Dialogue With Indigenous Women’s Historical Memory Requires Epistemic Openings

Abstract

Indigenous people of today’s generations have placed our truths, questions, and answers in the space-time of the contemporary world in which we live and in which we want to realize a vital principle of our cultures. The historical memory of the indigenous women of Abya Yala is approached in this work as an experience conditioned by contemporaneity and by the needs that the indigenous women of Abya Yala have today to understand the historical processes of the indigenous peoples of this region. We discuss the forgetting of the historical memory of the indigenous women of Abya Yala, a socially produced and individually sustained forgetting in our territories, which have suffered colonial invasion since 1492. Among the various fundamental authors in this historical process that gave rise to modern psychology, we have selected some reflections by Wilhelm Dilthey, focusing the responsibility given by historical consciousness. A consciousness that is formed on the basis of extracting what is important from the past and making sense of it for the collective being. This paper does not exhaust the totality of the phenomena involved because it is based on the present elaboration of a historical phenomenon.