Perspectives of Environmental Justice from Indigenous Peoples of Latin America: A Relational Indigenous Environmental Justice

Introduction

In Latin America, indigenous peoples' demands have revolved around political and territorial autonomy and self-determination. However, these have recently evolved to demands for environmental self-determination, due to processes of discursive, symbolic, and de facto appropriation of their bodies, territories, and natures. The current dynamics related with scenarios of creation, appropriation, and globalization of natures, led by states and other actors, have caused in indigenous territories transformations in identity (gender and ethnicity), global–local economic relationships, internal and external territorial order, new environmental conditions, state's policies, and armed conflict and violence. These situations have led indigenous peoples to propose new demands and rights, which call for a cultural vision of environmental justice that includes indigenous peoples' rights and nonhumans' rights under their own conceptions of ancestral law and justice. In this sense, what is understood as environmental self-determination refers to indigenous notions of justice that are based on a sense of responsibility and reciprocity with humans and nonhumans and therefore imply specific actions and practices that imply interactions of the diverse actors with superimposed territorialities. Under these perspectives, environmental justice should be understood as an ethical, political, territorial, and reciprocal action with the nonhumans from indigenous territorial and cultural principles. Building on indigenous peoples' identity and political dynamics leads to what I call a relational indigenous environmental justice, which expands our notions and understandings of environmental justice.

Thus, indigenous peoples propose a notion of justice, which could be considered environmental justice as established, but is in fact based on other valuations and rights that involve territory, culture, and nonhumans. In fact, indigenous peoples' perspective differs from mainstream environmental justice debates related to recognition of rights, distribution, participation and capabilities, environmental injustices, environmental conflicts, social movements, and local confrontations. ¹ However, the indigenous movements have made connections and articulations with these concepts but simultaneously drawing upon their own different and distinctive perspectives.

For these reasons, rather than presenting the similarities and/or distinctions with the different approaches of environmental justice, I will present indigenous peoples' proposals that look for justice for their territories, humans, and nonhumans. Indigenous peoples' perceptions of justice are based on the following notions and demands: putting relational ontologies at the center of a rights-based approach to consider nonhumans' rights, including to not forget the implications of epistemic violence and ethno- and ecocide generated by the current global environmental geopolitics of knowledge and economic dynamics; proposing other notions of justice by including territory and “nature” as “victims” of processes of extractions and destruction of environment; considering historical inequalities that were respondent to modern dual conceptions, which were implemented since the conquest and colonial processes; confronting the extractivist processes that erased legal, environmental, and cultural rights previously recognized; and demanding other perspectives of environmental justice in which humans, nonhumans, and the territory are included as living beings and as political actors.

In Latin America, there are ∼45,000,000 persons who belong to 826 indigenous peoples. ² In this context and given the cultural and historical diversity, the idea of environmental justice from indigenous perspectives is difficult to generalize. Nevertheless, there are crosscutting debates, to which I will refer, that have emerged in my experience of over 30 years of working with indigenous peoples in Colombia and in other parts of Latin America, which can be considered a general demand of environmental justice to confront extractivisms. Arising from my ethnographic experience and in dialogue with indigenous peoples' leaders and intellectuals, as well as theoretical perspectives from Latin America, I propose the conceptualization of relational indigenous environmental justice as a way to put in discussion indigenous peoples' perspectives with general visions of environmental justice. To do that I will develop the implications of extractivisms and the political and environmental responses of indigenous peoples, as well as their proposals around environmental justice.

Global Environmental Transformations Versus Local Responses

In Latin America, debates on transformations and environmental crises have been related to environmental inequalities and extraction processes initiated since the conquest and colonial period. Current debates on extractive processes have become important given the increase of them, with the following implications: processes that involve territorial control, appropriation of local resources, displacement of people out of their territories, land and green grabbing, and violent conflict, among others. This culminates in what can be termed extractivisms, which are associated with programs related to climate change ³ and extraction processes linked to mining, hydrocarbons, water, or agribusinesses, among others, resulting in environmental degradation and other sociopolitical and cultural impacts and constructing what I call scenarios of environmental and territorial appropriation, dispossession, and confrontation. ⁴ These practices are also linked to cultural and social implications, leading to increased socioenvironmental inequalities.

