Comparing the learning experiences of Indigenous women in post-conflict periods: Umoja,Kenya and Chorrera,Colombia

Abstract

I conducted fieldwork in Umoja village, Samburu County, Kenya and Chorrera County, Colombia. These countries have a history of gender violence against Indigenous women and this violence often continues into contemporary times. Conversations about contemporary violence against Indigenous women in Chorrera’s educational spaces—high school or the workshops of the local Indigenous organization—during the post-conflict period are painful and uncomfortable for them. Thus, I introduced the experience of Umoja from Kenya as a memory device to analyze the violence against Indigenous women and their educational expectations in Chorrera. These dialogues prompted by Umoja’s analysis in Chorrera reveals the simultaneous opportunities of Indigenous women’s collective memory, resistance, and challenges to girls’ and women’s access to traditional and formal education.

Introduction

First, I want to introduce my principal argument. Indigenous women from the Colombian Amazon and Samburu region in Kenya share a similar outcome of violent memories and restricted access to education that derive from colonial and political oppression and military securitization. At the same time, both groups have freely circulated non-institutionalized knowledge among generations. These political dynamics and cultural practices have not been documented sufficiently.

Umoja, located near the village of Isolio, was founded in 1990 by Rebecca Lolosi and 15 Samburu (a semi-nomadic pastoralist Nilotic people of north-central Kenya) survivors of these crimes during their recovery process (R. Lolosi, personal communication, June 25, 2017). Lolosi was subjected to psychological and physical violence by her husband during her struggle to obtain justice and respect for female Samburu victims of sexual violence, her opposition to female genital mutilation (FGM), and forced marriages. Facing together the continuum of this violence, these women sought to transform their pain into political action and self-reparation to change the lives of other Samburu women (R. Lolosi, personal communication, June 25, 2017). The unity, solidarity, and respect forged among them are the formative principles of umoja uso (unity). The emergence of multiple versions of Samburu femininity, such as the alter-hegemonic Umoja model, encourages women to articulate their own interpretations of a new Samburu femininity.

Chorrera, located in the Indigenous reservation Predio Putumayo, Amazonas, Colombia, has a population of approximately 3,800 inhabitants original for four different Indigenous peoples: Bora (an Indigenous tribe of the Peruvian, Colombian, and Brazilian Amazon), Ocaina (a nearly extinct Indigenous people who live in Colombia and Peru), Uitoto (Indigenous people in southern Colombia and northern Peru), and Muinane (a nearly extinct Indigenous people who live in Colombia and Peru, numbering 550 persons). Since the early 20th century, it was the epicenter of the exploitation of the rubber regime through the Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company (PARC), financed by British capital in 1899 and known as the Casa Arana (Kuiru, 2018). Under the direction of J. C. Arana, this company imposed regimes of physical and cultural extermination of local Indigenous people for rubber exploitation. Systematic abuses, including cases of torture and murder, resulted in the extermination of entire clans, involving forms of sexual slavery, forced concubines, and exploitation of children and youth. Although these practices were publicly denounced and condemned, forced labor and extermination continued in the region for most of the 20th century through threats, bribes, and a system of indebtedness passed from generation to generation. More than 30,000 Indigenous people were killed. In the late 1990s, the presence of legal and illegal armed actors in the Amazon intensified with the agreement between President Pastrana and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia’s (FARC) guerrillas in the Colombian internal armed conflict. The repertoires of violence of the rubber regime have been resurrected in contemporary forms of violence.

The current study is based on a multi-sited ethnographic analysis (Marcus, 1995) of the feminized and decolonized memories and learning processes of Indigenous women in Colombia and Kenya (Smith, 1999). However, few comparative empirical African and Latin American case studies have explored women’s access to education and learning experiences in post-conflict periods. Thus, inspired by Linda Smith’s invitation to decolonize methodologies, I used Umoja as a mirror case to revitalize the resistance, educational, and healing practices of Amazonian women (Smith, 1999).

