Indigenous Feminism

Gregory D. Smithers traces Indigenous gender traditions through colonial suppression, survival, and renewal, locating the modern reclamation of Two-Spirit identity within language, spirituality, and sovereignty.

Drawing on Maya Ch’orti’ and Binnizá family memory, environmental science, and community cases, Jessica Hernandez critiques ecocolonialism and reimagines stewardship through Indigenous science.

An extraordinary work of memoir and investigative journalism by award-winning Gitxsan journalist Angela Sterritt who survived life on the streets. Combining personal narrative with in-depth investigation into Canada's missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG), this book reveals how colonialism and racism created a society where Indigenous women's lives are ignored and devalued, while proving that Indigenous women's strength and brilliance is unbroken.

An oral history of Zapatista women’s cooperatives, the Women’s Revolutionary Law, and the unfinished struggle over land, care, and community autonomy.

Combining Indigenous wisdom with scientific knowledge to explore the relationship between humans and nature, proposing ecofeminist practices based on reciprocity and gratitude.

This foundational work of ecofeminism reveals how the development paradigm threatens survival itself through violence against nature and women. Through the experiences and perspectives of rural Indian women, Shiva demonstrates how patriarchal development models simultaneously destroy ecosystems and marginalize women, arguing for women's central role as biodiversity custodians in ecological regeneration.

Writer and director Alfonso Cuarón has described Roma as a love letter to all the women who raised him. It's a beautiful rumination on all the 'hoods' women go through: girlhood, womanhood, motherhood. A domestic drama about a maid and the middle-class family she cares for in Mexico City, the story is told in crisp black-and-white, but it doesn't take long to see that a woman's work never ventures far out of the gray area.

Through an Indigenous Peruvian woman living with inherited fear, the film examines how wartime sexual violence survives in bodies, households, music, and unequal relations of service.

Girls aren't allowed to be Whangara chiefs. But that's not acceptable to Paikea (Keisha Castle-Hughes), the 11-year-old powerhouse who believes her destiny is to ride whales and lead her tribe. Courage, leadership, and defiance are all at play in this Kiwi drama from Niki Caro.

Aymara feminist thinker Julieta Paredes examines patriarchy as a historical relation and asks how shared life, bodies and community can become sites of transformation.

An IIS-UNAM gathering brings Indigenous and Afro-Mexican voices into conversation about movements, colonial memory and women’s political participation in contemporary Mexico.

Maya Q’eqchi’ and Xinka feminist and healer Lorena Cabnal connects bodily autonomy and land defense with collective healing and women’s political agency.

Kichwa activist Nina Gualinga connects Amazon defense to Indigenous women’s leadership and to the gendered intimidation faced by those who protect territory from extraction.

Anishinaabe attorney and organizer Tara Houska places resistance to the Standing Rock pipeline in a longer history of Indigenous land, sovereignty and cultural continuance, challenging accounts that reduce environmental struggle to a single protest.

This FCRJ episode features Leanne Betasamosake Simpson on Indigenous resistance across Turtle Island, land, transnational organizing, solidarity, and resurgence strategies, connecting Indigenous feminism with land politics and anti-colonial practice.

This All My Relations episode with Kim TallBear discusses critical polyamory, Indigenous relational ethics, feminism, and settler marriage, making it a key audio resource on how sex, intimacy, and family are structured by colonial power.