Processes related to climate change (green markets), mining, and water imply a complex relationship between extractivisms and indigenous peoples. Similarly, there are increasingly more conflicts and mobilizations around deforestation, illegal mining, and biodiversity loss, and the effects of climate variability in indigenous peoples' territories.

These scenarios transform and reconfigure indigenous peoples' territorial, cultural, identity and environmental, as well as, economic dynamics. Meanwhile, the state (as a political actor that has differentiate presence and actions according to each country), is a principal actor in constructing ideas of territory and nature, and in generating territorial confrontations. ⁵ It is related to transformations of legal conceptions of property, rights, and frontiers of local and transnational actors, affecting indigenous rights and territories. Similarly, these scenarios overlap with indigenous territories, creating multiple territorialities with the resulting of diverse ideas of control and ownership of land and natures.

However, these dynamics have as a counterpart the confrontations and collective resistance of indigenous peoples who demand justice in the struggle for the recognition of their rights and change the social and environmental inequalities. In these contexts, the demands of environmental self-determination of indigenous peoples enter into a discussion with extractivisms and all the forms of appropriation of their territories.

For example, for the Misak people, ⁶ their own justice and the exercise of their rights are an integral part of their autonomy, hence they affirm a nonaccess to their [“nature”] and territories. The Misak people demand recognition of their rights by the Derecho mayor (Ancestral Law or their Own Law), and being a nation with their own ancestral authorities. In a cultural declaration, they state that their demand of autonomy and self-determination is to “to guarantee our existence, develop our autonomy, recover and strengthen our cultural identity, recover and expand our ancestral territory, [and] to defend with honor and dignity [nature].” ⁷

Regarding climate change policies, in particular and environmental ones in general, indigenous peoples have demanded recognition of their ways of thinking about environmental issues and their rights. They are demanding the recognition of other ways of producing knowledge based on their ontologies. There are relational ontologies in which “humans and non-humans (the organic, the non-organic, and the supernatural or spiritual) are integral part of these worlds in their multiples interrelations.” ⁸ These imply to recognize that there are other conceptions of rights for nonhumans that include territory and all beings.

Indigenous peoples demand for environmental self-determination, this implies raising new demands of rights, cultural, territorial, and environmental confrontations, that call for a cultural vision of environmental justice, including the rights of indigenous peoples and the nonhumans, under their conceptions of ancestral law and justice. In this sense, environmental self-determination refers to indigenous notions of environmental justice that come from a sense of responsibility and interrelations between human and nonhumans; therefore, they involve specific actions and practices in specific areas in coordination with various actors with overlap territorialities. Thus, indigenous peoples propose an environmental justice based on other valuations and rights relating to territory, culture, and the nonhumans.

These perspectives are very different from the mainstream concepts of environmental justice. In fact, since the 1970s, environmental justice movements have generated diverse perspectives in their analysis of environmental inequalities related to distribution, access, control, rights, and decision making according to class, race, ethnicity, and gender, as well as the causes and environmental effects of, for example, contamination and commodification of nature, due to global and national economic relationships and broader structural processes. In the same way, environmental justice has put in the center of the discussion the cause of these inequalities and the way to confront them. The principal causes for the social inequalities imply to expand the conceptions of justice and the process of recognition of rights to include environmental differences. In the same way, some scholars called the attention of necessity of expanding the notion of environmental inequalities to include not only historical environmental inequalities ⁹ but also cultural, territorial, and epistemological differences. ¹⁰ Likewise, other scholars claim to expand the notion of justice to an ethical perspective with the environment. ¹¹

