The central theme of this proposal is the agency of Indigenous peoples in epistemic-territorial disputes in the region. This entails broadening the thematic focus of the Working Group on Indigenous Peoples and Extractive Projects, based on reflection among academic researchers from diverse disciplines and countries in the region and representatives of Indigenous peoples who have participated in the Working Group. We recognize that, despite the structural factors that coloniality/modernity has imposed on their lives, these peoples protect their territories, reproduce their epistemes and ways of life, and re-exist (not only resisting but also producing their modes of existence) according to their worldviews and epistemologies. They also develop strategies that include dialogue with academia in order to, as the Kuna say, "understand the movement of the serpent, without being one." In this way, their agency in territorial disputes is epistemic, as are their relationships with the non-human environment (nature, territory).

We use the concept of "indigenous peoples" in a broad sense, including the so-called original peoples or those comparable to indigenous peoples, peasant peoples, indigenous nationalities, tribal peoples, Afro-descendants and others under which they may recognize themselves.

Indigenous peoples, as recognized by international bodies, represent approximately 10% of the region's total population; their territories cover about one-fifth of the total land area (FAO and FILAC, 2021); of these, one-third lack recognition of their collective rights (FAO and FILAC, 2021). Indigenous territories are impacted by extractive and development projects, the imposition of state political and administrative structures, as well as the climate crisis and other disasters.

From the epistemic perspectives of Indigenous peoples, territory (including the maritime territory of coastal communities) holds a central place in their identities and the possibilities for the continuity of their ways of life and worldviews; these are territories of life, not "natural resources." Their defense is a defense of life itself. In this defense, they coordinate internally, with other peoples, and with other actors at various scales, from the local level to United Nations agencies. They formulate life plans, develop de facto autonomies (like the Zapatistas) or in accordance with constitutional provisions, or under forms of voluntary isolation; they participate in governance spaces and confront development or extractive projects.

We live in times of civilizational crisis (Lander and Arconada, 2019) that manifests itself in multiple dimensions of social and ecological life. The ecosystems that sustain life are damaged; the lives of countless species are endangered, including that of the sophisticated human primate. Social inequalities and violence are increasing across the planet, and wars are becoming ever more prevalent. It has been said that we live in the Anthropocene, a geological era marked by human activity; more precisely, it is the Capitalocene, a product of capitalism and not of humanity in general.

The defense of Indigenous territories is fueled by women's agency (Burguete, 2021; Ulloa, 2020; Basile, 2017; Green, 2017). These are "everyday practices as political strategies for the defense of and from the body" (Ulloa, 2020, p. 11) that reflect the decision-making processes of Indigenous peoples, challenging patriarchal structures and hegemonic categories of political participation in academia and international organizations. In this context, new relationships between academia and Indigenous communities are emerging through joint events and publications (Bulletin No. 3 of the Working Group on Indigenous Peoples, Autonomies, and Collective Rights; Ulloa, 2020).

Disputes over territories also have implications for the health of communities. Haro and Martínez (2019) document how a dam project in the territory of the Guarijío people mobilized the community in defense of their ethnobotanical knowledge and forms a central part of their defense strategies.

Extractivism in its various forms (mining, energy, forestry, and others) is one of the main factors disrupting Indigenous territories and is at the root of coloniality in the region. The rise in commodity prices between 2003 and 2013, coupled with the implementation of the Washington Consensus and the "commodity consensus" by governments, attracted increased foreign investment and a subsequent surge in extractive projects. Indigenous communities were among the most affected, generating processes of commodification of nature (Göbel and Ulloa, 2014; Ulloa and Romero-Toledo, 2018) and its integration into the circuits of the global market dominated by the Global North. Under mechanisms such as the development narrative, the reduction of the standards of the right to consultation and prior, free and informed consent of indigenous peoples to mere formal procedures, the criminalization of social protest, the murders of defenders of the territory in the absence of the State (or its own complicity), extractivism has remained one of the main economic orientations of the countries of the region.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted and deepened the conditions of poverty and exclusion in which most Indigenous peoples live. It has also exposed the vulnerability of economies to the volatility of commodity prices (World Bank, 2020a, 2020b, and 2021). At the beginning of the pandemic, Svampa (2020) proposed the need for a new post-pandemic “ecosocial and economic pact,” and Hidalgo (2020) proposed a post-oil and post-extractive future for Ecuador that seemed applicable to the entire region. However, governments are protecting extractive projects, defining them as essential activities and as pillars of post-pandemic economic recovery. The pandemic has signified more the consolidation of the “commodity consensus” than a turning point for a new civilizational framework.

