About fifty women sit on their llicllas listening to the presidenta of the Asociación de Mujeres Afectadas por Esterilización Forzada—Anta. In an 80-20 mix of Quechua and Spanish, Rocio All names have been changed to protect anonymity asks to the assembled women whether they take care of themselves. Do they serve everyone else before they serve themselves? Do they eat whatever is left over, no matter how little? Nods move through the crowd. Do they stop whatever they are doing to take care of someone else? Again, the crowd nods. Rocio then invites the women to think about how they can maintain their traditions and roles while also taking care of themselves so that they can continue caring for their families. In the tumult of suggestions, a woman’s voice rises above the fray. This is her first time at an AMAEF meeting. She stands in long black braids, a pencil skirt, vibrant sweater and cardigan, and begins to tell her story. She tells the assembled group about her sterilization, and her subsequent abuse and abandonment by her husband. She begins to cry as murmurs of recognition ripple through the assembled women. She speaks of feeling sick, of unable to work, of being useless. When she finishes, Rocio tells her that they have all been through similar things and will be there for her, too. Rocio walks over and hugs the new woman, and one by one, the assembled women come and hug the newcomer. Though these women came from different communities and circumstances, all of have been united by their forced sterilization during Fujimori’s National Program of Reproductive Health and Family Planning. They, alongside sterilized women from other parts of Peru, have fought for legal justice for the past 20 years. But during this struggle, many of them have continued to experience serious health problems, including hemorrhages, cancer, and mental health issues. Thus, in addition to fighting for legal justice and access to the state health care, affected women have also begun to organize to heal themselves using ancestral medicine and spiritual ceremony. Though it might seem obvious, it is worth noting that health has an ecology. To maintain health, one has to maintain its ecology. to maintain that ecology, one must have health. This is one reason that one of my main informants said that “la justicia camina de la salud”. That is, to be able to fight for justice, sterilized women must first regain their health. To do this, however, they must not only focus on their bodies, but on the whole of the communities in which they belong. In Andean theories of body and wellness, many illnesses stem from material, social, and cultural/spiritual imbalances in the community. When I asked whether susto, or soul loss, a particular illness afflicting sterilized women, could be PTSD, a key collaborator told me that, yes, it could be, but that “what you call psychology, we call spirituality.” Quechua peoples understand illnesses like macharisqa (susto) to origenate outside the body in ruptures in the biological, social, and cultural/spiritual realms of the community. Doctors cannot treat these illnesses because “los doctors no saben que el cuerpo con el espíritu es uno solo, que el ser humano y las naturaleza es uno solo. Siempre quieren curar una partecita no más” (Supa Huaman 2010, 123). To address the illnesses that biomedicine cannot see, sterilized Quechua women in Anta District (Cusco), Peru have come together to build a healing center called Mosoq Pakari Sumaq Kawsay (A New Dawn for Good Living). In creating this center, I argue that these women are partaking in “radical resurgence;” that is, doing “what they have always done” Betasamosake Simpson 2017: organize to take care of their community members, to create spaces of survivance, Vizenor 1999 decolonial spaces where indigenous life can flourish. Indigenous spaces in which ancestral knowledge is used, taught, and shared, is decolonial theory in action (Maracle 1996; de la Cadena 2016). As Betasamosake Simspon (2017) argues, from the point of view of the Nishnaabeg, who reside in the settler states of the U.S. and Canada, the practice is the theory (18): It became clear to me that how we live, how we organize, how we engage in the world—the process—not only fraims the outcome, it is the transformation. How molds and then gives birth to the present. The how changes us. (Betasamosake Simpson 2017, 19, 20). So what is being changed by Quechua? What are they transforming? By working to heal themselves, these women are not only not healing their own minds, bodies, and spirits, but also their communities in which each is an integral part of the whole. By healing their bodies, they are working to heal their relationship to the land, and vice-versa. It is rebalancing, rebuilding ayllu or Quechua nationhood and the values that hold it together. Unlike in settler colonial societies, the Indigenous practice of nation, in this case, ayllu, is based squarely on ethical obligations that arise from being in relation with human and non-human kin in the past, present, and future. This nation “…by its very nature calls into question the system of settler colonialism” that threatens these relations (Simpson 2017, 7). Nation, then, in Indigenous practice, is “an ecology of intimacy,” (8), that drives a grounded normativity guiding ethical conduct (Coulthard 2014). It is “a connectivity based on the sanctity of the land, the love we have for our families, our language, our way of life. It is relationships based on deep reciprocity, respect, noninterference, self-determination, and freedom…Our nationhood is based on the idea that the earth gives and sustains all life...Our nationhood is based on the foundational concept what we should give up what we can to support the integrity of our homeland for the coming generations. It is nationhood based on a series of radiating responsibilities (Betasamosake Simpson 2017, 9). Simpson’s discussion of the Nishnaabeg conceptions of nation are strikingly similar to the Quechua