In this chapter, we take inspiration from critical evaluations of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and global Indigenous feminism, to discuss practices that women from the Russian Arctic and from Kyrgyzstan experience as providing access to status, power, and more meaningful lives in their communities. We elaborate critically some SDG5 targets and the presumptions that inform them and show two levels of problems that they fail to acknowledge and which we think are central to women’s well-being worldwide: SDG5 does not recognize the colonial structures of knowledge that are embedded in some of the solutions it offers, and it fails to account for diverse possibilities for women’s empowerment in rural and Indigenous communities, and instead promotes urbanization and globalization. To the epistemological frames promoted by SDG5 we contrast women’s perspectives and stories of empowerment from Kyrgyzstan and Nivkh Indigenous people in the Russian Arctic. Practices like caring for the family and the household, fishing, handicraft mastery, and Kyrgyz koshok (lamentations) have significant role in communities and give women culturally specific status and power. We aim to inspire a debate on the possibilities to decolonize, democratize, and “customize” SDG5.