Indigenous Peoples Exercising Self-Determination Across Borders

This chapter gives insight into how cross-border solidarity movements can be constructed and sustained by examining MADRE, a community-based international human rights organization advocating for Indigenous women and girls. Using case studies of social justice campaigns across the US-Mexico border, this chapter explores the mechanisms by which networks of protection for Indigenous women and girls can be built simultaneously at grassroots and global levels. Ultimately, these networks strengthen both international and transnational solidarity movements and advocacy and provide community-level resources to defend the rights of Indigenous women and girls.

This chapter profiles the A´i Cofán People, whose traditional territories straddle the Colombia-Ecuador border, and their experience of colonization, natural resource extraction and exploitation on their land, the severing of their territory by the imposed land border, Colombian armed conflict, and neglect on behalf of state governments. This chapter demonstrates and explores the coping mechanisms that were developed in these communities to resist and survive these devastating phenomena. This chapter explains that the complex realities of living in borderlands are not limited to this space. The experiential relationship between the A´i Cofán People and the Colombia-Ecuador border is representative of similar experiences faced by other cross-border Indigenous Peoples in Ecuador.