One cannot help but feel so angry for the endeavours Rigoberta and her community had to endure. Endeavours which are not at all new and have happened to displaced, exploited, and underdeveloped people all over the world. Her unfiltered recount of her life ought to be enough to mobilize any decent human being. The beginning of her story provides many insights to the livelihood of Indians closer to present in the now established state of Guatemala. For her, her life revolved around learning and producing the teachings of her ancestors, to do things the Indian way, rather than the Ladino way, and to come to accept her suffering as the only course her life could take and to accept this fact. Her parents and ancestors knew the deviled intentions of colonization and capitalism; her parents were only trying to prepare her for her fate, as their parents had done to them.

From this story we come to understand her suffering, her people and their values and culture, and the barriers to retribution, which have now come to ‘radicalize’ her broader Indian ethnic group. The barriers these Indians face are surmount and exemplary of colonial traditions, such as deception and oppression, seen here through foregoing the Indians rights and claims to protection through language barriers and lack of knowledge, and greed and forced exploitation, seen here through the fincas or the bribery of elected officials. Important in this half of the story is recognizing the importance of language and of community strength and questioning what seems to be imbedded in our knowledge. It was exciting to read of the duality of cultural respect and the need for acquired knowledge in order to defend one’s culture remunerate in the mind of Rigoberta. And how fast the storytelling took place from her first initial expression of questioning what the Indian traditions taught her while she was a maid; realizing her respectable work ethic and humble restraint is what is continuing to propagate the pillars of her demise; especially considering the mix with Catholicism as well. It was interesting in this account recognizing the other barriers to potential knowledge exchange; the boys and the girls, the adults from kids, ladinos from the Indians, when all the other Indian communities would go to the fincas, they could not do much to communicate with each other, and the good Indian girl and the prostitute, which all had to be unravelled and questioned to maintain survival.