By Jeannette Curinao Alcavil

Against a backdrop of purple skies, thousands of women’s voices filled the streets last March 8 to once again demand their right to live life to the fullest.

We Indigenous women share this hope to be treated with dignity and respect. We seek this recognition in our daily lives, even in the simple and the invisible ways we are treated. Abya Yala, our land, is being mistreated and overexploited. So are we.

Long silences and hardworking hands weave a spirituality that is born from the womb of Mother Earth, which encourages us to stand firm against death that tries to rob our people. We suffer, yes, but we also sing, laugh, dance, create and sow together, in harmony with the healing and life-sustaining plants. With them we grow stronger!

In our journey to recover our Indigenous identity and to live it without fear of rejection by the dominant culture, we have found compassionate hearts who share the dream of Good Living.* They have chosen to walk with us, even at the risk of their own lives; they have not fled the violence that threatens us.

In Tirúa, the territory of the Mapuche-Lavkenche (People of the Sea) in Chile, where I live, the Licán Foundation, founded by the Jesuits, encourages us to protect and strengthen our language, Mapudungun, which is essential to our worldview. They also promote a sustainable economy through the creation of family vegetable gardens and work with the weavers' collective of the Relmu Witral Association. The Jesuits “waste their time" with us, as we describe their close companionship, sharing hot maté and long conversations in our families' homes.

We receive support from the Indigenous Solidarity and Apostolate Network of the Conference of Jesuit Provincials in Latin America and the Caribbean (Conferencia Provinciales en America Latina y el Caribe or CPAL), a Canadian Jesuits International partner, to strengthen our spirituality and make our struggles and resistance visible. The in-person meetings we have had with other Indigenous sisters in Andahuaylillas, Peru, in 2023 and in Manaus, Brazil, in 2024, showed us that our struggles are similar. This process has borne fruit with territorial meetings that we have held as sisters in various
places, like seeds that sprout in hope, keeping our cultures alive in the face of threats from mining and extractive industries that attempt to destroy us.

Internships and visits between territories and cultures have allowed women from our territory to exchange knowledge about medicinal plants, both in Mexico and in Tirúa, strengthening the bonds of sisterhood between our peoples.

These spaces of participation and dialogue have undoubtedly been a concrete form of reparation that the Church has made to the Indigenous peoples. But the debt is still great.

We trust that peace and justice will embrace each other when the Gospel of Jesus is incarnated in Abya Yala.

* Good Living (buen vivir) is an Indigenous concept in Latin America of an alternative development that emphasizes harmony with humanity, nature and community.

Jeannette Curinao Alcavil describes herself as a lay person “committed to the Kingdom in Mapuche territory in Chile, who has had the grace of meeting brothers and sisters travelling the same path.”