However, most of these debates relating to socioenvironmental inequalities are constructed from the point of view of dual western ontology relating to notions of justice, individual rights, and social and cultural rights, and also include a singular understanding of nature or the environment, as well as a territorial dimension, and from specific geopolitics of knowledge that legitimates explicit historical productions and trajectories. In relation to notions of nature, they seem to be considered as a part of human realm. Moreover, the notion that interrelated the causes and effects of environmental inequalities is based on a specific notion of territory (nation-state, which is and sometimes expanded to a global notion or a planetary based on the interconnection or scales ranging local–national–global), but it is thought in one dimension: horizontal, and sometimes vertical, when power is imposed (control of space o frontiers or the extraction of resources from subsoil as legitimate power of the state). ¹² These imply the idea of absolute territoriality. ¹³

These situations imply considering historical inequalities that were imposed on indigenous peoples, respondent to modern dual conceptions. In fact, unequal relationships based on dual categories were imposed since the conquest and colonial processes. These dual categories and their consequent relationships of power have been confronted by decolonial scholars ¹⁴ and indigenous intellectuals. ¹⁵

In the case of extractivisms, as we saw before, indigenous conceptions are not considered or included generating an epistemic violence against them. However, at the same time, there is violence against the nonhumans and their lives. These situations allow indigenous peoples to propose other notions of justice by including territory and nature as “victims” of process of extractions and destruction of environment. They are also confronting the current extractivist processes related to climate change, water, or mining. These economic processes misrecognized legal, environmental, and cultural rights previously recognized by national and international policies and declarations such as the Convention concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries −169, 1989, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 2007. This misrecognition allows international economic actors the appropriation of, symbolic and de facto, indigenous territories.

In other contexts, some authors have been questioning the implications of climate change and are reflected on the meaning of environmental justice to indigenous peoples, as Tsosie states ¹⁶ “justice can only be achieved by an affirmative commitment to protect indigenous peoples within their traditional lands. This is the type of justice envisioned by advocates of an indigenous right to environmental self-determination.”

In a similar way, there are dissenting voices among the scientific experts, which suggest other positions on climate change, extractivisms, and local developments, ¹⁷ and question extractivisms and their generation of inequalities. In the same way, local social movements have some local proposals, such as indigenous peoples, that give rise to demands for other relationships with nature, and other visions of environmental justice.

For these reasons, social, environmental, and justice movements from Latin America, called the environmentalism of the poor, ¹⁸ have been demanding the recognition of historical inequalities. Specifically, indigenous peoples' movements demand the recognition of their rights and position other notions of environmental justice. They arise from other ontologies, notions of nature, justice, and rights, and conceptions of territory.

I want to highlight here how from the perspectives of indigenous peoples from Latin America, it is necessary to rethink the meaning of environmental justice and to expand the notions to include new approaches to understand not only historical socioenvironmental inequalities but also the relationship among humans and nonhumans and territory. The proposals of indigenous peoples are based on self-determination, autonomy, and cultural governability, understood as a political strategy. These are also tied to particular knowledges and environmental management strategies, such as the recovery of seeds, food sovereignty, and territorial control, as well as their own economic production, all as strategies of cultural resistance and recuperation of the practices. All this helps to position local knowledges and legitimize them as environmental authorities in collective territories. Thus, their demands are related to territories, specific locations, and localized knowledges, based on other perspectives on nonhumans and on spatialities, due to the fact that they not only address access, control, and effects on territory but also other ways of being and living in different scales, following their notions of justice.

