Indigenous women, multiple violences, and legal activism: Beyond the dichotomy of human rights as “law” and as “ideas for social movements”

Abstract

This review interrogates the divide between human rights "as ideas for social movements" and human rights "as law" that permeates the literature on human rights law and gender violence by putting it into conversation with the scholarship on Indigenous women's legal activism against the multiple forms of violence that they face. This divide obscures the ways in which Indigenous women across the Americas have appropriated and re-signified the discourse and practice of human rights by engaging in formal legal processes at the community, domestic, and supranational levels. I problematize this dichotomy and argue that human rights "as ideas for social movements" and "as law" go hand in hand to challenge the multiple injustices affecting the lives of Indigenous women. This review invites sociologists to consider the experiences of Indigenous women's legal activism and its relationship to colonialism in their analyses of social movement dynamics and it contributes to decentering analyses on legal mobilization that are based on the global North.