From Development to Citizenship: Rights, Voice, and Citizenship Practices

Indigenous women address sexual-reproductive health (SRH) issues through frameworks that differ from both indigenous rights movements and state intercultural health policy. Interculturalism sought to create new accommodations between western/colonial health systems and indigenous practices. The chapter provides an overview of the gender politics and biopolitics of female indigenous bodies that prevail in indigenous federation approaches to SRH. Women’s perspectives on family planning, family size, health systems, and public health provision are documented, as are indigenous women’s organizations’ SRH agendas. The chapter shows how interculturalism does not provide a singular means by which racial-ethnic politics can be addressed, as women continually dispute the terms by which colonial difference can be defined by either the state or by male-dominated ethnic rights organizations. Indigenous women call for recognition of diversity in diversity, in part through vernacularizing rights discourses, although they then rework rights discourses and forge a unique framework that articulates collective and individual rights. The chapter argues for considering heterosexuality as a key factor in analyzing postcolonial intersectional hierarchies.