INDIGENOUS WOMEN, RELIGIOUS PRACTICES AND ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY

Abstract (English)

Indigenous people view land and natural resources as sacred –living, thinking, and acting beings. Indigenous women are known as the protectors of nature - forests, land, mountains, and water, and renew their sacredness through religious worldviews and practices, feasts, and festivals. Nature is commodified and objectified from the dramatic expansion of large-scale extraction activities and mindless development ventures taken up by states and profit-oriented multi-national capitalist corporations. With massive urbanization, Industrialization, and modernization, indigenous people are displaced from their traditional abodes in the forests and hills and are migrating to the cities as menial laborers. In the process, the sacred environment is commoditized, and the women’s religious practices are compromised. Consequently, indigenous people often lose out to more powerful state and non-state actors, becoming one of the most disadvantaged groups in the country (UN 2010).

This panel will focus on women’s lived experiences of religious practices linked with the sustainability of the environment. Previously, one of us (Pandey and Kingsolver, 2022) discussed mountains as powerful and sacred actors in indigenous people’s efforts to organize and protect their regions from irrevocable destruction through mining activities. Historically, scholars have ignored women’s environmental activism tied to their religious practices. The presenters in this panel will present their research findings on women’s religious practices, known as more holistic, inclusive forms of expression of the environment, that includes engaging with indigenous ways of knowing, often sidelined in mainstream discourses.