Mesoamerican Women’s Indigenous Spirituality: Decolonizing Religious Belief

Abstract

Using documents, declarations, and proposals from the 2002 First Indigenous Women’s Summit of the Americas, Marcos discusses the ways in which indigenous women are simultaneously working for social justice and creating an “indigenous spirituality.” This indigenous spirituality differs not only from the hegemonic influences of women’s largely Christian, Catholic background but also from more recent influences of feminist and Latin American ecofeminist liberation theologies. Marcos draws on her work with women in Mexico’s indigenous worlds and systematizes the principles that have emerged from a distinctively indigenous cosmovision and cosmology. As the author shows, native women’s fight for social justice is also a “de-colonial” effort, in which indigenous women in the Americas are actively recapturing ancestral spiritualities in order to throw off the mantle of colonial religion, gender oppression, and elitism.