3 Swords Made of Loss: Indigenous Female Academia

In the article, “Under Western Eyes: Revisited,” it states that Feminist academic, Chandra Mohanty “via a complex and subtle argument, that […] that (much) white Western feminism is not merely different, but wrong.”^[1] The privilege of Western academics disadvantages them to understand the realities of the subaltern. Through analysis of feminist theory (Gayarti Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak? and Mohanty’s “Western Eyes: Revisited”), this paper will show how Indigenous women, as subalterns, contribute more to feminist thought than Western feminist academics. Indigenous women’s ability to counter-hegemonic powers through their multiple intersectional struggles places them above Western academics as centers of knowledge. The difference and reality of the subaltern empower them as activists and feminist theorists. Indigenous women do not limit themselves to describing the injustices in their community, but they also work against and identify multiple points of oppression. Although Indigenous women are identified as subalterns, their differences written in testimonios provide essential knowledge to dismantle multiple oppressive powers’ structure, showing that Indigenous women are at the forefront of radical feminist theory.

Rigoberta Menchú’s voice reverberated in her testimonio printed in 1983 in the middle of the Cold War. Menchú’s testimonio was a call to action against a genocide that lasted the majority of the 20th century against the Guatemalan Indigenous people under the watchful eye of the United States. The efforts to eliminate communism in “America’s backyard” caused atrocities that were ignored until Indigenous activists, like Menchú, forced them to be acknowledged. Yet, David Stoll made it evident that the horrors happening in Guatemala were less important than recording the exact dates of murders. Stoll published critiques on Menchú’s book, claiming she fabricated some of her stories within the testimonio. However,  Menchú created her testimonio through various translations. Menchú told the testimonio in her second language, Spanish. A second person, Elisabeth Burgos-Durbay, then recorded and translated Menchú’s interviews. There is a degree of mistranslation that Stoll does not account for. Regardless of possible mistranslation, the historical production of the testimonio was to be used as a collective action, not an individual’s perspective described perfectly. Stoll framed Menchú as a leftist, a communist, and an unreliable narrator. Burgis-Durbay’s reorganization of Menchú’s words is a form of forced Western discourse. Luhui Whitebear states in “Disrupting System of Oppression” that “In academics, terminology can be used to exclude and disempower groups. Obviously, this is damaging to Indigenous people who struggle to maintain their sovereign powers.”^[2] Stoll tried to criticize Menchú’s work through Western academics, damaging Menchú’s reputation. As “‘Authentic’ discourse is a suppressed or hidden ‘truth’ because of the Westerner’s inability to comprehend it in its own terms; thus, sublatern subjects are forced to use discourse of the colonizer.”^[3] Because Burgos-Durbay believed that Menchú’s Spanish and recollections would confuse Western audiences, she altered Menchú’s story. Monhanty has also been misunderstood or silenced within the academic community as her peers tried placing her saying, “the ‘nondutiful daughter’ of white feminists to being seen as a mentor for Third World/ immigrant women scholars; from being invited to address feminist audiences at various academic venues to being told I should focus on my work in early childhood education and not dabble in ‘feminist theory.’”^[4] Like Mohanty, Menchú is misunderstood in Western academia. Stoll couldn’t or didn’t try to understand the purpose of testimonios, leading to his efforts to delegitimize her. Menchú is made to collaborate on a project that is no longer entirely hers and is questioned as authentic by Western academics. However, Menchú’s insight is vital as “Indigenous feminisms offers a lens that helps us understand the role settler colonialism plays in cisheteropatriarchal systems of oppression, including violence, that draws on Indigenous knowledge and experiences.”^[5]

The discourse around Menchú within Western academia concerns whether Menhú recorded truthfully. However, testimonios work for more than just truth. Testimonios have the additional function of speaking of an entire group’s experience, not just the testimony of a single person. In fact, Mechú even mentions this at the beginning of  I, Rigoberta Menchú: an Indian woman in Guatemala that  “I’d like to stress that it’s not only my life, it’s also the testimony of my people.”^[6] In Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” Spivak states that “In subaltern studies, because of the violence of imperialism epistemic, social and disciplinary inscription, a project understood in essentialist terms must traffic in a radical textual practice of differences. The object of the group’s investigations, […] the people or subaltern – which is itself defined as a difference from the elite.”^[7] Testimonios provide the radical practices of differences. Indigenous activists are the most knowledgeable about those differences because each aspect of their lives is separated from privilege. Menchú is an Indigenous woman from a country in the global south. Menchú grew up working class within a colorist country. Menchú was also given limited wages or none at all. It is then safe to acknowledge Menchú as a subaltern woman different from the elite. Mechú’s testimonios express the difference between Guatemala from the rest of the world; it especially establishes away from Western academics and causes a decentralization towards the Guatemalan Indigenous people.

