Remembering Resistance

Women’s Translations of Territorial, Linguistic and Cultural Rights

In cooperation with the NGO Fundación Pachamama and the Department for Human Rights of Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar

What role did translation play in female Ecuadorian scholars’ resistance against the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL)? How were legal, political and cultural concepts translated across borders and struggles to expose the violation of indigenous territorial, linguistic and cultural rights? What forms of knowledge emerge when Waorani women engage in collective remembering as Citizen Scientists, using media and historical documents to narrate the past from an indigenous perspective? Which academic, political and cultural strategies of resistance did female Ecuadorian scholars develop to organize against the US-American evangelical missionary organization Summer Institute of Linguistics? What role did translation – of documents from related cases in other countries, of legal or philosophical concepts or of contents of human rights campaigns – play in these women’s aims to highlight violations of territorial, linguistic and cultural rights in indigenous communities where the SIL was active and, eventually, in contributing to its expulsion from Ecuador by presidential decree in 1981?

How can an experimental epistemically defiant remembering, undertaken by Waorani female Citizen Scientists and drawing on selected materials (newspaper and academic articles, video, audio and photographic material) on the SIL’s past involvement in the Waorani hunter and gatherer family groups, serve to translate/transculturalise indigenous collective memory with a special emphasis on territorial, linguistic and cultural rights?

This project addresses such questions to challenge dominant narratives of translation, memory, and rights. By combining biographical interviews with scholars and collaborative workshops with Waorani women in Ecuador, we aim to foreground translation as a central tool of resistance and epistemic transformation. These women’s acts of “Remembering_Resistance” do more than recall—they translate injustice into demands for recognition, autonomy, and legal revision.

We seek to develop an experimental, decolonial methodology at the intersection of Translation and Human Rights Studies, placing indigenous cosmovisions and collective memory at the heart of translational research. The project contributes to rethinking translation as a site of struggle, bridging legal pluralism, intercultural justice, and gendered knowledge-making. By doing so, it not only uncovers past strategies of resistance but also shapes future agendas for indigenous rights and academic collaboration.

Funded by the programme Joint Excellence in Science and Humanities (JESH)