As Foro Internacional de Mujeres Indígenas (FIMI, 2019) affirms for others countries, Indigenous women in Chorrera face a kaleidoscope of violence, including their exclusion from traditional and external education. This exclusion, made visible through collective memory practices, is articulated with other forms of violence, such as colonial, missionary, tradition-based, sexual, spiritual, political, and armed violence (FIMI, 2013). Addressing these forms of violence is a methodological challenge, which I explored through a mirror case a memory device methodology as I explain in the methodological section. I set out to explore the following questions: (a) What is the situation of Indigenous women in Umoja and Chorrera regarding gender violence and access to education? (b) What specific forms of education have been implemented by women in this context of educational exclusion? and (c) What painful and healing memories emerge in the learning process when using the mirror case of Umoja Village for Chorrera?

Theoretical background

Violence against Indigenous women forms a complex pattern of control that simultaneously constitutes, reinforces, reproduces, and overlaps with the structures imposed on them. For the Uitoto intellectual Fanny Kuiru (2018), in the Colombian Amazon, education plays a crucial role in the reproduction and prevention, transformation and reparation of violence within the peace agreements. Within the continuum, educational spaces can be consolidated for women and the subversion of unequal social structures and the establishment of potentially transformative relationships (Kuiru, 2018). These spaces require attending to and contributing to the redress of complex violence against the female spiritual knowledge system; neocolonial economic violence against Indigenous women; displacement from traditional lands; forced migration to cities; limited access to sacred sites and natural resources by transnational extractivism; violence in the name of tradition, FGM, forced early marriages, and honor crimes; and sexual and domestic violence as an individual and collective harm (FIMI, 2013; Kuiru, 2018).

Similarly, Gatwiri and McLauren (2017) characterized the diverse experiences of oppression and violence for being female, Indigenous, and black in Central Africa. They introduced a similar typology by distinguishing violence from external intrusions on women related to colonialism and neocolonialism; legacies of traditional African cultural structure, patriarchy, race, backwardnessor limited access to education, money, and health care; self as internalized oppression and her abject body as illness and disability experiences. Ogundipe-Leslie (1994) describes this violence as the six mountains that African women carry on their backs. Due to the complexity of the violence against Indigenous women in these countries, and their systematic exclusion from the educational system, I was commissioned to reconstruct the Umoja experience by the Chorrera women’s committee. I was also asked to introduce a comparative component in the training of Indigenous women during the Colombian peace agreement with FARC. The construction and implementation of the course took place in Chorrera, during the Colombian government’s peace negotiations (2017–2018) with the former FARC guerrillas operating in the region. It was crucial for the participants to understand some elements of the state reparation process implemented in Colombia, and in African and other Latin American countries in relation to violence against Indigenous Women because they were facing the offer of reparation from the Colombian government. On this point, Moon (2012) and Crosby and Lykes (2011) show how, in South Africa and Argentina, victims’ rejections of reparations implied a rejection of state reparations and their transitional policies, rather than genuine gestures of reparations for racialized gendered harm. Therefore, the challenge in ethnic and gender reparations for Chorrera will be to attend to the forms, spaces, and languages in which the protagonists give meaning to reparations, and the tension between individual and collective rights after the signing of the peace agreements. This will be possible through an education for women’s peace (Theidon, 2012).

Moon (2012) and Maya (Indigenous peoples of northern Central America) feminist Cabnal (2017) explained how, for the Mayan cosmovision in Guatemala, spirituality and time were central to any interpretation of loss and reparation, especially when it came to violence against Indigenous women in the post-conflict. Creative and ritual resources were crucial to generate more embodied, complex, and collective experiences of harm and reparation. In these processes, educational spaces for women on the reparation of violence against Indigenous women were vital to inform and reflect on their rights, as well as to imagine self-managed processes from Indigenous organizations.

Seminal works by Chávez Ixcaquic (2014) and Cabnal (2017) explore the defense of body-earth territory and ancestral territorial memory in Guatemalan post-conflict, promoting a communitarian feminism. McEwan (2003) asserts that the collective memory of black women in post-apartheid South Africa was largely marginalized, excluded, and discriminated against before and during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The author emphasized the importance of creating a postcolonial archive of black women’s voices and texts as a valuable form and legacy of belonging.

After analyzing these works, I observed how the educational spaces allowed Indigenous and black women to meet and reflect on their bodies as the first territory, and the community as the second territory, strengthening and vindicating their educational and leadership processes.

