Settler extraction: María Belén Noroña, Marcia Aguinda,’Settler extractive governmentality, Kichwa storytelling, and Indigenous environmental justice in the Ecuadorian Amazon’, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler extraction: María Belén Noroña, Marcia Aguinda,’Settler extractive governmentality, Kichwa storytelling, and Indigenous environmental justice in the Ecuadorian Amazon’, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 2025

15Feb25

Abstract: This study brings Kichwa epistemology into conversation with extractive governmentality, settler colonialism, and Indigenous environmental justice to demonstrate that extractive governmental frameworks in the Ecuadorian Amazon engage with settler colonial logic. Settler logics found in territorial legal frameworks are intended to displace and destroy practices of Indigenous-forest relations and replace them with “productivity” at the service of extractive enclaves and larger markets. Indigenous-forest relationships are reproduced through interaction with the forest and storytelling, a form of embodied textuality. The settler logic seeks to dismiss, marginalize, and displace storytelling and relational thinking, as the presence of the state and corporate power rearranges the region’s territory, people, and livelihoods. By documenting female Kichwa storytelling in the communities of Pañacocha and Tzawata, we illustrate how Kichwa epistemology based on Indigenous-forest relations becomes a tool of environmental justice. Women insist on upholding human forest relations, storytelling, and dreaming as legitimate avenues for understanding mining conflicts, for informing grassroots organizing, and for suggesting adequate Amazonian territorial governance.

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