INTRODUCTIONWhen addressing a British treaty delegation in the late-1770s, Tsalagi (Cherokee) peace chief Ada gal'kala asked, "Where are your women?" He was speaking to the British exclusion of women in their treaty party; in contrast, Tsalagis always brought delegations comprised of men, women and youth to participate in negotiations. While Indigenous women had been actively engaged in international diplomacies prior to and during first contact with colonial powers, Ada gal'kala's question becomes even more salient today when examining Indigenous activism within global fora such as the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, and sites of resistance to state authority, such as the continuing Zapatista (EZLN) self-determination movement in Chiapas, Mexico, and the recent Haudenosaunee (Six Nations Confederacy) reclamation of their homelands in Ontario, Canada.Although women's rights are now officially codified as human rights (CEDAW 1979), the rights of Indigenous peoples have yet to be formally codified (despite the creation of a UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in 2000) in the UN system with the failure to ratify the Draft UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. 1 However, due to colonization and on-going imperial influences, both women's rights and Indigenous rights movements have been problematic spaces for Indigenous women's participation in treaty making and standard setting in international legal fora. Both rights movements often require Indigenous women to make trade-offs (either as women or as Indigenous peoples) rather than make space for the more fully intersectional frameworks that Indigenous women have been lobbying for.