The pandemic highlighted inequalities in access to drinking water, but it also favored the revitalization of traditional medicinal practices and the exercise of certain degrees of territorial autonomy that were more a product of the weakness of the coverage of public health services - and in many cases of their monocultural responses - than measures of recognition of indigenous self-determination (GT CLACSO Indigenous Peoples and Extractive Projects, 2020).

The current narrative of “green” capitalism is being presented as a deepening of ethnocidal and epistemicidal extractivism (Agostini, Nasirov, and Silva, 2016; Dunlap, 2017; Magaña, 2020; Zarate, Patiño, and Fraga, 2019). So-called “sustainable energies” are pushing to extract lithium, whose deposits are frequently located in Indigenous territories.

Extractive practices don't operate solely on nature; they also affect Indigenous epistemologies. Both are relevant to this proposal. We are concerned with the appropriation of Indigenous peoples' cultural heritage by the State or private entities, as well as the epistemic extractivism reproduced by academia, which treats Indigenous peoples as objects, extracts knowledge, fails to contribute to or compensate the communities for the knowledge generated, and imposes conceptual categories. We also recognize another academic approach, one that develops practices of epistemic justice from perspectives of knowledge co-production and collaborative research. We consider it crucial to work alongside Indigenous peoples to implement mechanisms for determining what research is conducted in their territories, based on principles of epistemic sovereignty (Quidel, 2016) or epistemic justice.

On a theoretical level, this proposal brings together diverse critical perspectives from the social sciences of the region and from Indigenous peoples. On the one hand, we situate ourselves within the epistemological and ethical-political proposals of the "ecologies of knowledge" and the Epistemologies of the South (de Sousa Santos, 2013). Since the work developed by the Working Group on Indigenous Peoples and Extractive Projects 2019-2022, at least two epistemes (from the South)—the Western episteme of Latin American critical social sciences and the epistemes of Indigenous peoples—have been in dialogue to co-produce situated knowledge. This dialogue draws on proposals for dialogues of knowledge, intercultural and interscientific dialogues (Delgado and Escobar, 2006), epistemic sovereignty (Quidel, 2016), and self-determination in research. also of decolonizing methodologies (Linda Tuhiwai Smith, 2016) and indigenous epistemologies in research (Kovach, 2010). From these perspectives, we recognize indigenous peoples as subjects of knowledge, with epistemologies, cultures, or worldviews through which they establish a relationship with the non-human environment (nature, territory) (Göbel and Ulloa, 2014), which is also recognized for its capacity to protect the environment—vital knowledge for thinking about a new civilizational matrix.

On the other hand, we engage in dialogue with the current diagnosis that we are in a civilizational crisis (Lander and Arconada, 2013)—of which extractivism is one of the central vectors—with the theory of extractivism (Gudynas, 2021; Svampa, 2019), and with the contributions of Latin American political ecology, such as the debates on the commons and the rights of nature. We assume as our epistemological starting point that Indigenous peoples reproduce their own relationships with the non-human environment—nature, territory—based on their worldviews or epistemes. Nature, therefore, is not merely "natural resources" but territories of life; defending territory is defending life. From this epistemological position, it is necessary to challenge analytical perspectives pointed out by Gudynas (2021) for whom epistemic extractivism is not part of what is analyzed by the theory of extractivism, a distinction not shared by indigenous peoples' organizations under whose experience the dispossession of nature/territory is part of the same process as the dispossession of their epistemes (epistemicide).

