Exploring Leadership and Territory through Indigenous Women’s Biographies in the Paraguayan Chaco

By analyzing Indigenous women’s biographical reconstructions and intertwining their collective and family histories, we can explain current power imbalances in the Chaco due to long-lasting colonization processes. Here, environmental change is understood as a social process experienced through unequal power relations, where the concepts of territory and leadership gain relevance when focusing on Indigenous women’s histories.

When exploring territory through Indigenous women’s life histories, we see that its relevance and how it is presented depend on their position within current power imbalances. Analyzing their family experiences provides insight into how territory is shaped across generations and within power struggles between groupings. Additionally, collective memory opens possibilities for assessing territory through rules for interpreting the past. Analyzing how these are contested or supported (often in conflicting, ambivalent ways) enables us to explain current power struggles for narrating the past and how they shape the notion of territory.

Likewise, the concept of leadership depends on how we trace it empirically and understand it as emerging within the relationship between individual and social/historical processes. In this sense, leadership might look like confrontation against settlers or organizing a group towards political claims, but it might also develop around ambivalent relationships with dominant and vulnerable groupings.

Hence, in this presentation I explore how both concepts benefit from an empirical reconstruction and centering Indigenous women’s experiences in the analysis. Intertwining the collective past with present circumstances and recognizing dominant discourses prevent us from falling into stereotypical assumptions.