Although their bodies and their relationship with the territory is crucial to understand the reproduction of gender violence and space for resistance is complex in Indigenous and intercultural education.

Lesorogol (2008) describes how the external education of Samburu girls in northern Kenya imparts new knowledge, skills, freedoms, economic opportunities, and independence from traditional marriage. It also implies ideas and attitudes in tension with conventional conceptions of female capabilities, sexuality, and gender roles in Samburu society. Although external education implies differentiation and the creation of symbolic boundaries between more traditional women and educated women, generating negative implications for female solidarity, it provides young women with the necessary tools to access information about their sexual and reproductive rights and their rights as women.

Similarly, in Colombia, Nieto (2006) and Nieto and Langdon (2018) analyzed the possibilities of Amazonian Indigenous educational sovereignty as a space where masculine knowledge dominates over feminine knowledge. Likewise, they highlight the possibilities of strengthening Indigenous women from Indigenous education, particularly from the coordination of women, family and generation, and their educational processes. This is also reproduced in Indigenous secondary education, updating legacies of colonial and neocolonial violence, in a spiral of intensification of structural, political, and domestic violence. Anthropologists agree on the abuse, appropriation, and violence provoked by the simultaneous marginalization of Indigenous and external education (Belaunde, 2015; Nieto and Langdon, 2018). This education contrasts with Amazonian feminine education, the ethics of healing and the cooling or sweetening of the word, affirming the consequences of colonial relations on local gender dynamics during and after the Colombian conflict.

Methodological perspective

For more than 25 years I devoted my teaching and research work to community work with Indigenous women in Colombia, my country. By invitation of my Indigenous students at the Universidad of Rosario, and as a survivor of sexual violence, working with Indigenous women has been a scenario of healing through education. Likewise, it has been Indigenous Amazonian organizations who called me to assume the educational challenges in working with women in crisis, since they are the most affected by armed violence.

I founded my methodological perspective on communitarian feminist participatory action research (PAR) that suggests the body and thinking–feeling are the primary components of the collaborative experience of learning and researching (Moon, 2012). Thus, emotions and corporeal memories help to identify the ways in which the Indigenous women’s bodies create their memories. Previously, I applied the notion of a kaleidoscopic mixture of methodologies with reference to the complexity of kaleidoscopical violences inflicted against and by these women (Santamaria, 2019; Santamaria et al., 2019). As reflected in the multiple forms, figures, colors, and designs that emerge within the kaleidoscope, the violence is expressed in ways that cannot be fully grasped when analyzed using a single method.

Position of enunciation and ethical issues

My position as a teacher of women’s educational processes in the Amazon began through my friendship and collaboration with Fanny Kuiru, my student at the University of Rosario. Each phase of the research project involved consultation with Uitoto intellectuals in the city of Bogotá. The themes, questions, methodologies, and publishable results were shared with stakeholders in Chorrera, including Indigenous women. As a methodological and ethical strategy of action without harm, I chose to focus on the analysis of violence from generalized practices, safeguarding and anonymizing the women’s identities. The entire process of intercultural research in Peace Schools as a methodological tool centered on the advice of Uitoto Elder Manuel Zafiama from the central Maloka of Chorrera and with the consent of Rebecca Lolosi, leader of Umoja.

Methodological tools

The research questions were collectively framed during two participatory workshops in Bogota conducted in the first phase preparation of the diploma course (2015) with Fanny Kuiru and her team. Initially, I proposed the use of traditional methods, such as an ethnographical approach to violence and interviews. On advice from Fanny Kuiru, these approaches were subsequently supplemented with participatory and communitarian methods inspired by the works of the Indigenous Maya woman Lorena Cabnal (2017).

Body mapping

This methodology elucidates otherwise obscured or oppressed views and promotes a process of recognition across sexual, cultural, psychological, and social dimensions. Nevertheless, Amazonian Indigenous women are reluctant to speak directly about sexual violence on the subject and the presence of men (Silva et al., 2013; Sweet & Escalante, 2016).

