Keeping Yasuní Oil in the Ground: Contesting Epistemic Extractivism in the Amazon

• In Event: The Postcolonial Politics of Land

Abstract

In 2008, Ecuador became the first country in the world to grant “nature” Constitutional rights. Constitutional articles outlined the “rights of nature” through conceptual buttressing in Indigenous (kichwa, more precisely) cosmopologies reflecting Andean Indigenous conceptions of nature (Pachamama) and ecological relationships (sumak kawsay). In the decade that followed, by contrast, government after government pursued the intensification of extractive activities expanding oil production and new frontiers into hydroelectric and mining. In response, anti-extractive movements and actors emerged. This paper examines this movement, focusing on the work of several actors and their accompanying campaigns and discourses: Yasunidos and Wao Resistencia, and Napo Resiste.


Yasunidos came to prominence in 2014 as key actors in articulating wide-based protests and resistance against proposals to begin oil production in Yasuní national park in the Amazon, one of the most biodiverse regions in the world and ancestral territory of the Waorani peoples, including three uncontacted groups. Yasunidos also first proposed that keeping oil in the ground become a public referendum item for the country to decide, a proposal that despite garnering the required signatures the government of then President Rafael Correa rejected. After 10 years of legal battles, on May 9. 2023, courts ruled that signatures were valid and a public referendum could take place. On August 20th of this year, the referendum took place and won with a 60% margin, successfully catalyzed through a broad-based Sí al Yasuní campaign that included anti-mining movements, and activists from Indigenous movements such as Wao Resistance and Indigenous-led ecological movements like Napo Resiste.


In this paper, I examine the work of Yasunidos and the campaign for the public referendum to engage with the issue of decolonizing the appropriation of Indigenous cosmovisions to support extractive projects. Bringing together Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s concept of “epistemic extractivism” with Marisol de la Cadena’s “Indigenous cosmopolitics,” I view the political work of these actors in contesting the ontological politics and epistemological extractivism of the state as crucial for severing fossil capitalism’s logics. I also raise important concerns that emerge in building alliances and bringing together larger, non-Indigenous publics in support of anti-extractive politics on the basis of representations of Amazonian Indigeneity that can both visibilize and also occlude the lived realities of Indigenous peoples in extractive zones.

Author

• Angelica Maria Bernal, University of Massachusetts, Amherst