit-crop cultivation, the plundering of natural resources, and the criminalization of rural poverty. There was no way to name this new generation of violence (Figueroa and Hernandez 2023).

In 2013, after participating in a feminist mapping and documentation workshop, CONAMI members created a digital activist initiative called Community Gender Alert (ECG). ECG is an activist response to the government’s reluctance to recognize the resurgence of armed violence and the invisibility of indigenous women in official figures on feminicide and gender violence due to the lack of information disaggregated by ethnicity and race of the victims, as well as the particularity of violence in rural territories (Del Jurado and Don Juan 2019). ECG’s technological strategy consists of a Facebook page where CONAMI’s affiliates share information and local reports on cases of violence against indigenous women and girls in the territories and communities to which they belong. Every November 25, they produce an annual report based on the systematization of the notes captured collectively.

The objectives of Community Gender Alert (ECG) are the following: a. to document feminicides in indigenous regions and understand their particularity; b. to make visible the violence against indigenous women and evidence the interconnection between them and the violence against indigenous peoples from a historical and contextual perspective; c. to heal and humanize what the quantitative data dehumanize; d. to frame these facts from a political and critical point of view that makes the state responsible for impunity and/or helps to eliminate the conditions of risk by recognizing, and therefore integrating, our worldviews, practices, and knowledge for prevention, care, justice, and reparation of damage in public policies; f. to generate culturally relevant public policies for the eradication of violence, incorporating values and practices of indigenous peoples for prevention, protection, access to justice, and reparation of harm.

CONAMI’s leaders responsible for elaboration of the annual reports have faced many methodological and conceptual challenges that they have tried to solve collectively. The construction of the ECG databases has been derived from an analytical exercise to build a data capture grid that tries to gather the basic description pieces of each case, identifying places, municipalities, dates, events, plot, victim, and perpetrator descriptors. The criteria of selection of cases are not only limited to individual cases, but it is also their interest to capture information on collective events where violence against women and minors is involved. They are keen to reveal the invisible internal violence within indigenous communities such as forced/child marriage, sexual abuse of minors, violence that is silenced because it takes place in the domestic space and/or because its denunciation would break community fabrics. CONAMI leaders have been criticized for their work on the grounds that it is an artisanal initiative and that it requires better technical and methodological support for the collection, systematization, interpretation, and dissemination of information.

The term artisanal contains many meanings, but probably the most salient is the one that refers to work that is performed using simple tools, a product such as handicraft, made manually (CONAMI Forthcoming). In the Mexican context, artisanal refers to art crafts produced by peasants and indigenous communities. This term can be taken as discriminatory if is employed by those in power to dismiss the value or scientificity of grassroots-made knowledge. As an academic ally of CONAMI, I am conflicted about how to find the better way to provide collaboratively the means and input that better assist them to continue their mission and undertake this task following their goals. I am aware of the critical comments that have dismissed their initiative. Those comments come from the academy and from personnel in state institutions. All that criticism is based on Western arrogance—racist disqualification—that easily discharges community-based initiatives to produce knowledge.

CONAMI leaders have been debating internally to react wisely to all external criticism. CONAMI leaders have argued several times in forums and written articles that “artisanal” indeed reflects the very origin of ECG. They inaugurated this initiative by resorting to accessible tools such their personal cell phones for pooling news. The initials report and excel pages were constructed following their own sensibility and inquiring aim. Their original intention was not to build sophisticated databases but to generate a platform to mobilize information about the particularity of indigenous women’s experiences of violence. In various forums and public events, CONAMI’s leaders have stated that they honour the memory of those women whose lives have been taken away; each one is a person, rather than a number and a statistic (CONAMI Forthcoming).