Mirror cases

This methodology was a co-creation process with Indigenous women. As I mentioned before, the analysis of Umoja was proposed by Fanny Kuiru with the aim of learning about the educational experiences of Indigenous women from the perspective of prevention, care, and self-managed reparation of sexual crimes related to tradition and militarization. Umoja is an iconic case on the subject. After contacting Rebecca Lolosi in Kenya, I analyzed and understood the experience over 2 years through documentary and audiovisual archives. I conducted ethnographic observations and interviews in Umoja Village in the summers of 2017 and 2018. The idea was to engender a direct exchange between the two communities. Unfortunately, after securing the resources for the Samburu leader’s trip to Colombia, her visit was not possible due to governmental dispositions against her. Subsequently, Chorrera had to face the aggressiveness of COVID-19, and the exchange was interrupted.

Thus, I searched in implicit learning studies (Cleeremans et al., 1998) for structural equivalences and similarities with the violence and resistance. The Umoja experience worked as a memory device enabling a partial and provisional suspension of some of the barriers to naming indirectly intracommunity violence and exclusion practices inflicted on Amazonian women, without exposing them to possible future retaliation.

Studying documentaries, photographs, and testimonies of Samburu women in Umoja served as priming stimuli to activate internal representations and experiences of violence and resistance. Doyen et al. (2014) claim that activated representations lead to behavioral changes. This methodological perspective is useful where working on these issues is taboo. In one of the diploma sessions, the husbands of two participating women, both victims of domestic violence, joined them. By decision of the Elders Leonor and Manuel, in charge of the ceremonies and as well, the local Indigenous women’s coordinator, they were allowed to participate to avoid further violence and retaliation against the women for wanting to study. The care of the participants was provided by the women’s coordination and the Elders. On the advice of the Indigenous team, the authorship of this article was entirely assumed by me, to avoid possible re-victimization of the participants by revealing their identities.

The image of Umoja was also a brutal metaphor and an inevitable and indirect way to approach the current situation experientially and cognitively. Thus, the connections and tensions between what is said and what is shown, between word, image, and impression, contribute “to most human behavior, including perception, memory, decision making, and action” (Doyen et al., 2014, p. 3).

Findings

Sexual and structural violence in Umoja

When I arrived at Umoja, I brutally discovered how FGM, structural violence, and sexual violence in militarization constitute the genesis of the village. The driver, who drove me to the village, told me how the British Army Training Unit Kenya (BATUK) was established near the Samburu National Park in Kenya. The rugged terrain of the traditional Samburu territory affords an opportunity for British soldiers to train and acquire skills for deployment in Iraq or Afghanistan (interview with Julius, June 26, 2017). The British government provided logistical support for the Kenyan army against Al-Shabaab in Somalia by providing anti-terrorism training to police forces and border guards. Fifteen Samburu women were raped by BATUK soldiers (Wax, 2005). The British military base was established on traditional Samburu territory. During 30 years of impunity, more than 650 cases of sexual violence against Kenyan women by these forces were reported by Amnesty International (2003) to the British Ministry in London, which include the founding members of the village (Interview with Rose, June 25, 2017).

Gatwiri and McLauren (2017) described practices of sexual and structural violence that converged in Umoja. These included sexual violence by the British army under the auspices of the Kenyan authorities without investigation or sanction. However, other forms of violence, such as the tradition-based forms of violence such as domestic violence, repudiation, and expulsion of survivors by husbands and families following sexual violence by the British army, FGM, and forced marriages as a recurrent practice among the Samburu, including the illness and disability they entail, converged. Although FGM was banned in Kenya in 2001, the practice survives among the Samburu through hegemonic cultural norms focused on molding women to be the right way. An important project for Lolosi in Umoja is the co-educational school for Samburu girls, who have historically been excluded from education.

The Umoja school

A preschool and an elementary school were built in the center of Umoja. At 3 o’clock in the afternoon, 15 young children dressed in red uniforms walk through the village with their teachers. One of the teachers is a woman. I visited the two classrooms in the preschool building with Rosalinda, a 30-year-old, Umoja resident, high school student, Samburu, speaker of Samburu language, Kiswahili (another name for Swahili, the language of the Swahili people of Tanzania, Kenya, and Mozambique) language, and English. In her words, “We get up at six o’clock. I go to high school and the children to school. The women make necklaces all day and we sleep at seven” (interview with Rosalinda, June 12, 2017). Rosalinda brought her linguistic knowledge to the interlocution with visitors and researchers.

