This co-sponsored session focuses on climate justice for Indigenous communities and how traditional ecological knowledge can inform climate policy, green energy expansion, and climate resiliency. The first paper explores how ethno-territorial rights, environmentalism, and ecological religious cosmologies can improve food security for marginalized populations in Ecuador and Bolivia. Second, analyzes the impacts of glacier extinction on Indigenous Aymara communities in the Milluni Valley communities in the Bolivian Andes and how religions and traditional ecological practices support socio-economic responses to a contested landscape. The third paper proposes Coyóte activism as resistance to settler-imperial structures and instigates new ends-of-worlds for settler-colonial necro(nuclear)politics. The fourth paper examines two parallel movements engaging TEK for mitigation and adaptation which must be reckoned with to avoid ecocolonialism: the unjust extraction and commodification of Indigenous knowledge, and obfuscation of the colonial relationship and Indigenous decolonial goals.
In high mountain communities, global climate change contributes to the extinction of glaciers, threatening water access for rural and Indigenous communities. Through ethnographic research in the Bolivian Andes in 2022, including 45 semi-structured interviews in Indigenous Aymara communities in the Milluni Valley at an elevation of 4300 meters, surrounded by glaciated peaks of up to 6,089 meters, we found a society and landscape in flux in response to glacier extinction. The Milluni Valley has been a contested landscape of conquest, extraction, and tourism in its history since colonialism. New lands are revealed as the glaciers recede, offering new opportunities for grazing, tourism, economic extraction, and religious practice, and exacerbating community tensions around access to these sites. Religions and traditional ecological practices support socio-economic responses to a changing environment.
This paper excavates nuclear dystopian hauntings amidst the Diné as a palimpsest of ecological and cultural devastation, and through the exploration of Coyóte onto-philosophies *as* interdisciplinary assemblages, I seek to enunciate possible futures for human, non-human, and planetary kin. Diné Bikéyah is filled with nuclear ghosts: the result of the first atomic bomb at White Sands Trinity Atomic Testing Site and the subsequent Federal mining of uranium on Navajo land. In the dystopian reality of the 21st century, I follow the Diné narratives of *Ma’ii*’s antics to construe a speculative onto-philosophy of Coyóte activism and resilience amidst ruin to cast a new apocalyptic *of* settler-imperial structures. In this paper, Rez-Dogs—as the modern descendant of Coyóte—are imbued with the potential for traversing spiritual and physical worlds—they are ciphers of imaginative revolution, engaging haunted matters and matter, and instigating new and necessary ends-of-worlds for settler-colonial necro(nuclear)politics.
The Republic of Ecuador and the Plurinational State of Bolivia—the only countries in the world to affirm plurinational identities in their Constitutions—have codified environmental protection and sociobiocentrism. Until now, the contemporary dynamics of Catholics and other major religious actors advancing decolonial possibilities for the protection and survival of ecological cosmologies—including treating Indigenous, ecofeminist, Afro-Descendant, and other communities as dialogue partners to resist mining, violations of ethno-territorial rights, and exploitation of food security—have yet to be researched alongside the recent liberative-theological stances to these cosmologies in Ecuador and Bolivia that have advocated—albeit to differing degrees of potency—the environmental protection and sociobiocentrism that these plurinational states promise in their Constitutions. This essay analyzes these relations, proposing the following question to examine the shaping of decolonial possibilities in plurinationalism: How does a decolonial stance in liberative-theological thinking impact contemporary relationships between lived cosmological spaces and environmental-sociobiocentric liberation?
Analysts, activists, and government agencies increasingly emphasize the value of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) for mitigating and adapting to ecological crises. This emphasis merits praise for amplifying Indigenous voices. However, numerous colonialist perils attend such turns to TEK; this paper describes two. Building on the work of Laurelyn Whitt, I argue first that uncritical turns to TEK can enact ecocolonialism through the unjust extraction and commodification of Indigenous knowledge, thereby actively exacerbating the settler-colonial status quo. Second, I argue, following Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, that such turns to TEK can cast settlers as Indigenous allies while obfuscating the colonial relationship and Indigenous decolonial goals. If the turn to TEK aims to both help the world to manage ecological crises while supporting climate justice for Indigenous people, then such risks should be explicitly articulated and opposed.