Menchú’s work was effective literature that turned the eyes of the world toward Guatemala and allowed Menchú to work on multiple systems of oppression. Menchú is a radical in the sense that she is an Indigenous woman that controls the majority of her narrative in defense of her entire people. Menchú’s literature is more effective than works from White feminists because Menchú is a subaltern woman. Menchú is the head of an Indigenous struggle as well as a workers’ struggle. Because of the reality of intersectionality, Menchú is not limited in the effect she has on multiple political movements. Menchú acknowledges that oppression is not selective. Menchú’s agency is linked to her identity as a subaltern woman and because of her knowledge can attack multiple oppressive streams. Spivak states that “The workers’ struggle is located in the desire to blow up power at any point of its application. This site is apparently based on a simple valorization of any power.”^[8] Menchú’s focus is not on just ending the genocide, but ending all the injustices her people struggle against.

Menchú’s exposure of Gutemala’s political, social, and economic issues through the Maya experience in the testimonio is radical.^[9] As Menchú centralizes her community, she differentiates her people from the greater Western world and cements her people as a subaltern group. Menchú is countering the belief of the world powers as guardians of liberty. Her works should be at the forefront of feminist theories because her work as a subaltern wrecks the hegemonic ideologies of Western benevolence and superiority socially, politically, and economically.  To exempt Menchú from feminist theory would be to ignore her ability to dismantle systematic hegemonic beliefs through her subaltern status.

Much like Menchú, Domitila Chúngara’s work with the Housewives Committee is a radical act showing effective grassroots organizing. Chúngara also separates herself as a subaltern woman, speaking to the fact that she is also an Indigenous woman from a poor working-class family, isolated from major cities in a mining camp. As Menchú’s voice is collective, Chúngara’s work, Let Me Speak, was meant to be used as a collective act.  The book was “meant to be taken to neighborhoods, factories, and farms to be read by or read to poor, peasant, and working-class people – particularly women, who might identify with and be inspired by Domitila’s experiences.”^[10] The book is supposed to be a collective experience. Rather than the book being seen only by middle-class intellectuals, Let Me Speak was used as a method of outreach to enlighten other subaltern women. “The book is meant to be read or listened to actively and collectively in a process that stimulates discussion, analysis, and criticism.”^[11] More importantly, the book, Let Me Speak!: Testimony of Domitila, a Woman of the Bolivian Mines, was meant to incite excitement. Whether opposition or support, the book was not only a call to action, but also shows how distinctly Chúngara analyzed her status and how the world operated to her desperation. More specifically, “Domitila comes to very definite conclusions about how the world operates, who extracts surplus value, who the friends and enemies of the working class are, and what the major weapon of the people is in the face of superior armed force.”^[12] Chúngara, although translated by foreigners, created the book to be consumed by ordinary people that could relate to Chúngara and reach their own political consciousness. The book was not to serve Western academics, nor was it a plea to the international community for intervention. Chúngara’s work aims to educate the present working class on organizing and improving their communities.

Like Menchú, Chúngara dismantles hegemonic ideology that is catastrophic to the Bolivian working-class life. “The failure to combat bourgeois ideology is ‘tantamount to having the enemy inside your own house’ and ‘just one more weapon that our common enemy can use toward a dangerous end.’”^[13] Although Chúngara does not ally herself with one singular party, she effectively integrates communist theory into her activism and counteracts the popular belief of female subordination. Norma Chinchilla frames Chúngara in “Working-Class Feminims: Domitila and the Housewives Committee” as a proletariat feminist because she emphasizes how integral women are in seeking their own liberation within the committee. Chúngara also states that in her upbringing, she had the unusual experience of being raised by a single father to conclude that women are equal to men. Chúngara’s activism for the working class is missing within most feminist theories in favor of discourse about power discrepancies within sexes and individualism.^[14] Chúngara highlights the experience of working-class women and provokes political consciousness in an effort to change the reality of the most oppressed, including women. Chúngara’s efforts make her one of the most important feminists of our time because her knowledge is a catalyst against the patriarchal capitalist system. In Mohanty’s Under Western Eyes, Indigenous people are paramount in postcolonial studies because “Native or indigenous women’s struggles, which do not follow a postcolonial trajectory based on the inclusions and exclusions of processes of capitalist, racist, heterosexist, and nationalist domination, cannot be addressed easily under the purview of categories such as ‘Western’ and ‘Third World.’ But they become visible and even central to the definition of One-Third/Two-Thirds Worlds because indigenous claims for sovereignty, their lifeways and environmental and spiritual practices, situate them as central to the definition of social majority.”^[15] Whether in India or in Latin America, Indigenous people are recognized as the social majority. Indigenous women are essential in feminist theory because they define their countries’ titles as one-third/two-thirds worlds. If subaltern people define their reality then they must also illustrate its solution, not absorb elite Western academics’ ideas. Chúngara also places women at the front of her activism. Chúngara is also not unique in centering women in her movement as “women are increasingly at the forefront of indigenous peoples’ struggles, challenging state violence and racial discrimination and demanding respect for collective rights to group autonomy. At the same time, they have also developed important critiques of gender violence within their communities, in particular of certain aspects of ‘tradition’ or ‘culture’ that reflect patriarchal gender ideologies.”^[16] Chúngara openly criticizes her husband for trying to limit her activism, but she also uses her platform to counter violence against women in her communities. Chúngara continues to push against hegemonic powers further than the injustices of mining communities.