In other communities, traditional Samburu women are restricted from accessing school because of arranged marriages, working for their families, and pregnancy (Lesorogol, 2008; Omwami, 2011). Women’s educational experiences are defined by the interacting influences of patriarchy, paternalism, and poverty (Omwami, 2011). In Umoja, priority is given to girls’ education. The school is free and open to the entire region.

Our girls go to school every day. It’s an important message. We want to show them that they will be able to choose the husbands they want in the future. Normally, at the age of 12, they are ready to get married in exchange for a dowry. So, the father’s authority is taken over by the new husband. (Interview with Margaret, June 27, 2017)

According to Margaret, for parents, investing in their daughters’ education is not important. Girls leave their natal homes to become members of their husband’s lineage following patrilineal and patrilocal traditions. Lesorogol (2008) showed how sending girls to school and preparing them for a different life is a transformative act within Samburu communities. In Umoja, traditional leaders promote the two types of education. Girls and boys simultaneously attend formal education and receive traditional Samburu education from wise women. The tension introduced by Lesorogol is reframed, interweaving formal education and Samburu women’s education in which educated women like Rosalinda work hand in hand with leaders like Rebecca and Elders like Margaret to re-actualize the interaction between the two educational spaces.

Umoja: self-repair and economic autonomy

One of the vital projects for Lolosi is the productive activities. In Umoja, multiple restorative practices and productive projects exist, ranging from jewelry making to tourism and animal husbandry. The women have an ecotourism project for visitors to Samburu National Park. Ten huts, a restaurant, and a museum were built. The museum denounces FGM as a harmful cultural practice while showcasing dignified cultural practices. Some 47 women and 200 children currently live there. Lolosi envisioned the village and tourism project as a radical solution to the continuum of violence, with women owning the land and directing economic and educational activity with self-managed repair practices. Rosalinda stated, “All these women came here because they were beaten in their communities. Some escaped from forced marriages and FGM. They left their husbands and now work in a safe place.” Nonetheless, the women are still subjected to attacks from neighboring villages and predators. The husbands of some of the women have come to Umoja looking for their ex-wives, with the aim of beating and threatening them. The women of Umoja and their children, however, do not accept domestic violence as natural or commonplace. Some sons, like Mohamed, the village guardian, work to protect their mothers and other women by building fences and making patrol rounds. Mohamed revealed,

In 2006, we implemented this security system because the neighbors and an ex-husband were harassing the women. My mother lives here, but I don’t. I work here. We want to bring change. Our fathers did not want it; they have disowned our mothers. (Interview with Mohamed, in Roubaix (2014))

Returning to Moon (2012), this self-healing approach transcends the hyper-focus on sexual harm by addressing individual and collective economic, cultural, and educational needs. In restorative terms, following Theidon (2012), the village constitutes a collective experience, with spaces and languages for self-repair materializing in community assemblies, where dance, singing, rituals, and the elaboration of necklaces conjure pains and heal wounds. Despite the challenges described, Umoja is a body-territory (Cabnal, 2017) of healing, reparation, and economic autonomy that transcends the perspective of subjective reparation by proposing dynamics of being, living, and feeling what it means to be a Samburu woman or a Samburu man-child of the survivors.

Horror spaces and the resistance of female Amazonian bodies in Chorrera

Fanny Kuiru (2018) has dedicated her life to revitalizing feminine knowledge and defending the rights of Indigenous women in the Amazon Indigenous Peoples Organization. She denounced the atrocities perpetrated against Indigenous women during the rubber regime, including forced concubinage, sexual exploitation, and slavery. During conferences and formal discussions, Fanny narrated how the caucheros (rubber traders) constituted harems comprising dozens of Indigenous women; therefore, their testimonies and experiences are identified on their own behalf with her permission (Kuiru, 2018). Roger Casement described such practices in his diary during his visit to Chorrera witnessing Uitoto women enslaved in sexual servitude in harems (Spencer, 2004).

The various ways of appropriating the bodies of women within and outside of harems serve as painful symbols of the sexual exploitation and territorial domination of the caucheros in Chorrera. Outside of harems, the bodies of other Indigenous women served the needs of the traders. The Indigenous women’s bodies were forcibly used in rubber collection, cooking, cultivating orchards, laundry, and other types of manual labor. These bodies, under domination, were exploitable and without rights, subjected to torture, and treated as interchangeable objects. In addition, the abused bodies were—and continue to be—the outcomes of the patriarchal junction and colonial repertories of violence and boundless experimentation with the technologies of horror and the effects of capitalism (Cabnal, 2017).