In addition to the former, CONAMI’s strategy has been to prioritize dialogues with other indigenous organizations and indigenous scholars, who are equally committed to producing information about violence, resourcing their own means and world cosmovision. This action speaks about a political project that aims to denounce the epistemic violence that is routinely exerted against indigenous knowledge (Del Jurado 2023). CONAMI leaders have become familiar with debates and political positioning of other indigenous movements around the world that claim the right to have control in the production of data on indigeneity, a project that is known as data sovereignty. This dialogue has greatly contributed to being better positioned to state their points of vision, aspirations, and needs in their own collaborating process relation.

3. A Counter-Hegemonic Project: Data Sovereignty and Indigenous Statistics

Indigenous intellectuals and activists from British colonial countries have developed a critical debate on the production of state statistical information on indigenous peoples based on two crucial points: (1) historically, former Anglo-colonial governments such as Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia imposed civilizational policies on indigenous First Nations, compulsively forcing their cultural assimilation and territorial dispossession (Walter and Andersen 2013; Walter et al. 2020); (2) data collection and knowledge production on indigenous peoples is influenced by national imaginaries where indigenous people are alien to the country—white/settler—to which one wants to aspire.

Statistics—according to Walter and Anderson—map the contours of society and provide supreme tools for making “right” decisions. Statistics count and tell us who they are, indigenous and non-indigenous, where they live, what they consume, what they produce, what services they require, and how they contribute to the national economy. From a decolonial perspective, these authors question the deficient and negative construction of indigeneity as a social group that is culturally and socially inadequate to integrate into the national society as individuals who produce and generate wealth, defined in capitalist terms (2013: p. 21). Statistical information on indigenous people is a straitjacket tied around negative notions: educational deficiency, chronic poverty, inclination to criminality and begging, etc. In general, the inability to adapt to modernity.

If these statistics are elaborated from the assumption of deficiency, then the representation that emerges from them is decontextualized and prejudiced. It could then be assumed that the objectives of public administration are oriented based on statistics that are not designed according to the needs of indigenous peoples or their vision of development, but rather for the achievement of a country model in which indigenous people are dysfunctional. Authors such as Rebeca Tsosie add that indigenist policies are doomed to failure because they simplify social and human geography, pretend to discipline the subjects, and impose their government actions, taking as an advantage the insurmountable imbalance of power (2020: p. 205).

The indigenous peoples of the Anglo world claim a dignified treatment and historical justice from the white hegemonic society—descendants of the white pioneers who arrived one day from far away to settle and never left (Chartrand 1991). This essay takes up the concept of epistemic violence, which manifests itself in all knowledge construction practices on indigenous peoples, as subjects excluded from the processes of elaboration and extraction of information (Fricker 2007). From the voices of the south, epistemic violence is defined as follows: “epistemic violence is the denial of peoples and communities as creators of knowledge, it is the placement of our knowledge only as traditional things, minimizing our knowledge as second rate, or only important for the local sphere. In this sense, the practices of denial of our knowledge are common in public and private universities, where they universalize and homogenize knowledge, and try to erase indigenous cosmovision as “other” philosophies and impose a single way of thinking” (Del Jurado 2023).

The indigenous data sovereignty movement asserts that indigenous peoples and native nations should control the collection and use of their data, for their own purposes and consistent with their collective right to self-determination. The concept of indigenous data sovereignty reorients the overall debate to recognize the autonomy of indigenous peoples and their specific interests in the governance of their data. This project invites one to think about the formulation of “good data”, discarding the assumption of indigenous deficiency as a starting point, while seeking to think about indigeneity from its own referents. This inward exploration implies recovering alternative views to the Western value system, privileging indigenous voices and knowledge, producing information in terms of the political strengthening of peoples and the reconstruction of the community fabric, and disassociating from the site of victimization to assume more proactive roles in the construction of communities free of violence (Jacobs 2018; Lucchesi 2019; Walter et al. 2020).

