Editors’ Introduction Free

As we detailed in our introduction to Meridians vol. 22, no. 1 (spring 2024), this two-part special series on “Indigenous Feminisms across the World” (“IFAW”) is a first step in addressing a notable lack of Indigenous feminist work in the Meridians content archive.¹ The response to our 2022 “IFAW” call for submissions was extraordinary and ultimately yielded so much quality content that we decided to publish two special issues, the first of which was published in the spring of 2024, and this second issue is being published in spring 2025. In addition, as hoped for, Meridians’ explicit interest in Indigenous feminist knowledge production and knowledge producers has inspired a noticeable increase in these submissions, reviewers, and readers.

The features in this “IFAW 2” issue address Indigenous issues in Australia, Canada, China, Chukchi/former Soviet Union, Mexico, Nigeria, Palestine,² Peru, and Turtle Island, intervening in the segregation of decolonial feminism typically associated with Indigeneity in the Americas, and postcolonial feminism’s typical association with South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. In the process, “IFAW 2” also attempts to intervene in existing frames of thinking about Indigeneity in the United States/Turtle Island. As in our first issue, we have tried to acknowledge interventions that get short shrift in conversations about Indigeneity. We have also endeavored to evoke trans-hemispheric and trans-Indigenous linkages as well as differences by including activist, creative, and scholarly interventions from beyond the Western hemisphere, in the process of both including and decentering the Americas in thinking about Indigeneity from feminist and gendered standpoints. This is an attempt to validate a “Fourth World” movement paradigm that shifts perspectives beyond the paradigm of the Westphalian settler-colonial, franchise colonial, and postcolonial nation-state. With these two special issues, our hope is that the enhanced involvement of those who work in the field of feminist Indigeneity that we highlighted earlier will continue far into the future of Meridians.

We are pleased to feature “Aleqa’s Taqqiq (Older Sister of the Moon), 2024” by Canadian American scientist and visual artist Kai Two Feathers Orton (Innuinait, Tђchϙ, Niimípuu, Nēhiyawak) on our cover. Although it is part of her “Tree Women Project,” Two Feathers Orton created this particular piece specifically for this “IFAW 2” issue of Meridians. In addition to appreciating its inherent aesthetic quality, we felt the piece perfectly complements this issue’s content because as you will see, “Aleqa’s Taqqiq” alludes to the multiple themes, theorizations, and concepts that the authors address, from Latin American Indigenous feminist calls to care for our embodied selves, particular communities, humanity, and the pacha mama (Mother Earth) as coconstitutive cuerpo-territorios, to North American Indigenous understandings that trees are kin, healers, and protectors to the centrality of caring for forests in Northeast Indian Indigenous communities.³ Thus, we open this issue with Jenny L. Davis’s (Chickasaw) exegetical poem “How the Oak Tree Came to Be,” which centers Indigenous epistemologies, ontologies, and survivance with five deceptively brief stanzas that brilliantly convey settler-colonialism’s past, present, and possible future.

We follow this with “Decolonizing Feminisms: Accomplices, Action, and Accountability,” a State of the Field essay by Robyn Bourgeois, a thoughtful and generative overview of four books “with the ongoing efforts to decolonize feminism and its implications for the field and feminist futurities.” Bourgeois deftly teases out the theoretical and political threads that run across all four of these otherwise seemingly disparate books, which range from a twentieth-anniversary edition of a now-canonical text in Australian Aboriginal/Indigenous feminist knowledge production to two North American–focused books that focus on BIPOC solidarities to a call for “revolutionary relationality” as a strategy for decolonial futures rooted in humanity’s fundamental kinship. As in the first issue of this series, here we attempt at generating a trans-Indigenous and trans-hemispheric feminist kinship as a strategy for decolonial futures.

Staying with this theme of the challenges and potentials of BIPOC solidarities across geopolitical borders, Tatsiana Shchurko’s essay “‘we were two ends of one taut rope’: Audre Lorde and Black-Indigenous Relations in the Eurasian Borderlands” examines the connections Lorde made with Chukchee poet Antonina Kymytval’ during a 1976 journey to Soviet Eurasia. Through a close reading of Lorde’s poem “Political Relations” (1986) and her “Notes from a Trip to Russia” (1984), Shchurko argues that the Lorde-Kymytval’ relationship “disrupted Cold War geopolitics and provided an anti-colonial pathway for the East and the West to unite against entangled imperialism, along with their accompanying Eurocentricism and Russocentricism.” As Arctic Indigenous people, the Chukchee have dealt with Slavic/Russian settler-colonialism and its attendant violence since the seventeenth century, a history and everyday reality that Kymytval’’s writing documented. Thus, when Lorde saw Kymytval’ perform her work at the Afro-Asian Young Writers Conference in Tashkent, even though she could not understand the language, Lorde “was moved . . . and felt a strong connection with her own experiences as a Black American” due to Kymytval’’s passionate affect. By the end of the conference, they had formed an “intimate connection” that transcended the fact that they did not speak the same language and that “provide[d] a vital blueprint for constructing a more just and equitable future.”