Fanny recalled the case of a young Indigenous girl at a rubber station recounted by a Bora grandmother. The vengeful practices of the caucheros to punish female or male resistance comprised rape of Indigenous women on a massive and public scale. This young girl was a victim of this practice, assaulted by dozens of men:

The magnitude of the event caused a blockage of her vagina with [exudation of] a white liquid. A grandmother cured her with medicinal plants. During this period, people did not even have time to heal and to recover. (F. Kuiru, personal communication, March 5, 2017)

The grandmother’s metaphor of the blocked vagina evoked the individual and collective pain suffered by women during this period.

Peace School and intercultural diploma courses

I conducted fieldwork in these two regions and a teaching and learning process in the Amazonian region through Peace Schools. These encounters took place during 1 week with the participation of 50 women and 120 hr of learning and research coworking. To date, more than 400 women have graduated from Peace Schools with a diploma certificate. The methodological approaches used in this study were specifically designed for the PAR project entitled: From the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta to the Colombian Amazon: Micro-memories of Indigenous Women and High Resistance. Each phase of the research project was discussed with the Chorrera women. The two cases were compared based on the identification of structural equivalences and differences, such as the long-term continuum of extreme violence against Indigenous women that persists with total impunity; the conjunction of tradition-based and domestic violence, related to armed conflicts, and militarization in geographically distant areas with possibilities of exchange and mutual learning, and the unprecedented and necessary comparative dialogue between the cases that was requested by the women of Chorrera. The cases were crucial for the understanding of this ingrained violence in my trajectory as a mestiza researcher and promoter of South–South methodological dialogues.

I created diploma courses and Peace School as intercultural, local, and female-only spaces of learning and teaching because gender issues are difficult to address (Silva et al., 2013; Sweet & Escalante, 2016). I hosted workshops in Chorrera that provided opportunities for the participants to discuss memories, rights, and leadership of women, rights of Indigenous peoples—nomination used by the Amazonian peoples for their self-recognition and enshrined in the Political Constitution of Colombia 1991, and violence inflicted against Indigenous Women.

During the hosting of the first Diploma Course on April 10, 2017, I suggested to the participants that activities to induce corporeal memories should be performed. Corporeal memories is a concept proposed in war contexts, such as Northern Ireland and Mozambique, referring to the everyday sensory memories created from the bodies of female ex-combatants, and excluded from the common and dominant narrative (Katto, 2013; Santamaria, 2019; Wahidin, 2016). For many of the women, their bodies were the symbols of the maloqua (sacred temple), the seat of territorial control. The rape of a girl, wielded as a weapon, had a collective impact on the women, clan, and community because women are the representation of cultural foundations. The painful event of rape is directly related to the social and cultural environment. Thus, Indigenous women interpreted their pain in terms of their interaction with other bodies and with social and historical environments. The pain inflicted on the bodies of these women by the caucheros’ practices of domination triggered other positive forces, namely, the clandestine and silent resistance of women and their desire to escape. Thus, listening to the stories of suffering people who are in pain is crucial because this pain is inherently social and can be transformed and used to forge communities of hope.

Indigenous women maintained hope by developing clandestine practices to protect their babies and children.

Kuiru (2018) recounted how a grandmother resisted the rubber regime through strict obedience to rubber law enforcement. Some women deployed pregnancy and birth as a form of political resistance, contributing to cultural preservation through their maternity. During the day, they concealed their children in the ravines while they performed forced labor in the rubber plantations. Cultural transmission occurred clandestinely at night. Women kept as concubines used cultural measures, such as incantations and prayers of the Elders, to avoid getting pregnant and having to give up their children to slavery. The women of Chorrera developed clandestine practices of embodied corporeal resistance through their sexuality and maternity in their relations with Indigenous men who were not part of the exploitative rubber regime (F. Kuiru, personal communication, June 10, 2018; Kuiru, 2018). Those who were concubines of the caucheros and Indigenous capataces (supervisors) secretly formulated infertility treatments. Although Indigenous women and girls did not have access to the official education system during the rubber regime, mothers and fathers continued to transmit their languages, culture, and ancestral history in captivity. It was precisely through the reproduction of these cultural practices that women resisted and survived using songs, spells, and advice for their survival and that of their offspring in the face of extreme violence.