4. Social and Gender Politics of Change

This section explores the rationale behind the political engagement of academics and scholars in supporting the struggles of indigenous peoples’ social movements and community organizations to achieve social change (Grünberg 2021; Hale 2004). My point of reference is Mexico, as a country in which social scientists—anthropologists, feminists, sociologists, and political scientists—have always been deeply concerned about socio-economic inequality, structural discrimination, and racialized violence that characterized Mexican society. Accordingly, progressive academics and social researchers are inclined to use their academic skills to contribute to the social actors’ actions in achieving social change and justice (Hale 2004; Jimeno et al. 2012). The politics of forging social change can vary according to different social movements as well as political thoughts, but this presentation refers primarily on the leftist and feminist perspectives of social transformation that is achieved through social research, popular education, advocacy work, and awareness-raising processes (Hartmann 1981).

The political commitment of social scientists entails mainly two things: the alignment and solidarity with positioned social actors engaged in the struggle and the applying of a conceptual analysis to reveal the complexity of the social order, such as the class conflict, the mechanisms of systemic racism, social and material inequality, gender inequality, environmental violence, and colonial exploitation (Hale 2004; Grünberg 2021). To challenge the mentioned injustices, feminists and left activists must break through the hegemonic discourses that harness all privileges that justify dispossession and discrimination (Mallon 2017; Hartmann 1981). By knowing the socio-structural underpins of the injustice, it became possible to map out strategies, actions, and praxis aimed to disrupt social orders/gender regimes/toxic habits/colonial oppression.

Nevertheless, I must say the undertaking solidarity with social struggles for justice is not an easy task. Being committed to the poor (as the theologists of the liberation would say), it entails many challenges. Do we—social researchers and community-based leaders—foresee social change and justice in the same way? Do we coincide in the strategies to follow? Have our actions the same meaning? The statement that justifies “the alignment with the poor” is far more complex if it is scrutinized through a decolonial lens. Tuck and Yang (2012) have profoundly critiqued the role of privilege academics in making a space for their intervention and adoption of social justice projects. They have pointed out that decolonization is a distinct project from other civil or human rights justice projects. It entails that a deconstruction of the link between academics and social actors is tainted by colonial power relations/tensions. Academics’ class/race privilege has been bypassed in very problematic ways (Tuck and Yang 2012). What was once assume as proactive and consequential solidarity with indigenous organizations, workers, peasants, and community-based women is now a terrain of inquiries about the practices of knowledge production and social representation (Hale 2004).

5. The Mestiza Ally Positionality

I have mentioned above that my role and position in this collaborative partnership is contested. In this section, I introduce some elements of analysis as a non-indigenous scholar. I am part of the academy, the hegemonic system that disqualifies them. My sole good intention is not enough to cope with this contradiction. This section contains reflexive thoughts to explore and disentangle critically what I have experienced in relation to the sovereign decision of CONAMI to strive internally against the challenges imposed on ECG. For unpacking this moment, I would like to refer to Mariana Mora’s analytical gaze on the locus of mestizo women as they engage in fulfilling ethic and political commitment in social change struggles from a decolonial perspective (Mora 2022, p. 195). Mora departs from a solid decolonial feminism legacy that is quite diverse and ample as it comprises voices from the Andean indigenous region, Afro-descendent caribe and Mesoamerica platform, and Abya Aya continent. Decolonial feminisms depart from recognizing that coloniality is not a lost past but a current hierarchical ordering that ranks races, knowledges, territories, and cultures across the Americas (Lugones 2008).

Feminists of all colours are rebelling against the patriarchy but also the racist capitalism that plunders natural resources and displace indigenous and Afro-descendant communities from their rightful territories. The decolonial struggle is informed by a deconstructive reflexivity that put under scrutiny the power relations that shape spaces, races, and knowledges. Decolonial feminists are called to dismantle and inquire social and gender injustice, recognizing that even our positionalities are determined by coloniality. This site of colonial subjugation has an extension in contemporary national imaginaries. Indigenous women today are excluded from local power and community decision making, but also at the national level, they are invisibilized and infantilized by prejudicial ideas about their community ties and lack of control over sexuality and marital life. Even more serious is the current indifference to violence against indigenous women and women of colour, which deeply alarms Lugones, who called for a better understanding of victimization and indifference towards them. For Lugones, the activist mission of contemporary feminism is to decolonize its advocacy of women’s liberation based on the white woman’s experience of life and domesticity. Doing this is imperative because white women are the social norm for thinking about everything (e.g., gender justice activism), while black and indigenous women are silenced and erased by being held without agency (2008).

