Kankuama women, living fabric, and ancestral justice

By:
*Omaira Marcela Cárdenas Mendoza
**Mariana Camacho Muñoz
*Diana Quigua

The indigenous justice system is incomplete without Kankuamo women. Their way of explaining justice is through the **chipire**, the weaving with which they start the traditional bag, whose purpose is to hold feminine thought. For Kankuamo women, these processes make sense because they are thought from the origin; they are part of that fabric of life. In this journey, there are numerous women who have helped to thread, stitch, and weave their processes of strengthening. Mildred Montero and Ana Manuela Ochoa, a current magistrate of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, initiated the gathering of women around weaving, the hearth, sharing coffee, and other daily activities that allowed them to strengthen their voice.

Therefore, the chipire contains principles such as complementarity and duality; the mandates of the spiritual mothers and fathers who govern the sacred sites; and the very law of origin. These principles guide the Kankuamo people’s self-government, the territory, and are the foundation for the laws of coexistence among communities, the relationships between human beings, and their relationship with spiritual beings. That is, it is the entire ancestral order that must be respected in order to maintain balance. Kankuamo women are the protagonists of the physical and cultural survival of their original nation, despite having suffered the onslaught of the armed conflict that structurally affected their families, territories, generations, and seeds of life.

Thinking Justice from the Territory

“We women are territory, our body is territory.” This is how the **mayora** (elder) Elsida Bolaños Cáceres defines the relationship of Kankuamo women with the heart of the world: the Sierra Nevada de Gonawindúa (Santa Marta). The care of women’s bodies, and of that gigantic body that is the territory of the Sierra, has been their struggle from the “sweet word”: that is, the one that seeks to maintain harmony and avoid conflict, while still being the decisive word of women and their determinations. It is the word that has the power of harmony.

This is how the Community Committees were born, an initiative that seeks to strengthen Kankuama self-government and justice system from the “feeling-thinking” of women. Their main role is to guarantee comprehensive justice for women, children, and families. Omaira Cardenas, a Kankuamo leader, lawyer, and advisor, says, “For us, talking about this means talking about all those disharmonies that women, but not only women, but women in families with families, women in the community facing all the obstacles and barriers, both internal and external, where being united has allowed us to build together those elements and tools for participation but also for healing and being able to train ourselves to train other companions and accompany them on this path.”

To achieve this, the women organized, participated, and actively influenced the congresses of the Kankuamo people, the highest governing body that meets every four years to legislate, agree, control, evaluate, and guide their mandates. This work was not easy; it took them several years (to date, five congresses have been held) and it was within the framework of the fourth congress, in 2016, where the Kankuamo people finally recognized the work that the Community Committees do, formalized them, and instituted them as part of the Kankuama justice system.

The Community Committees and Inter-jurisdictional Coordination

The Community Committees are a collective effort, conceived and supported by Kankuamo women for the construction of peace, taking into account the multiple forms of violence they face. Under that mandate, the Committees carry out actions of promotion, identification, and comprehensive and intercultural care. Also, they undertake processes of documentation, registration, referral, and follow-up of cases of all types of violations against them and their environment.

For the **mayora** Elsida, spirituality is a fundamental issue in the struggle of Kankuamo women. The **pagamentos** (payments) or tributes to the earth are used to ask the mother for permission and to establish dialogues related to their needs and interests. Likewise, the concept of justice impacts two dimensions of Kankuama life: the spiritual and the physical. In this way, by complying with the laws of origin and spiritual mandates, the physical order and the plane of human relations are maintained.

Understanding these dimensions of justice, Kankuamo women handle cases of domestic violence, gender-based violence, and food insecurity. For the latter, they created the “Weavings for the restoration of harmony for Kankuamo women and families who are victims of violence” route, a strategy of psychosocial, psycho-spiritual-cultural (from the **mamos** or spiritual guides) and legal attention for the parties involved in the case. This is led by the Community Committees in articulation with the General Council of Elders, the highest justice authority in the Kankuamo people. The initiative is developed autonomously and self-managed, as the authorities themselves, along with the Kankuamo women, assume all the costs of transportation, food, and lodging.

They also point out, as Sibelis Villazón, **mayora** and coordinator of the Commission of Indigenous Women and Kankuamo Families (CMIFAK), does, that it is necessary to have their voices in their own government to balance that search for justice, and thus influence the commitments of intercultural coordination with the State. This is why today, in the discussion that the Kankuamo people are having about the Protocol for inter-jurisdictional coordination, the Law for inter-jurisdictional coordination, and the strengthening of the Special Indigenous Jurisdiction, the women actively participate in the discussions with the authorities and express their word.

In this context, one of their proposals is to build a house of healing and harmonization, that is, a space for psycho-legal-spiritual accompaniment and healing for Kankuamo women and families. With this, Kankuamo women want to continue articulating their efforts, for the care of that great territory that is the Sierra, where the seed of life insists on prospering.

Therefore, when one speaks of the “Force of Life,” one speaks of the Kankuamo people and especially of the Kankuamo women, who with the power of weaving, the sweet word, and good thought, have been robust pillars that have sustained and will sustain an entire collective. Where not even the hardships of “the bad death” from long-term violence and especially from the armed conflict have been a reason to be silent or to die. On the contrary, a reason to live, fight, and resist.

* Lawyer and Kankuama leader

** Researchers at Dejusticia

***This article is part of the special #TejidoVivo, a product of a journalistic alliance between the Dejusticia study center and El Espectador.