Indigenous Women Speak Out on the Role of Social Sciences and Decolonizing the Discipline This paper will present conclusions and some short excerpts from interviews conducted with Indigenous women from the Latin American region on the role of social sciences. The disciplines comprising Western social science come under scrutiny in the conversations with these women as tools for empowering, and/or conversely potentially oppressing Indigenous Peoples in 2016-17. In particular, these women address how the social sciences have been coopted by white hegemonic colonial structures. Further they question the utility and objectivity of the social sciences in the aftermath of their perceived failures around the US elections, constitutional crises in Latin American countries, violent oppression, and the trend to criminalize legally-sanctioned protest. Indigenous Peoples around the globe, and in the Americas, have been actively defending their territories, cultural heritage, languages, and the right to consultation with regard to land resource management. As they seek health and food security for their communities, and target megaprojects that are contaminating communidades, they are rescripting discriminatory development models. Their objectives are driven by more than profit margins and economics exclusively, and are designed to integrate Buen Vivir as codified in constitutions around the continent.
The interviewees are trained in myriad fields of the social sciences, and navigate the processes of change with academic rigor. Others bring backgrounds in Indigenous Knowledge to bear. Yet they acknowledge the collective nature of resistance work today as having conjoined forces of academics and grass roots public intellectuals, as well as integration of western and Indigenous epistemologies. Some appropriate the Occidental tools to advance their causes; others subvert these hegemonic doctrinal mechanisms of oppression. In these various contexts, they discuss ways to decolonize the social sciences so that they can be of better use to a wider set than the dominant social, political and economic powers. Following the decolonizing trends of works like White Logic, White Methods, “The Misery of Settler Colonialism: Roundtable on Glen Coulthard's Red Skin, White Masks and Audra Simpson's Mohawk Interruptus” and other theoretical postures taken up in contemporary Native American social theory, we hear the Indigenous response from the South to issues of recognition and rights for the global Native populations.
This subject is of great import to these change makers especially because many Indigenous women are at the forefront of protest against natural resource extraction megaprojects, rape and violence, and socio-economic discrimination and racism. They lead the charge for educational reform, consciousness-raising, transformation of the cultural imaginary, cultural preservation and vindication of their tribal identity, equality and social justice. Similarly, they are targets of violent coercion and criminalization of state-sanctioned modes of dissention. Based on their experience within law, sociology, anthropology, and economics, in educational and societal institutions, the presentation will highlight the various ways they draw on their self-identification as contemporary professional Indigenous women, to challenge and decolonize the social sciences. Analyzing the role and functioning of the social sciences within the multicultural project, constitutional crises, genocide trials, and recent elections, they identify and deconstruct the oppressive, colonial structures and discrimination, embedded in social sciences.
This presentation is based on a series of interviews with individuals in Guatemala who were involved with the peritajes for the court cases against perpetrators accused of genocide against indigenous populations in the Civil War. The interviewees point to the shadow of structural racism, which must be dismantled in their nations and disciplines. In particular, they wage a critique of the social sciences, as disciplines of study as much as failed social mechanisms of democracy and equality continue to be eroded. 
The interviews reflect on recent global events after the 2016 elections in the US, and local post-genocide trials in Guatemala. They also reflect on the ways in which Indigenous women, triply marginalized can capitalize on the social sciences when the discourse and methodology integrates their alternative knowledge production as different yet legitimate.