A Strategy, a Market and New Voices: Indigenous Women and the AWID Forums

AWID’s forum story places the Indigenous Women’s Movement (IWM) as an actor shaping feminist spaces, not as a constituency waiting to be added to someone else’s agenda. AWID presents the account as shared by Mónica Alemán and María Manuela Sequeira; the page gives no individual byline, so FemRes credits the institution rather than misidentifying the interviewees as co-authors. The strategy they describe was more than securing speaking time: it involved entering decision-making spaces with proposals, building a critical mass, and carrying that experience into other settings, including the United Nations.

The story also challenges the assumption that feminism must focus only on individual rights, or that culture and spirituality are inherently oppressive. The women describe a feminism that can be plural, intercultural, and grounded in community; collective rights, land, ancestral knowledge, and spirituality can all be part of feminist politics. This does not mean every tradition is just, or that culture should shield internal gendered power from criticism. It means refusing to let a single outside model decide what liberation should look like. The change is reciprocal: feminist spaces begin to understand collective rights and land differently, while new voices emerge within the IWM—including younger and more radical women, supporters of abortion rights, and LGBTQ+ people.

This politics is built through more than symbolic representation. The account traces an Indigenous Women’s Caucus, advocacy at the UN, professional networks, participation on AWID’s board and forum planning committees, and donor advocacy. It also describes an “informal market” where participants sold objects that women had made and gathered over time, and the resource conversations connected with the Ayni Indigenous Women’s Fund. Together, these details show how knowledge, funding, agenda-setting, and cultural expression make movement infrastructure. “Market” here is not a spectacle of exotic culture; it names a practical space participants created for organizing and livelihood.

This is an institutional account rooted in AWID forum experiences and a Latin American movement history; it cannot stand for all Indigenous women or organizations. Its discussion of cross-regional alliances should not flatten distinct communities into one global “Indigenous voice.” Read it beside ECLAC’s study of Indigenous women’s rights and social conditions in Latin America to compare what institutional statistics and movement testimony make visible, then continue with Queer Indigenous Feminism. AWID provides the full story PDF and the complete forum-stories report.