Chapter 5: Indigenous Women Warriors: The Embodiment of Place

For many Indigenous people around the world, there is no separation between oneself, land and place, Mother Earth, and the larger cosmos (Deloria, 1992; Echo-Hawk, 2010; White Hat, 2012).^1,2 This embodiment of a holistic connection often manifests itself very differently in Indigenous cultures than from those in dominant societies who often view the firmament – Earth and its beings as resources to be owned or dominated over (Echo-Hawk, 2010).

Given this philosophical and embodied relationship to place and cosmos, there is little wonder why Indigenous women often use their embodiment of place to call attention to social and injustice issues, especially those harmful to Mother Earth and their communities (Kimmerer, 2013; Wildcat, 2010). Indigenous women (and people) have experienced historical and continued oppressive, genocidal, and an overwhelming degree of marginalization (Adams, 1995; Pickering, 2000; Risling Baldy, 2018). This is due to a patriarchal and colonial mentality that dominant societies often are embedded in (Smith, 2021; Smith et al., 2019; Wilson, 2008). To counter these oppressive structures and systems, Indigenous women have engaged “the power of refusal on the frontline of ancestral homelands to disrupt colonial ideologies of knowledge and power” (Lane, 2018, p. 197). As Lane (2018) notes, “In the face of violence, Indigenous women stare back into the eyes of the oppressor and demand a respectful existence” (p. 197).