As every year since 1983, International Day of Indigenous Women is celebrated today to pay homage to those who gave their lives for their families and fought against discrimination because of their gender, social class and ethnic group status.
According to the site gloobal.net, on September 5 this celebration is held, instituted during the Second Meeting of Organizations and Movements of America in Tihuanacu, Bolivia.
On that day in 1782, Bartolina Sisa, a Quechua woman murdered by the royalist forces during the anti-colonial rebellion of Tupaj Katari in Upper Peru, was assassinated, a substitute for the great rebellion that Túpac Amaru had carried out.
Bartolina Sisa was head of indigenous battalions where she demonstrated great capacity for organization, armed a battalion of indigenous guerrillas and groups of women collaborators of the resistance to the Spaniards in the different towns of the upper Peru.
For years, indigenous women have struggled for their human and specific rights, although in the latter the effort is greater because they fight for their guarantees as women, in their poverty status and as members of some ethnic group.
Indigenous women demand their rights to respect the cultural identity of the people to which they belong, to their identification as a member of a specific indigenous people, not to be assimilated or forced to accept foreign cultural practices that violate their own identity cultural.
They have also fought for the right to change their social, cultural, and economic customs and traditions that damage or impair their dignity, as well as to recover practices and traditions that favor and dignify them as women.
“The indigenous woman is a vital carrier of the cultural heritage, which teaches the ancestral language to the sons and daughters, which continues with the traditions, which resists the different forms of structural violence precisely because of its triple condition of being excluded: being Indian , being poor, being a woman,” added the social site.
NTX