Reviewed by: Scales of Resistance: Indigenous Women's Transborder Activism by Maylei Blackwell Lynn Stephen (bio) Scales of Resistance: Indigenous Women's Transborder Activism by Maylei Blackwell Duke University Press, 2023 THE DECOLONIZATION of Western knowledge is a tall order, but one that Maylei Blackwell successfully fills in Scales of Resistance. Centering conversations on how Indigenous women's activism brings Indigenous cosmovisions, balance, and relationality to the table, Maylei Blackwell pushes us to rethink categories of colonialism, the settler/Indigenous binary, and the ways that gender permeates local, regional, national, and global Indigenous organizing. Blackwell's book is driven by a multigenerational accompaniment of Indigenous women, social movements, Indigenous and other intellectuals, and activists. Blackwell incorporates scale into the structure of the book. She begins with a focus on Indigenous women in Mexico and in diaspora who are engaged in national movements for Indigenous autonomy and explains how they organize to preserve autonomy in their homes, communities, and through local forms of justice and governance. As the author notes: "Indigenous women moved the struggle for autonomy from a discourse of rights to a practice of autonomy by scaling down to the levels of the community, the home, and the body." (42). Blackwell then explores how women from the Coordinadora Nacional de Mujeres Indígenas (CONAMI), founded in 1997 in Oaxaca City, also began to participate in hemispheric spaces of women's organizing such as the Enlace Continental de Mujeres Indígenas de Ayba Yala (ECMIA). Blackwell centers the concept of Abiayala but also the tensions that emerge from using it as an organizing concept. "Abiayala forges a trans-Indigenous political frame that names an alternative sense of relations and responsibility to one another and a way in which Indigenous actors at multiple scales root their own nations' and communities' struggles to broader international Indigenous rights frameworks and practices of solidarity" (109). Abiayala became, however, unscalable in Blackwell's scheme of multiple scales as women moved simultaneously between local, national, transnational, international and trans-Indigenous and transborder scales of organization—also producing new identities, kinds of consciousness, and strategies. As global consumption, tourism, and different forms of extraction ramped up in the 1990s End Page 137 and 2000s, weaving, as well as medicinal and agricultural knowledges, for example, went from local discussions to national and global arenas. Simultaneously, Indigenous women engaged in intense confrontations with hegemonic Western feminism centering Indigenous women's knowledges and their own sense of gender justice bound to collective rights and autonomy. Women also engage in their own forms of gender-based advocacy to shape community decisions from the bottom up. Long-standing practices of comunalidad have been key to women's success in empowering themselves. Through deep analysis of the life histories and testimonies of Indigenous women leaders in Oaxaca and Guerrero, Blackwell documents how communal work, kinship, ritual life, and assemblies have been used by women to empower themselves locally and regionally. These structures are rooted in long-standing Indigenous forms of governance. Blackwell uses her multidecade relationship with women in the Frente Indígena de Organizaciones Binacionales (FIOB) to illustrate how the Indigenous male and female leadership worked across colonial and national borders to increase women's and youth leadership. Trying to change discrimination against Indigenous women and empower them as communal leaders across a binational organization is a major challenge. The election of the FIOB's first binational female leader, Odilia Romero Hernández, in 2017 marked a shift in the organization; however, she bore the marks of many years of debates, doubts, and incredibly hard work in her body and biography. Indigenous Los Angeles bears the ongoing structures of multiple colonialities, Tongva territory, a large population of "relocated" and "detribalized" Native Peoples from the U.S. because of U.S. government policies of termination, and a large diaspora of Indigenous Peoples from Latin America and Oceania. How do you theorize diasporic Mesoamerican (and other) Indigenous Peoples in the tribal homelands of others using Indigenous concepts? Seeking to avoid the settler/Indigenous dichotomy, Blackwell uses the Tongva concept of Kuuyam/guest to refer to the three hundred thousand Indigenous Oaxacan and Mayan Indigenous Peoples in diaspora in Los Angeles. Being a guest focuses...
Lynn Stephen (Fri,) studied this question.