Lorena Cabnal: Body, Territory and Community Feminist Healing

This conversation with Lorena Cabnal, a member of the Red de Sanadoras Ancestrales del Feminismo Comunitario Territorial, was recorded in Córdoba at CISCSA’s 2019 gathering on women and territorial injustice. Cabnal locates her thought in Iximulew—the name she uses for Guatemala—and in her experience as a Maya Q’eqchi’ and Xinka woman. The recording is brief, but it opens onto a question central to her work: what happens when political violence against territories is also lived through bodies?

The concept of body-territory names a relationship, not a poetic equivalence. The appropriation of land and the control of bodies are connected through colonial and patriarchal histories that regulate who may inhabit, decide, extract and care. This lens resists treating violence against women as separate from territorial dispossession or the erosion of the conditions that sustain life. Yet it does not turn land into a metaphor for the body: communities, territories and bodies have distinct histories and conflicts, even when their subordination reinforces itself across these scales.

Healing emerges here as collective political practice. It is not private therapy intended to help people adapt to unjust conditions, nor a substitute for material justice. The Network of Ancestral Healers draws on knowledge and community ties to accompany the wounds left by violence while keeping open the question of the structures that produce them. Care can sustain life and organizing, but it also contests the assumption that care is women’s natural disposition and an unlimited resource available for others to consume.

The proposal should not be turned into a universal recipe or an untroubled celebration of “the ancestral.” Indigenous knowledge is contemporary, diverse and debated; its force does not depend on idealization. The conversation instead invites us to ask how movements connect territorial defense, bodily autonomy and networks of care without erasing internal differences or speaking in place of communities. Read it alongside the regional report on Indigenous women’s autonomy in Latin America and Feminisms in Movement, a collection that holds different political genealogies across the Americas in view.

Conversation and context

• Video published by CISCSA Ciudades Feministas
• CISCSA: gatherings on women and territorial injustice
• Radio Savia interview on Cabnal’s identity and healing practice