The orphanage: missionary violence and the revitalization of Indigenous education

The caucheros left Chorrera in 1930, and the Capuchin mission—associated with violent cultural assimilation of Indigenous orphans—then entered. Cabrera (2015) has analyzed the impact of religious missions in the Colombian Amazon. One of the most painful cases was the orphanage of Santa Teresita del Niño Jesus founded by the catholic missionaries after the war between Peru and Colombia (1932–1933). Asociación Zonal indígena de Cabildos y Autoridades de La Chorrera (Indigenous Zonal Association of Councils and Authorities of La Chorrera) took control of Casa Arana and the orphanage in 1994 with the founding of an Indigenous primary and secondary school. As a collective Indigenous education and culture revitalization strategy, they chose to convert places previously associated with torture and death into cultural and educational spaces. However, in the 1990s, when Indigenous communities gained official recognition and control of their education system through their collective resistance, no radical changes in Indigenous women’s access to education occurred.

I visited the Santa Teresita del Niño Jesús orphanage with Fanny in October 2017 and again in the following month with 45 women participants from Peace School. The memory journey led by the grandmothers was their own methodology to promote their perspective of historical memory. Three grandmothers served as guides during the visit, recounting their stories of pain and joy on the boarding school. The grandmothers reminisced about their ancestors’ exploitation during the Casa Arana, on sites of memory such as the dungeons, the rubber trees, and the rooms where their ancestors were enslaved and raped.

Therefore, the intersecting patriarchal structures of the caucheros, the Capuchin conception of education, and ancestral cultural practices constrained Amazonian women’s access to education. Adult women who participated in the Diploma began to have access to basic education approximately 50 years ago. However, for the most part, they were unable to complete their studies because of culturally prescribed early marriages and pregnancies when they were 12 or 13 years by order of the head of the clan. Hours before, during the workshop on Indigenous women’s rights, Hortensia explained that the right to education entailed recognition as an Indigenous woman and not merely the right to go to school:

Look teacher! [she spoke in a choked voice, when we arrived at the entrance of the boarding school during our journey of memory] . . . this is the portal where my mother left me to begin my studies. It makes me emotional. I suffered a lot because of my separation from her and the nuns were very strict. But at the same time, it was here that I learned to read and write! (Grandmother, 65 years old)

The storage rooms, torture spaces, and rooms and cells of the Capuchin orphanage have been transformed in the past 20 years and are now inhabited by Indigenous female students from Indigenous schools. The presence of the children of the survivors in these places of violent memories is a strategy of cultural resistance and healing. Nevertheless, traces of cultural assimilation and extermination remain in the surviving architecture in the middle of the forest, namely, the church, the statues of the Virgin, and exploitation stations. Standing next to the virgin statue in the garden, Luz Mila, a grandmother, recalled the suffering she experienced at the orphanage at the hands of a cruel, old Spanish Capuchin nun: “We did not have the right to talk in our language in the boarding school nor to talk about our gods and culture. When they heard us speaking in our languages, they punished us; they mistreated us.”

Female offspring in Chorrera

Being subjected to the continuum of patriarchal violence inflicted by the cauchero regime and during the missionary period, most adults and older women continued to be excluded from schools even after Indigenous organizations gained control of education in the 1980s. This situation was exacerbated by domestic and traditional forms of violence. I met grandmother Angelina on my visit in 2018, who confirmed this. Angelina is an empowered cultivator and guardian of seeds who received a prize from the Ministry of Culture for her work reviving traditional orchards. When I asked her why she loves her orchard so much, she responded,

I love to go every day to my orchard. I wake up very early, at 4 o’clock in the morning. I spend my whole day there with my plants, my cassava, my fruits, and my machete. I drink some water and caguana [a cassava drink] during the day and I work all day. I come back to my house in the afternoon, and I have dinner with my nephew. I am very happy in my orchard. I do not like being in my house with my husband. One night, not long ago, he woke up drunk. He was very angry at me, and he said he wanted to cut off my head with his machete. But I protected myself with a stick and managed to stop the blow. (Angelina, grandmother, 60 years old)

