In June 2021, this online conference was hosted by Stockholm University. It was a great space to dialogue! My presentation was entitled "'Imagine Otherwise': Protecting and Doing Justice to Indigenous Land and Life in Mapuche Poetics."
Frame from the video-poem "Musgo-Agua" by Mapuche poet Leonel Lienlaf and Del Aire Editores.
I'm currently working on a book chapter where I develop the ideas I presented in this workshop. The current version is focused on poetic micropolitics of justice, land ethics, and terricide as a result of settler-colonial laws.
This is the abstract of my talk:
The Indigenous peoples of what is today known as South America have been thought of as part of a savage natural environment by European invaders and settler-colonial societies throughout history (Ulloa 2004; Jáuregui 2008). This stereotype constitutes a political, scientific, and literary trope utilized to make claims about Indigenous peoples’ inferiority to European civilization and to the criollo (European descent) elites, while appropriating their lands, knowledge, spirituality, culture, and even their bodies (Huinca Piutrin 2013; Boccara and Ayala 2011). Contrastingly, in present day “South America,” non-Indigenous environmental activists join Indigenous peoples in their fight for land, waters, and the wellbeing of entire ecosystems. However, non-Indigenous literary critics have not sufficiently stressed how entangled socio-environmental detriment is with settler colonialism and anti-Indigenous white supremacy. My paper centers on human-nonhuman relations in Mapuche poetics in order to highlight Mapuche ways of contesting the “systematic extermination of all forms of life” by settler-colonial States and corporations; what activist, writer, and weichafe (fighter) Moira Millan (2020) calls “terricide.” In the contemporary literary works of Roxana Miranda Rupailaf, Leonel Lienlaf, Adriana Paredes Pinda, Faumelisa Manquepillan, and Francisco Vargas Huaiquimilla, I analyze the micropolitics that protect and do justice to Mapuche lands and its diverse lives, from listening to silenced and endangered vegetal voices to offering one’s dead body as food for the earth. I argue that the works of these Mapuche poets emerge from a code of ethics that does not yield to the settler-colonial justice beliefs and judicial systems of the national States. Therefore, reading nature in these poetics through the lens of decolonization is necessary to “imagine otherwise,” as Cherokee scholar Daniel Heath Justice (2018) says, and to plan a future outside the destruction of life.