International/Local Justice: “Ndé Women as Drivers of New Justice Spaces” El Calaboz Ranchería on the Texas-Mexico border.

• In Event: Indigenous Peoples, Gender Justice and Legal Pluralism in the United States, Mexico and Guatemala

Abstract

This paper explores the emergent transitional justice space sculpted by Ndé (‘southern Lipan Apache’) women in El Calaboz, under the shadow of the US border wall. As the border wall bore down upon their lands, Ndé women fought its imposition and the multiple rights violations through a variety of legal means from state courts to the Interamerican Commission on Human Rights, to no avail. The wall was completed in El Calaboz in 2010, running literally through women’s backyards. In June 2011, Ndé women gathered at the El Calaboz Gathering on Indigenous Knowledge, Lands, Territories and Human Rights to make key decisions and implement actions in a transitional justice space of their own making. Through an in-depth examination of the 2011meetings, the paper analyzes Ndé women’s activism within the newly created justice space of the Emilio Institute for Indigenous and Human Rights, as well as in cases before the U.N. CERD, the Inter-American Commission. This research examines the effects of engagement in these spheres, examining how in the process of the pursuit of justice, women’s recovery of Ndé knowledge systems opened up new, yet vulnerable, spaces for Ndé women’s enactments of self-determination

Author

• Margo Tamez, University of British Columbia Okanagan