Over a period of more than 40 years, men in Chorrera observed how settlers and Indigenous persons who collaborated with the rubber regime dominated, controlled, exploited, and abused the female bodies of their ancestors. A century after the rubber regime ended, domestic violence against Indigenous Women has been naturalized and normalized by communities. Illegal and legal armed actors are responsible for forced recruitment, forced displacement, sexual violence related to armed conflict, and forced pregnancies. During the workshops held in 2017, women spoke of their desire to know more about their rights and how to access education in a context of state neglect and impunity for violent acts.

Despite the continuum of violence that includes domestic violence inflicted on Indigenous Women, Angelina’s daughters and granddaughters have been able to obtain a basic education at the Indigenous school. However, grandmothers’ illiteracy places them in a situation of great vulnerability, as in Angelina’s case. I observed in Chorrera that grandmothers have developed knowledges: in traditional education; linguistically because many speak two or three Indigenous languages; politically related to Indigenous movement; and culturally as experts on weaving, agriculture, Amazonian history, music and dance, and healing through spells and incantations. Thus, in parallel with exclusionary practices relating to the official education system and the violation of women’s sexual and reproductive rights by actors within and outside of their communities, women have forged transgenerational resilience within traditional feminine training spaces.

Exploring the Umoja experience in Chorrera

To introduce the case, I explained how some authors have denounced the dehumanization, lack of respect, and indignity promoted by the West. For example, interventions for the eradication of FGM may expose African women’s bodies including vaginas and intimate experiences, re-victimizing them again (Nnaemeka, 2005). The women of Chorrera showed indignation and solidarity when hearing the Umoja case. They recognized the great courage and strength of the survivors of sexual violence and FGM. Some women commented that sexual violence has increased in Chorrera. They specifically denounced the rape of a Laurita nun working in the region. Many women have become pregnant by Colombian soldiers in the army, paramilitaries, and guerrilla groups at the Chorrera military base. Moreover, they denounced the forced recruitment of young women, adolescent pregnancies, abandoned children of soldiers of the Colombian Army, and the FARC’s guerrillas as consequences of the long-term militarization of their territories. However, one older woman stated,

We don’t agree with the idea of a village just for women. We believe that it must be possible to work together on this issue of sexual violence. We don’t want to confront men, nor be ahead of them, nor behind them, but side by side. (Elizabeth, Chorrera workshop)

Conclusion

The cross-analysis of the two cases presented in this article reveals—as McEwan (2003) showed in South Africa—the simultaneous processes and opportunities that Indigenous women’s collective memory projects provide to visualize, heal, and restore. The women denounced the different forms of violence as resistance and challenges to girls’ and women’s access to traditional and formal education. The Umoja case demonstrated the deployment of female pain as an engine of resistance and access to education for young girls.

The women of Chorrera were moved, empowered, and eager to explore more cases like Umoja. As in Umoja, they insisted that the memories of pain must be recognized and can be transformed through a dialogue between the different educational spaces with and from the leadership of Indigenous women. They also expressed their desire to establish more South–South relationships with Indigenous women, like those of Umoja. I observed and reaffirmed that this mirror case operated as a catapult for the emergence of the memories and stories of the women of Chorrera. The memories that emerged in the conference spaces and other private places would otherwise have been impossible to awaken without causing harm.

Both case studies demonstrate the forging of healing and the deep desire to access and lead Indigenous women’s basic and higher education. In both cases, women have been excluded from the school system and relegated to a subordinate position within their communities. This restricted access to education has exacerbated their exposure and vulnerability to violence.

Working from body memories and body maps was an interesting path for me and the participants to explore, and requires further detailed investigation. However, it was impossible for me to return to Umoja and Chorrera during the COVID-19 pandemic. Difficulties maintaining a continuous relationship in Kenya and the Amazon because of funding issues, such as lack of prioritization of this relationship in a competitive research funding environment, and the geographical isolation of the two areas, were challenges with this study. Nonetheless, an important contribution has been to generate improbable dialogues through unpublished processes and to propose a group of methodologies.