Search

This article addresses how water is being represented and positioned by Wayúu people in order to claim and defend water’s territorial rightsagainst the expansion of the Cerrejón coal mine, in La Guajira, Colombia. In a semidesertic region in Colombia, Cerrejón (the largest open-pit coal minein Colombia and Latin America, and the 10th biggest in the world) has created environmental inequalities and control and infrastructure arrangements that transform local water dynamics, affecting Wayúu people in a differentiated way. Cerrejón has intervened the territory technically and environmentally, affecting the river Ranchería and its water streams, which has dispossessed and transformed Wayúu peoples’ cultural and daily relationships with water’s territories. In response, the organization Fuerza de Mujeres Wayúu (FMW) has not only proposed water defense strategies and resistance against mining, but also opened debates about water’s territories and water’s rights. For the FMW the defense of water’s territories(sacred places in which the spirits of water inhabit) implies that Wayúu territories and water are in an embedded relationship which is not possible to fragment or separate either by mining processes or by institutional policies. Their proposals allows us to rethink the notion of water justice, and access to water by humans and nonhumans.

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 extractivism and global environmental transformations. 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' and territorial rights under their own conceptions of ancestral law and justice. 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. These have emerged as part of spatial, environmental, and territorial alternatives incorporating cultural principles centered around five axes: the positioning of other relationships with the nonhumans (relational natures), horizontal and vertical territorial politics (relational spacialities), relationship between men and women under other categories of gender, life practices based on their knowledge, and environmental autonomy and self-determination. All this, according to their identity and political dynamics, so that it leads to what can be termed as a relational indigenous environmental justice, which involves expanding our notions of environmental justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]