Conclusion

Indigenous peoples confront and oppose projects and programs, which establish inequalities and exclusions, according to their view of environmental issues, through actions and demonstrations that tend to dismantle these projects. Similarly, there are resistances, proposals, and alternative forms of relationships with the nonhumans in their territories, which focus on life and the right to be and to live in their territories. Thus, they are based on the positioning of the relationships between the territory and the nonhuman, under the vision of environmental, territorial, and political self-determination against the (national and international) attempts of appropriation and dispossession. ¹⁹

An example is the ways in which indigenous peoples construct other worlds based on various relationships between humans and between them and nonhumans. ²⁰ The perspectives of indigenous peoples provide a standpoint that allows both the critiques of development and proposals from local processes of interaction with the nonhumans, which have some peculiarities in terms of spatial and temporal processes. On the contrary, what is understood by nature is redefined especially in contexts where the material (land, forests, species) is coproduced; new analytical processes are generated. For indigenous peoples, articulations and connections between humans and nonhumans are thought to be a continuous process with no separation. For some cultures, it is a permanent transformation from one to another, and all beings have a point of view, ²¹ and according to this, different connotations. They are also beings that transmute and transform. Everything happens in a space, but it itself changes, since there is a vertical and horizontal geopolitics of what is conceived as territory. Under these perspectives, the territory is alive, and although the control can be vertical or horizontal, beings are in constant interaction in temporal dimensions.

In this contentious cultural and political arena, indigenous strategies for environmental and climate justice have emerged. They propose spatial, environmental, and territorial alternatives based on cultural principles around five axes: the positioning of other relationships with the nonhuman (relational natures), horizontal and vertical territorial politics (relational spacialities), relationships between men and women under other categories of gender, life practices based on their knowledge, and environmental autonomy and self-determination.

To rethink environmental justice, as well as its relationship with indigenous peoples, it becomes vital to reconsider the global economic, environmental, political, legal, and cultural dimensions in local contexts, and their interrelationship with the global–local transformations. Similarly, rethinking environmental geopolitics is necessary: knowledges, representations, and relationships with the nonhumans. Therefore, in the reconfiguration of the perspectives of environmental justice, four dimensions of analysis are proposed: reversing inequalities based on the dual notions of culture and nature; rethinking global environmental and climate change policies; reframing legal issues and rights recognized in international and local–national contexts to include all beings, and inclusion of cultural demands and diverse perspectives.

All the above dimensions lead us to the recognition of environmental self-determination, based on the demands for autonomy and cultural governability. Such recognition is linked to knowledges and environmental local management strategies that position indigenous knowledges and legitimize them as environmental authorities in collective territories. Thus, environmental justice is related to territories, specific locations, and localized knowledge.

Indigenous peoples' proposals are based on the concept of circulation of life, which means the continuity of life related to their territories. As a central axis, they posit the defense of life, starting from its practices and male–female relationships, and the relationships between human and nonhumans. Similarly, they propose the defense of their everyday subsistence activities, of food sovereignty, and of their livelihoods.

Under these perspectives, environmental justice should be understood as an ethical, political, territorial, and reciprocal action with the nonhumans from indigenous territorial and cultural principles. All this according to their identity and political dynamics, so that it leads to what I call a relational indigenous environmental justice, which involves expanding our notions of environmental justice. According to this perspective, the territory enters into the dynamics of interaction as a living entity, as well as the nonhumans. For all beings have to be recognized, their rights to be and to exist, and in relation to the human, which allows the circulation of life.

In this way, indigenous peoples are putting their notions within global political arenas, based on relational ontologies, as a basic premise to understand the reciprocity, complementarity, and connections among all beings. This perspective implies also another conception of rights to consider nonhumans' rights. This right implies notions of being, existence, and feeling, which expand the idea of recognition and participation by including nonhumans and the territory as living beings with feeling, emotions, and as political agents.

Based on all their cultural perspectives, indigenous peoples are demanding not only recognition, participation, and historical reparation of their cultural, environmental, and legal misrecognition of their rights, and also to position other knowledges and notions of territory, but also the responsibility of all humans for the circulation of life, which allows the continuity of spirituality and materiality and guaranties the humans' and nonhumans' existence.