Lorde’s work on “the erotic as a response to violent geopolitics” informs Bright Alozie’s analysis in his culture-work essay “Between the Sensuous and the Sacred: A Postcolonial Reading of African Spirituality, Sexuality, and ‘The Erotic’ Through Mbari Art in Igboland, Nigeria.” Alozie shows how late nineteenth-century British colonial interpretations and late twentieth-century scholarly understandings alike mistakenly “depicted mbari sexual imagery as lewd, profane, and embarrassing.” These conventional “European perspectives on the erotic” and on women’s bodies as “passive objects to be eroticized” fundamentally distorted the meanings of mbari art’s sexual themes and the Indigenous cultural worlds it belongs to. Specifically, mbari art is devoted to honoring “the earth goddess, Ala” and celebrating the connection “between the Igbo earth goddess, the female body, and its ability to bring new life” into the world. Moreover, contrary to colonialist insistence that mbari art perverted the sensibilities of those who viewed it, for Igbo people it “fosters a positive [and inclusive] view of sex,” “educate[s] the people socially and religiously,” and “help[s] devotees of Ala in their spiritual journey.”

Next, we have two Pedagogy features that exemplify the resonant diversity of Indigenous epistemologies across the world, which share commonalities such as respect for the wisdom of women elders/Aunties and a calling to take care of/with the earth and all living beings while also honoring their respective particularities. The first feature, “The Making Is the Story: Sovereignty, Sharing, and the Seven Sisters Cloak” by Sabra Thorner, Fran Edmonds, Kerri Clarke (Boonwurrung/Wamba Wamba), and Maree Clarke (Mutti Mutti/Wamba Wamba/Yorta Yorta/Boonwurrung), textually and visually narrates the process of endeavoring a decolonial collaboration between a white US-based anthropologist academic and four Australian aboriginal artists who undertook a process of “making together, an Indigenous mode of knowledge transmission that is both intergenerational and intercultural.” Thus, this multigenre piece details the intentional process undertaken by a white faculty member, her students, some staff at Mount Holyoke College, and Australian aboriginal artists-in-residence who came together in the spring of 2022 “to center Indigenous knowledges and uplift Indigenous sovereignty” by making a possum-skin cloak. “The Making Is the Story” textually and photographically documents the geographic, institutional, and cultural context of the collaboration, which included the creation of both documentary and “high-art” photographic portraits of project participants intended for museum exhibition, as well as this essay.

As editors, we emphasize that here kinship is not about romanticizing the Indigenous as apolitical passive subjects who can establish affective bonds with all and sundry. Rather, kinship is about “staying with the trouble” (3) by “making kin” (2) for “wounded flourishing” (120) in the context of the havoc wreaked by empire, as Donna Haraway (2016) puts it. However, the photo essay about the possum skin cloak—a form of Indigenous art from Australia—by Thorner, Edmonds, Clarke, and Clarke marks a clear departure from Haraway’s feminist theory that teaches us about “multispecies alliance” amid irreversible ecological damage. In the introduction to “IFAW 1,” we spotlighted Ulunn-guaq Markussen’s critique of metropolitan society calling for sacrifices for the climate crisis from the Indigenous Arctic peoples, long exploited for their natural resources. Likewise, this photo essay raises thorny questions about metropolitan response-ability to the nonhuman in the context of metropolitan response-ability to the Indigenous peoples, particularly given the creative manifestation of the cloak within a US institution of elite higher education located on Indigenous land.

The second Pedagogy feature is “Yakama Auntie Lessons on How to Outfox a Monster” by Michelle M. Jacob, who was inspired to send this innovative piece to Meridians in honor of Kum-Kum Bhavnani, her graduate school mentor and the journal’s editor from 2000 to 2002. The opening litany of didactic affirmations of self-care’s precepts—which are repeated throughout the text—speaks to the quotidian yet critical ways Indigenous women teach, sustain, inspire, and protect their cuerpo-territorios. It also alludes to what the settler-colonial “monster” has attempted to rob Indigenous peoples of: happiness, supportive and nurturing systems, participation in decision making, understanding, and respect. In turn, the Aunties have taught the people how to identify and outfox the monsters’ seemingly insatiable hunger for power and capital. As Jacob notes, these Aunties come in many forms and exist in many spaces, including the academy, which is why she closes her piece with a bibliography of decolonial scholarship and narratives.

