Marie-Eve Courtemanche – Whitten Research Fund 2024-25
Marie-Eve Courtemanche
Université Laval
Winner of the Norm and Sibby Whitten Research Fund 2024-2025
Cosmopolitics of the body-territory: Huni Kuin women and contemporary Indigenous art in the Brazilian Amazon
This research project focuses on the Huni Kuin women of the Terra Indígena Kaxinawá do Rio Jordão (Acre, Brazil), who mobilize art as a mean of achieving financial autonomy, asserting themselves as political actors and using their art as a tool for struggle and protest. The work of these Huni Kuin women artists is part of a broader context of rising visibility for indigenous women’s movements and contemporary indigenous arts in Brazil. These movements denounce both violence against indigenous peoples and the environmental crisis, while at the same time valorizing indigenous epistemologies. The aim of this research is therefore to deepen our understanding of the indigenous concept of body-territory, the political dimension of indigenous art and the specificities of indigenous women’s political commitments in the Brazilian Amazon.
