Muyu Raymi, the Seeds Festival: Indigenous Women’s Means to Sustain, Resist, and Rebuild

Abstract

ABSTRACT Among the Raymis, the Indigenous celebrations of the Andes, the seeds festival Muyu Raymi has a unique path. It is a colorful one-day event that most explicitly exemplifies interculturalidad and the achievements of Indigenous Peasant politics at a local level in Ecuador. Nevertheless, Indigenous women’s active and committed involvement in the event is not sufficiently understood from the intersection of culture and politics. This work aims to identify the ways in which Indigenous women have managed to link themselves to Muyu Raymi and what Muyu Raymi shows about our understanding of interculturalidad. This work argues Muyu Raymi has its origins in the dawn of neoliberalism and remains connected to a long process of resistance led by Indigenous women. The findings are discussed through a lens of interculturalidad that highlights people’s ability to sustain, resist, and rebuild their ways of living. The analysis considers the existence of a relationship between human and non-human actants as explainer of social life; in this case, Indigenous women and the seeds. This work highlights the transformative potential of the women-seeds connections and their mixed strategies to resist and support systems of power, through a history that correctly attributes credit to women as history makers.