The Abiayala* Working Group is made up of NAISA members who are committed to maintaining hemispheric Native American and Indigenous dialogues across the Americas and the Caribbean, emphasizing the importance of maintaining North-South relations in our scholarship and activism. In particular, we aim to create, facilitate and maintain accessibility for Indigenous academic as well as community voices and views from south of the settler US/Mexico border, to assure these perspectives continue to shape Native American and Indigenous Studies at large.
Abiayala Working Group
Current Coordinators: Cueponcaxochitl Moreno Sandoval, PhD. Current Secretary: Marcelo Garzo Montalvo, PhD.
*Instead of “Latin America” or “Americas” to refer to this geographical, religious, cultural, and linguistic region, we use the term “Abiayala”, which in Kuna Language means “Land in its full maturity”. The term was proposed by the Bolivian Aymara leader Takir Mamani to epistemologically rethink the Americas from Indigenous perspectives and cosmologies and to resist “subjecting our identity to the will of our invaders and their heirs.”