Instagram and Indigenous Women in the Amazon

The rampant shift from off-line activism to digital activism has played a major role in allowing awareness to pervade in today’s culture. Many activists nowadays credit themselves in their ability to constantly post educational material and informative videos, but it can be difficult to discern which activists are performing in order to ride along the mainstream movement wave and which genuinely care about the causes they are constantly promoting. To be able to delve further into these questions and understand the different facets of social media activism, this paper focuses on how Indigenous women in the Amazon have developed their resources to situate themselves on a digital and social level within the confines of Instagram. With an analysis of colonialist effects as well as preconceived notions of eco culture, this paper will shed light on how exactly these aspects mask themselves within Indigenous women’s digital activism. This paper will explore these elements through a case study of Mujeres Amazónicas, an Ecuadorian Indigenous women’s activist group