It is necessary to develop perspectives for analyzing territorial governance and extractivism that incorporate colonial coordinates and take indigenous peoples as a starting point. Along these lines are the contributions of various indigenous peoples in the region: the Mapuche in Chile and Argentina, the Quichua and Aymara in the Andes, the Amazonian peoples and Quilombola communities in Brazil, the indigenous peoples in the Cauca Valley and many other regions of Colombia, the Kuna people in Panama, the peoples of the Mayan cultural stock in Guatemala and in the Zapatista Caracoles region, the Nahuatl of El Salvador, the Oaxacan peoples and their concept of Communality, the Nahua Maseual of the Sierra Norte of Puebla, the Purépecha in Michoacán, the Yaqui, Wixaritari, Guarijío and Rarámuri of northern Mexico, the Amuzgo of Guerrero, the indigenous peoples of Canada and many others.

Thus, extractive projects transform territories of life into "natural resources," the circularity of life is transformed into the integration of the territories of life of indigenous peoples into global markets as "commodities" or "capitalization of nature," and the power mechanisms that ensure extractivism are based on laws, procedures, and institutions of colonial origin, such as the distinction between subsoil rights (state property) and surface rights (property rights, usufruct, occupation) under the assumption that the subsoil is not part of the territoriality of indigenous peoples, and therefore remains outside their rights. We have no doubt that these analytical perspectives need to be deepened from coordinates that recognize indigenous epistemes and read extractivism in a colonial key, even more so when we see that the pandemic produced an accentuation of the "commodities consensus", so we can expect socio-environmental conflicts, human rights violations, now under narratives of "sustainable development", "green energies", "sustainable mining", among others.

Incorporating the analytical framework of epistemic extractivism into the field of territorial disputes reveals the asymmetries, injustices, and historical inertia within the epistemic sphere. Educational institutions—and universities in particular—are permeated by the coloniality of knowledge, defined by Catherine Walsh as “the repression of other forms of knowledge production (that are not white, European, and ‘scientific’), elevating a Eurocentric perspective of knowledge and denying the intellectual legacy of Indigenous and Black peoples, reducing them to primitive based on the basic and ‘natural’ category of race” (Walsh, 2005: 19). “The coloniality of knowledge,” Eduardo Restrepo tells us, “is constituted by a pattern of global classification and hierarchization of knowledge, where some forms appear as the embodiment of authentic and relevant knowledge, while other forms of knowledge are expropriated, devalued, and silenced, to such an extent that they cease to be knowledge and appear instead as ignorance or superstition.” (Restrepo, 2020: 13).

This Working Group will incorporate the theoretical debates of Indigenous researchers who question the epistemological, ethical, and political aspects of academic production, as these are part of the colonial project that conceives of the Indigenous subject as a mere object or informant from whom knowledge is "extracted" and Western categories are imposed (Nahuelpán, 2013; Leyva et al., 2018; Antileo, Cárcamo-Huechante, Calfío, and Huinca-Piutrín, 2015), potentially leading to "epistemicide" (De Sousa Santos, 2010). This form of research has been conceptualized as "epistemic racism" (Grosfoguel, 2013), "epistemic extractivism" (Grosfoguel, 2016), "abyssal thinking" (de Sousa Santos, 2013), or "academic extractivism." and with the epistemic violence addressed by Castro-Gómez (2000). Knowledge generated and shared outside scientific circuits is recognized, at best, only as having local validity, unlike that produced by science:

The practices and discourses of numerous researchers, research and academic training institutions, and higher education, science, and technology policymaking bodies are based, at least implicitly, on the idea that "science," as a mode of knowledge production, and "scientific knowledge," as an accumulation of knowledge produced "scientifically," would have "universal" validity; that is, they would be true and applicable at any time and place. Within this worldview, the other kind would encompass a wide diversity of types of knowledge, modes of knowledge production, and their results, which, in contrast to the "universal" knowledge of "science," are usually characterized, depending on the case, as "ethnic" or "local"—in any case, as "particular" knowledge, that is, "non-universal" (Mato, 2009: 46).

Epistemic injustices intertwine with social, political, and economic injustices, contributing to the environmental crisis because, within the hegemonic, Western-influenced cultural matrix, human beings are placed outside of—and above—nature. Water, soil, and vegetation come to be conceived and managed as "resources" at the service of human groups. We thus forget that we are nature.