By: GISSELE GONZALEZ
Staff Writer
Bartolina Sisa (died September 5, 1782) was an Aymara woman, an Indigenous heroine. She led an Indigenous uprising against the Spanish in Bolivia at the head of an army of some 40,000, which laid siege to the city of La Paz in 1781. In her honor, the 5th of September has been instituted as the International Day of Indigenous Women since 1983.
Rigoberta Menchú Tum is a K’iche political and human rights activist from Guatemala. Menchú has dedicated her life to publicizing the rights of Guatemala’s Indigenous feminists during and after the Guatemalan Civil War (1960-19960), and to promoting indigenous rights in the country. She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 and the Prince of Asturias Award in 1998.
Buffy Sainte-Marie was born February 20, 1941, on the Piapot Plains Cree First Nation Reserve in the Qu’Appelle Valley, Saskatchewan. She is a Canadian singer/songwriter, musician, composer, visual artist, educator, pacifist, and social activist. Throughout her career in all of these areas, her work has focused on issues of Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Her singing and writing repertoire also includes subjects of love, war, religion, and mysticism. In 1997, she founded the Cradleboard Teaching Project, an educational curriculum devoted to better understanding Native Americans. She has won recognition and many awards and honors for both her music and her work in education and social activism.
Comandante Ramona (1959 – January 6, 2006) was the nom de guerre of an officer of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), a revolutionary Indigenous autonomist organization based in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. Perhaps the most famous female Zapatista, Ramona, was one of seven female commanders in charge of directing an army that consisted of one-third women. A member of the Zapatista leading council, the CCRI (Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee), she served as a symbol of equality and dignity for Indigenous and impoverished women.