In reference to the former, Mora points out that decolonial feminists are allies in the decolonial struggle, but the political move to join this cause is not free of racial hierarchies (Mora 2022, p. 195). The fight against patriarchy is incomplete if we do not place anti-racism at the centre of any collaborative praxis. This mean (1) making racial categories explicit and (2) expressions of racism. In thinking about all these lessons, I would like to apply these analytical tools to explain the controversy around the ECG artisanal database. Western binary thinking considers superior knowledge only that one scientist and objective because it follows the Cartesian methodic method of production. The knowledge produced by indigenous leaders is artisanal because it lacks a method—or does not follow strict procedures. This is a racist assumption, and artisanal is a racial category. The practice of disregarding indigenous knowledge is a racist expression. Even further, as a non-indigenous ally, I came to realize that I have been exerting my privilege in setting the agenda and positioning one knowledge over another. The concern around how to obtain the scientific quantification of feminicides of indigenous women signals as forced expectation.

In reading again, the uneasy exchange of messages between CONAMI leaders and myself, I realized that the very category of feminicide must be deconstructed from a decolonial perspective. The feminicide of mixed-race female bodies is perceived as individual victims of omnipresent toxic masculinity. This violent death is isolated from the social fabric. These ideas completely differ from how indigenous women express their concerns about the violence (s) in their communities. A woman’s death is a vehicle to force the submission of the whole community to which she belongs; women’s deaths are inscribed with a threat that is meant to establish dominion over communities and territories (De Marinis 2020; Segato 2013).

And another racist assumption would argue that the indigenous women are encapsulated within their communities, and their communities are nodes of a complex network of illicit economies. Their territories are intrinsically violent, because of their poverty, cultural difference, and geographic isolation. These racial–spatial distinctions are constructed in relation to and in comparison, with other territories and economies (not violent and legal). Racial classification and hierarchization are relational—the feminicide of mestizo/urban versus indigenous women—and by looking at this dichotomous narrative, it is possible to dismantle what underpins the colonial divide.

6. Conclusive Remarks

After having many years of accompanying indigenous women’ struggle, I came to realize that Western feminism has a colonial and patronizing gaze over indigenous women’ s resistance praxis. Gender justice and its praxis to achieve it are crafted by Western feminists, to the point that the fight against patriarchy and gender-based violence can only occur if it meets certain cultural parameters and expectative (Herr 2020). From my perspective, decolonizing social research is deeply linked to a constant reflexive exercise about my efforts to contribute to the organizing process of indigenous women organizations in Mexico. Good will is not enough, I must always be attentive to check if I am inclined to pursue my own academic inquiry, or I am capable to listening what the grassroots organizations leaders are demanding and looking for. Certainly, what I perceive in CONAMI’s leaders it is a strong positioning against any form of epistemic violence.

Indigenous women are claiming a sovereignty over any information that belongs to them as well as the right to control the gathering and use of their data for their own purposes and consistent with their collective right to self-determination (Figueroa and Hernandez 2023). State policies and institutional data must be designed based on process of consultations, every matter that concern to indigenous women. This quest seeks to formulate “good data”, discarding the assumption that indigenous peoples are backwards or deficient or incapable of foreseeing their liberatory path. This inward exploration implies recovering alternative ways of life that are disappearing because of cultural assimilation policies of the Mexican state (Aguilar 2022). The claim of restoration of the community social fabric entails the elimination of gender-based violence through cultural methods of intervention as well as the empowerment of women in various realms. By privileging indigenous voices and producing information in terms of their own political strengthening, it will be possible to reconstruct communities free of violence, now and for the coming generations.