Perhaps not surprisingly, some of the scholarship listed by Jacob is drawn from by Palestinian sociologist Ashjan Ajour’s “Storytelling from the Heart: A Decolonial Feminist Humanism” in order to outfox the manifest and latent monsters lurking in paradigmatic methodological and interpretive norms that call for objectivity and neutrality. Ajour narrates how her experience interviewing Palestinian former hunger strikers who had been held in “administrative detention” in Israeli prisons led her to “writing from the heart” in order to “provide a space for colonized people to articulate their counternarrative” because neutrality in the face of violence is really a cover for complicity. This essay offers an important reminder that recent events in Gaza are part of a much longer history of Israeli-Palestinian “existential conflict” and that decolonial feminist methodologies are critical to “researching human suffering.” Rather than landing on despair or nihilism as a result of being entrusted with these painful stories, however, Ajour concludes that “in the end, humanity is the light that shines out of the darkness of the conflict.”

Ajour’s essay also contests existing paradigms, this time about storytelling for penal justice. The essay which uncovers the plight of Palestinian hunger strikers in Israeli jails raises another set of thorny questions about the appropriateness of neutrality—a colonial mode of ethnography founded on a Cartesian logic. As Nelson Maldonado-Torres (qtd. in Quintero et al. 2019: 7), who understands the coloniality of power as the coloniality of being, which is closely related to the coloniality of knowledge, has argued, if thinking grants the quality of being—“I think, therefore I am”—then those who presumably do not or cannot think do not exist or are dispensable. This analytic ego conquiro is preceded and survived by the Cartesian ego cogito, as “not thinking in modern terms translates into not being, and ultimately justifies domination and exploitation” (2019: 7). Instead, Ajour delineates an affective ethnography modeled on empathy in writing about Palestinian political prisoners. Given that Ajour’s social location as a Palestinian is a crucial factor in shifting paradigms of ethnographic work, the essay all the more speaks to the impossibility of representation under coloniality of knowledge.

As Ajour’s article contests existing paradigms about penal ethnography, Evelyn Saavedra Autry’s essay contests existing gender-neutral paradigms about transitional justice. “Insurgent Memories of Armed Struggle: Self-Representation by Female Ex-combatants in Peru” takes up the traumatic experiences of political prisoners, in this case Indigenous women imprisoned for engaging in ideologically motivated armed struggle against the mestizo/settler-colonial state, which “categoriz[es] Indigenous subjects as semi-Peruvians” and shows how they affirm their complex humanity in the face of these ideologies. After analyzing forty testimonios written for the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) by women who had participated in the Shining Path, Autry “disputes the normalization and acceptance of torture against women identified as Indigenous, campesinas, and insurgents.” Unlike the Palestinian men that Ajour interviewed, who characterized themselves as actors rather than victims, these “racialized women imprisoned for treason represent themselves through testimony as agents in history [in order] to reclaim victimhood” in order to hold the state accountable via the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

Autry’s essay is a challenge to much of North American thought trends on Indigeneity, which resist assigning Indigenous people the status of victims because it flattens their identity. This North American discursive trend is a response to the continuing history of erasure of Indigenous inhabitants of the Americas under settler-colonialism—a history that started with calling vast territories terra incognita, or undocumented land, thus normalizing invasion and conquest through feminization and queering of such territories as penetrable. Autry’s article, on the other hand, underlines how anti-state female ex-combatants in Peru launch their human rights claims at the international/regional levels both as victims of torture who also happen to be perpetrators of torture, contesting the settler-colonial state’s monolithic narrative of truth and reconciliation that segregates “victims” from “perpetrators” and normalizes statist torture of insurgent Indigenous women.

Here it is crucial to acknowledge the larger feminist conversation that this article joins—about the denial of atrocities against women by state and nonstate actors in truth and reconciliation narratives. This evokes trans-hemispheric linkages with the South African post-apartheid context of transitional justice where the TRC and ANC terrorized into silence the stories of gender apartheid that female liberation fighters experienced within the revolution where they were tortured and sexually abused by their own comrades. Beth Goldblatt and Sheila Meintjes’s report to the TRC underscoring the flawed methodology of its gender-neutral truth finding led to the TRC’s special women’s hearings in Cape Town, Durban, and Johannesburg. In response, the ANC merely acknowledged the gender-specific violence against female comrades by ANC men and went no further than mentioning that the perpetrators had been punished. Given that Goldblatt and Meintjes’s report was an outcome of the workshop Gender and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission at the University of the Witwatersrand, Autry’s article is part of the genealogy of feminist work on transitional justice that intervenes in truth and reconciliation projects for gender justice.