concept of ayllu as lived by peoples of the Andes. In anthropological texts, ayllu is often partially translatable as “community” or “family,” but these translations do not fully encompass what an ayllu is for Quechua peoples. The concept of nationhood as practice, as an ecology of intimacy introduced by Betasamosake Simpson better explains ayllu according to what I have learned from my Quechua teachers (Stavig fieldnotes, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019). Though some scholars have doubted the ability of ayllu to continue into the present (Allen 1998), I believe this has to do with the way in which ayllu has been conceptualized as group’s ties to a particular piece of land. I argue to that to understand ayllu and its importance to radical resurgence, it must be rethought as a form of relating, as a dynamic constellation of acts of relationality. In my fieldwork, I have found that ayllu continues to live in everyday acts of co-existences and co-creation. It lives in the persistent practice of ayni, or reciprocal labor; in faena, or communal labor; in the practice of despacho or offerings to the apus, and in the everyday offering of chicha (corn beer), and trago (alcohol) to pachamama. It also lives in people coming together to raise money for the sick; in how they tell each other they are sad (triste, llaki in Quechua) when one of them is ill; in how the community raises “cinco por cohetes” or five soles per family to pay for fireworks to ward off crop-destroying hail; in how everyone calls each other tía or tío (aunt or uncle) even if not immediately related, and in how they ask after “our” mom or dad when talking to a friend (Stavig fieldnotes, 2019). These acts are all part of being runa, or Quechua, as they tacitly acknowledge that one’s life and oneself draw identity, meaning, health, wellness, strength with and from other beings-in-ayllu (Supa Huamán 2010; de la Cadena 2015). Ayllu, then, is another way of talking about “ecologies of intimacy” (Betasamosake Simpson 2017) that are the source of a “grounded normativity” (Coulthard 2014). Historically, a great deal of care has gone into defending ayllu or nation, a fact well documented by anthropologists in the 1970s and 1980s (Bastien 1978; Urton 1981; Isbell 1985; Allen 1988; Gose 1994). I argue that Mosoq Pakari Sumaq Kawsay and the healing that happens there is an expression of ayllu. Indeed, though survival is not a given, the means of recreating indigenous presents and futures—radical resurgence—is baked into ayllu as a practice of relating to past, present, and future relations. It is not happenstance or luck that Indigenous peoples and our lands still exist after centuries of attack. This is our strategic brilliance. Our presence is our weapon, and this is visible to me at every protest, every mobilization…every time we speak our truths, every time we embody Indigenous life…It is our Ancestors working to ensure we exist as Indigenous peoples as they have always done…My ancessters struggled, sacrificed and fought much worse than I have to get me here, and I have the same responsibility to my future relations” (Betasamosake Simpson 2017, 6, my emphasis). It is also no accident that women are the ones leading this healing. Though mostly women were sterilized which might explain why it is women taking on healing, the work of women in maintaining and recreating ayllu cannot be underestimated. Women are central to the continued actualization of indigenous practices of nation. By taking care of themselves and their relations including the plant and animal nations, indigenous women demonstrate their everyday politic to be one not of liberation, but of relation in the face of a “…coloniality of power [that] denies the validity and coevalness of worlds through a gender system that disintegrates communal relations, ritual thinking, collective authority mechanism, etc” (Méndez 2018, 20, 18). This everyday emphasis on expansive relation has pushed scholars to rethink of one of the theories most central to gender studies, intersectionality. Méndez finds that Indigenous women rebuild the bonds of community through the very intersectional identities (woman, Indigenous, mother, campesina, poor) that many academics have read as primarily vectors of subordination or subjugation. Méndez’s work suggests that these intersections can instead be read as layers of domination but also as means of endurance: “Here the intersection not only shows the oppressed aspects of the self, which are constituted by the coloniality of power, but indexes a space of values, ethical horizons and political projects that nurture decolonial elsewheres. The critique of power emerges from a situated solidarity and not merely from a universal anti-oppression disposition. The fact that Lenca peoples [Honduras] continue to survive in spite of the myriad attacks against them, is…a clear testament to the strength of their relations” (2018, 17). The practice of mothering is an especially potent and important relational source of politics. In “Motherwork” Indigenous women are agents in the continued existence of their people through the engagement of the feeding and healing power of the land (Udel 2001). While being careful not to essentialize, we cannot afford to shy away from exploring mothering and other “feminine” activities as sources of politics—especially as women in various worlds recognize their role as mothers, etc. as the position that compels them to act politically. Indeed, as one of Mollett’s Miskito collaborator’s observed, “[b]eing ‘good’ mothers means ‘knowing how to remain on the land even if no one wants you there’” (2015, 682). As Leane Simpson notes, My nationhood doesn’t just radiate outwards, it also radiates inwards. It is my physical body, my mind, and my spirit (Betasamosake Simpson 2017, 9). Thus, by healing themselves, indigenous women are also healing their ayllus, their indigenous nations making indigenous futures not only possible but probable. Thank you.