Making Space for Feminist Decolonial Geographies of Peace with the Shuar in the Ecuadorian Amazon: A Case for ‘Cuerpo Territorio’

ABSTRACT

This article follows urgent calls from peace and conflict studies and geographies of peace to be decolonised. Our study shows that for the Shuar communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon, the concept of peace is quite different from that of the Ecuadorian state. This study demonstrates how ‘Western’ centric definitions of the term are rooted in colonial logic and power structures. In this article, we explore what it could mean to decolonise theories and spaces for peace. Through encounters with Indigenous Shuar understandings of peace in a community-based participatory research project, we highlight the plurality of possibilities for the term. Using a decolonial lens we conclude with a call to action for scholars in those disciplines to engage with the Feminist Indigenous Latin American and Caribbean methodology and epistemology ‘cuerpo territorio’ (body-territory) to understand territory from the perspective of Abya Yala, that sees women’s bodies as the ‘first territory’. We argue that ‘cuerpo territorio’ is well suited to do decolonial work and help us step outside a Westernized understanding of peace and make strides towards the pluriverse. While typically this Indigenous concept has been used to better understand violence surrounding extraction sites, we propose that engaging with the methodology will prove useful for theoretical findings in spatial understandings of peace and its praxis.

Acknowledgements

This work is only possible because of the invitation to create this partnership between the authors to do this work. As a community-based project, this research lives in both inspiration and commitment to being a relationship with Martina (the PhD researcher) and the Shuar community of Buena Esperanza, the community advisory group collectively named the ‘Shuar Kakaram de Buena Esperanza.’ We would also like to thank the Inisha Nunka Foundation, who first invited Martina to undertake her doctoral research in partnership with the community. Additionally, we would like to thank the support of the HEC lab, and Martina’s supervisor Dr. Heather Castleden. As well as, the International Development Research Fund of Canada, who support this work under Grant 109418-021.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Positionality

It is important to note that Martina is a non-Indigenous white female settler scholar from the Global North from Tkaronto ‘the place in the water where the trees are standing’, Treaty 13 territory. The home to many nations, including the Mississauga’s of the Credit, the Anishinaabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat Peoples, in what is now home to many diverse First Nations, Inuit, and Metis. She is a second-generation Canadian whose grandparents were born in Finland and Hungary. She has been privileged to grow up as guest on these lands and have been invited to do her Ph.D. research in partnership with the Shuar peoples in their ancestral homes of what is now known as the Ecuadorian Amazon. These manuscripts have been co-authored through a community-based research advisory committee, collectively named Shuar Kakaram de Buena Esperanza (or the Strong Shuar from Buena Esperanza Community). Honouring the principle of ‘nothing about us without us’ (Marsden, Star, and Smylie 2020, para. 6).

Notes

1. Indigenous peoples definition: The statement of coverage of the ILO Convention No. 169 - article 1 (1) (b) – identifies indigenous peoples as being ‘peoples in independent countries who are regarded as indigenous on account of their descent from populations which inhabited the country, or a geographical region to which the country belongs, at the time of conquest or colonisation or the establishment of present states boundaries and who, irrespective of their legal status, retain some or all of their own social, economic, cultural and political institutions’ (International Labour Organization ILO 1989).

2. This was the original wording for the protest by CONAIE. ‘Sí a la vida, no a la minería. Somos guardianes del agua, de los territorios y de la naturaleza’. (Please note that all the translations were made by the authors).

3. Note that Ecuador ratified Convention No. 169 on 15 May 1998 and it has been ratified in the country since 15 May 1999. Articles 6 and 16 should already guarantee Indigenous peoples in the country Free, and Prior Informed Consent in matters regarding themselves and the land (International Labour Organization 2001).

4. Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014) work ‘Epistemologies of the South’ defined the term: The energy that propels diatopical hermeneutics comes from a destabilizing image that I designate epistemicide, the murder of knowledge. Unequal exchanges among cultures have always implied the death of the knowledge of the subordinated culture, hence the death of the social groups that possible it. In the most extreme cases, such as that of European expansion, epistemecide was one of the conditions of genocide’ (Sousa Santos 2014, 92).

5. Robert Nixon coined the term ‘slow violence’ to mean ‘violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence typically not viewed as violence at all’ (Nixon 2011, 2).

6. Mario Blaser’s definition of ‘ontological conflict’ describes it within the hierarchy of knowledge prescribed by schools of thought around modernity that would define them: ‘conflicting stories about “what is there” and how they constitute realities in power-charged fields’ (2013, 548).

7. The globalisation of the world is, in the first place the culmination of a process that began with the constitution of America and world capitalism as a Euro-centred colonial/modern world power. One of the foundations of that pattern of power was the social classification of the world population upon the base of the idea of race, a mental construct that expresses colonial experience and that pervades the most important dimensions of world power, including its specific rationality: Eurocentrism (Quijano 2000, 215).

8. The dictionary of human geography defines ontology as ‘the study and description of “being”, or that which can be said to exist in the world’ (Rogers, Castree, and Kitchin 2013, 511).

9. ‘Buen Vivir is parallel to many other indigenous ontologies and social constructs, in Bolivia and Ecuador also known as sumak kawsay (Kichwa) and suma qamana (Aymara). The Mapuche, the Guarani and Kuna have parallel concepts as do the South Africans, with ubuntu, and the svadeshi, swaraj and apargrama in India’ (Acosta 2018, 132).

10. The word for non-Shuar outsiders encroaching on their territories.

11. The study of the more than human world can be consideration of relational approaches to plant that seek to decentre humans from the anthropocentric worldview (Atchison & Phillips 2020). ‘These more-than-human geographies – also sometimes called post humanist, multispecies, or multinatural – set out to understand how plants and humans affect one another and more recently, the lived experiences of plants. It sets out to understand how plants and human affect one another’ (Atchison & Phillips 2020, 168). Thinking about how human societies and politics take shape in relation to nonhuman creatures and forces, and the ethical implications of these relations.

12. It is born from the embodied experience of women that seeks to dispel the myth of separation between body and territory. Cuerpo-territorio aims to relate ‘gender-based violence and gender resistance to the extractive industry’ (Zaragocin and Caretta 2021, 1509).

13. Epi-ontology we mean to assert that is both concerned with the methods of investigating truths as far as it is about what is true.

14. In the 2020 compilation book Pluriverse: A post-development dictionary, the pluriverse is defined as: ‘What has been missing is a broad transcultural compilation of concrete concepts, worldviews, and practices from around the world, challenging the modernist ontology of universalism in favour of a multiplicity of possible worlds’ (Kothari et al. 2019, xvii).

15. Name for the most powerful Shuar god, and the power this spirit gives you.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the International Development Research Centre [109418-021].