Jennifer Nez Denetdale, co-editor of the Fall 2009 edition of Wicazo Sa Review, has published a portion of her paper on critical Indigenous feminism, Claiming the ‘F’ Word: Native Women, Feminisms, and Visions of Sovereignty, on the First Peoples blog:
At a time when tribal nations are critical of women’s leadership, when they are passing bans on same-sex marriages, when we refuse to acknowledge or prefer to forget our exchanges with those from “races” other than white, when we are aligning ourselves with American interests in the Middle East, Native feminists find it important to interrogate the processes by which tribal nations and their citizens have adopted social, economic and political structures that re-inscribe colonial relationships of hierarchy and patriarchy. …
As feminist scholars have noted, women and gender are integral to the project of nation building, for women reproduce nations -— biologically, culturally, and symbolically. Including an analysis of gender is crucial to transforming contemporary Native governments because women are primary actors in the configurations of nation.
Read the post in its entirety here.