Nanya Jhingran argues that a similar strategy of systemic exclusion from citizenship and/or of categorization as less-than citizens accrues in India, where governmental “recognition” policies lead to “the inevitable dilution of [aboriginal people’s] political representation and [the] expropriation of their ancestral lands” in the country’s Northeast, which in turn benefits the Hindu settler-colonial majority. Her essay “‘Counter Me!’: Militarization, Postcoloniality, and the Poetics of Historical Experience in Mahasweta Devi’s ‘Draupadi’” situates contemporary armed conflicts between majority Meitei people of the Manipur valley and the hill-dwelling Kuki tribes “within the long genealogy of colonial modes of administration and occupation” through a close reading of the titular short story. Although “Draupadi” is set in the forests of West Bengal rather than the Northeast where current events are unfolding, the story’s central drama is how Dopdi, an insurgent woman whose rape was ordered by the military commander as punishment and interrogation strategy, “demands [the perpetrator’s] attention to the wounds of her violation.” In so doing, she “exposes the violent entanglements of the postcolonial nation-state, the gendering(s) of the insurgent tribal body, and a semifeudal semicapitalist agrarian system saturated by the structures of caste and class.”

“The Unfillable Stomach: Trauma and Its Discontents through Louise Erdrich’s The Round House,” by literary scholar Daniel McKay likewise explores the psychological effects of historical and epigenetic traumas wrought by settler-colonialism on Indigenous peoples by undertaking a fine-grained analysis of the rape of the Ojibwe narrator’s mother, Geraldine, by a white man who purposefully selected “a site of uncertain jurisdiction” to exploit the “legislative inequities” structured into Native American Indian “sovereignty” within the United States territory. McKay’s reading considers The Round House “as both [an] anti-colonialism and anti-misogynist” story that simultaneously addresses settler-colonialism and intertwined Indigenous and settler-colonial patriarchy. According to McKay, the novel does this by recentering Geraldine’s trauma responses, their multiple sources, and what she needs in order to heal, both as a particular subject and as an Indigenous woman.

Similarly, in “Grounding Emotions Across Borders: Zapotec Healing Practices in Places and Times of Social Strife,” anthropologist Candy Martínez “unpack[s] the connections between Indigenous epistemologies around healing and emotional distress” through “an embodied modality of feminismo comunitario,” which “considers healing in terms of political agency, Indigenous territorial struggles, interconnectivity, and ancestral memory.” Martínez argues that Zapotec healing rituals navigate the simultaneity of migrants’ roots in the cuerpo-territorio of their homelands and their transnational lives, as well as in the overlap between their personal and collective pain. As with many of the other features in this issue, Martínez notes that Indigenous women play a central role in doing the healing, pedagogical, and kin work that sustains the community across borders and generations. She also notes that trees play a significant role in healing rituals, as bearers and birthers of supplicants’ pain.

Elsewhere in Mexico, Ana Del Conde’s essay “Embodied Solidarities: Alternative Affective Autonomies through Acompañamiento” explains how the cuerpo-territorio concept and feminismo comunitario strategies have guided P’urhépecha women’s responses to the multiple forms of violence they experience, from interpersonal to structural. Among these is an “embodied solidarit[y]” strategy of “acompañamiento as a source of transformative justice through an understanding of the body as a territory that is sustained by affects.” To illustrate how “narrative production . . . processes” are central to acompañamiento, and how the strategy and concept differs critically from Western feminist notions of empowerment because it is rooted in the collective rather than individual subject, Del Conde shares several of the community women’s stories. Through these storytelling practices, which are both particular and emblematic, P’urhépecha women have developed “alternative nonviolent securities” strategies oriented toward a truly “transformative justice” for themselves and for their communities.

Finally, we close this issue with the 2024 Elizabeth Alexander Creative Writing Award Winner for Poetry winner, Winnebell Xinyu Zong’s “3.13.22: Translations of Ba’s Recipe for COVID Prevention.” Our Creative Writing Advisory Board chose this piece because “part directive, part prayer, the words of this poem highlight the real time precarity of the pandemic, which in turn renders the labors and sacrifices made to create a type of closeness/intimacy, which in its cruel paradox, is the very thing that kills. This poem is as much of a panacea as it is a dispatch, as it is a recipe—it provides a type of clarity and nourishment in a time of bone-deep, existential darkness and hunger.” We include it in this “Indigenous Feminisms across the World” issue because reading in the context of the fifth anniversary of the global COVID pandemic, the poem reminds us of how simultaneously collectively surreal the entire experience was, and that the pandemic was—and continues to be—much more consequential for BIPOC communities across the world.

Notes

Works Cited