Chúngara dismantles hegemonic thought in her interview titled“The Owner of This Land” with Aníbal Yañez. Although forced to go through a Western medium in this interview, Chúngara continues asserting her political purpose throughout. When asked about the “quicentenary of the discovery of America ”Chúngara claims that “it is shameful that governments that supposedly represent the majority of our peoples should celebrate the Spanish conquest that massacred their people and looted their.”^[17] Chúngara also states that the date marked is not a “discovery” or “encounter,” but rather a “shameless  invasion that looted our wealth, that enslaved and raped our people.”^[18] Chúngara uses the interview as an opportunity to counter the hegemonic ideal that Spanish colonization was a benevolent conquest that should be celebrated with Spain. Chúngara clearly states her position against the belief of “discovery” or “conquest” because her people have “resisted to this day and have done everything possible to preserve their language, their music, their customs, even their dress” that proves to negate the notion of complete conquest.

Within the interview, Chúngara includes the disbelief of “discovery,” theft from foreigners, imperialism, and class struggle. Chúngara states that the Indigenous are the true owners of the land, and the mestizos and creoles continue the legacy of theft from the Indigenous people.^[19]  From this, Chungara moves to how the reality of class struggle cannot be ignored for the return to Collasuyo that some have argued for. Although the establishment of a class system is a European import, Chúngara claims that class struggle must be addressed, or society will remain blind. In the interview, Chúngara also addresses how imperialism still permeates Bolivian society today through United States intervention, specifically in political elections and capitalism. To the issue of imperialism, Chúngara answers that only the Indigenous people have the key to their own liberation and that reaching a national counter-consciousness will aid in a smooth revolution.^[20]  What’s more, is the Pan-American consciousness that needs to tear at the roots of capitalism for total liberation and to return to being owners of their land and their own destiny.^[21]

Other Bolivian activists, like the Chola Mammani, also use Western social media to counter-hegemonic thought. Mammani uses her youtube platform to redefine the word bocona as a word that signifies an advocate rather than a person with a big mouth. Her youtube channel, Mammani or the Chola Bocona, as her channel is titled, describes the Chola’s place in society. Mammani further talks about how intellectuals view cholas as superficial projects within the channel. Moreover, Mammani also states that being a chola is an inherent identity that does not dissipate when the clothes are removed. Mammani declares that cholas should not be commercialized objects, seen more like adornments and caricatures rather than vocal, opinionated people. Through Western social media, the Chola Bocona is able to reach not only foreign audiences but also other cholas. Social media allows Mammani to speak freely without translators to her audience, offering advice to counter oppressive powers in her community.

To recenter Indigenous women, western scholars must acknowledge their own incapacities. In Western scholarship, feminists struggle to see their “subjects of knowledge” as centers for radical thought. The problem lies with the fact that “Many Western feminist researchers are reading their subjects through cultural productions that can only see the subjects as inferior to Western standards of ’woman’ and hence in need of enlightened rescue.”^[22] However, Indigenous voices continue to be dismissed as they “continue to be unintelligible and dismissed within hegemonic feminisms at an international and local level.”^[23] Indigenous activists are already the subjects of study and knowledge. Indigenous activists are rescuing themselves and sharing their own cultural productions rather than analyzing them as outsiders. Indigenous activists are not taking knowledge back to Western audiences, like vultures. Rather, knowledge is being kept within their communities. Currently, Indigenous activists have worked towards “constitutional and legislative reform in Ecuador and Bolivia,” which “provided opportunities to mobilize and lobby nationally for provisions for gender equality and protection from violence to be included as part of the recognition of indigenous autonomy.”^[24] Indigenous women and their activism is pervasive and effective. Indigenous women are leaders, as well, in feminist theories because their lens destabilizes the power structures that cause the disenfranchisement of whole peoples.

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