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This chapter critically examines dialogues between indigenous feminists and academic feminists about the role and significance of indigenous epistemologies in constructing social scientific knowledge, particularly feminist epistemologies. We argue that the term indigenous feminisms must be understood as broadly linking gender equality, decolonization, and sovereignty for indigenous peoples. In Latin America, this term typifies an activist and practical movement with cultural, economic, and politically specific dimensions. We posit that analytical and theoretical frameworks developed from indigenous women’s ways of knowledge production should be recognized and legitimated in feminist discourse because much is learned from their worldview about women’s emancipation, the importance of intersectionality in terms of race, ethnicity, and gender in indigenous contexts, in addition to political and cultural critiques. We show that indigenous feminist theoretical formulations are not homogenous but overlap in some areas of theoretical and practical formulations that involve new conceptualizations of the body, space, time, action/movement, and memory.

In this chapter, the author explores the conditions of sexualised, gendered violence against Indigenous women and girls. The author asks how various responses to this violence have shaped the present-day legal personhood of Indigenous women and girls from two perspectives: an Indigenous legal perspective and a Canadian legal perspective. To avoid the troublesome pan-Indigenous generalisations of legal personhood, the author focusses on one Indigenous society, the Gitxsan people from northwest British Columbia and their legal order and laws.² The author examines several specific questions about how the Gitxsan legal tradition historically defined the legal personhood of Gitxsan women and girls, and how this has changed with colonisation. The author takes up specific aspects of the operation and structure of Gitxsan law and legal institutions and analyse the ways that they are gendered.

Relations between Indigenous women and the Australian women’s movement have never been easy. For some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women the white women’s movement has seemed irrelevant to the real struggles in Aboriginal women’s lives, which have tended to be more politically aligned with Indigenous struggles more broadly. Many Aboriginal women have viewed white feminists as insensitive to their own role in Australia’s colonial history and the implications of this for contemporary intercultural relations. In response to such criticism, many white feminists have struggled with the challenge of effective cross cultural engagement and collaboration.

This chapter brings an intersectional analysis to bear in an effort to understand these challenges, developing a framing of agonistic processes of collective identity as a way of thinking about the potentially productive role of conflict in social movements. Through an examination of Indigenous and non-Indigenous responses to a particular policy framework, the chapter suggests that feminist interventions focussing on the negative, racist impacts of the policy have tended to neglect the gendered dimensions of the underlying problem. As a result these arguments risk neglecting (some) women’s lived experiences.

The significance of feminisms appears and disappears from where you stand. In the 20th century, feminisms of different contexts have been the very basis of struggles for equity and justice at the same as time as they have faced charges of illegitimacy or irrelevance. As in the last century, the current era can be read not as the histories of feminisms only but as chronicles of feminisms intertwined unevenly with other movements for social, political, and economic justice. In this sense, feminisms have disappeared or metamorphosed.¹ Both verbs signify either that many feminisms are not recognizable as some had known or interpreted them to exist, or that they have altered beyond familiar shapes to forms that have displaced or substituted them. These transformations have led to debates on purist and reconstituted versions; these disputes have, in fact, maintained the vitality of feminisms.²

Julia Rose Sutherland highlights the heart of her feminist practice as an indigenous artist: Feminism for everyone and feminism every day. From detailing her mixed media usage to collaborative project dynamics, Sutherland reemphasizes the urgent need to continue to highlight and address ongoing settler violence forced upon the land, women, and communities. By keeping histories and the work of knowledge keepers close to her individual work and pieces created with others, Sutherland demonstrates the complex and layered steps vital for navigating patriarchal institutions and questioning multiple systems of oppression through art in order for everyone to be “heard in their entirety.”

Feminist perspectives from women of color did not emerge solely as a result from racism in the white feminist movements; such an assumption negates the agency of feminists of color (Roth, 2004). Instead, feminist perspectives by women of color emerged from historical and sociopolitical dynamics within their own communities of origin, as well as in relationship to each other, including in opposition to, and at times in concert with, the white feminist movements. This chapter explores the development, complexities, and unique contributions of Womanist, Black Feminist Thought, hip-hop, Chicana, Native American, global, Asian American, Arab American and ecofeminism. These feminist perspectives include overarching themes, such as the intersectionality of gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, ability, age, religion, nationality, and other important identities and issues. Each contemporary feminist theory also explores the interstices of issues such as education, health, economics, reproduction, sociopolitical, historical, organizational, technological, and myriad interrelated dynamics.