Details
In Colombia, La Guajira, irreversible changes have occurred in territorial and environmental dynamics. The Wayuu are the largest indigenous population in La Guajira and Colombia. They hold legal rights over 28 collective territories known as resguardos. In Lower and Middle Guajira, the expansion of the Cerrejón mine — the largest open-pit mine in Colombia and Latin America — has affected the Wayuu people's relationship with water in different ways In Upper Guajira, the planned energy transition projects include 57 wind farms with 2,833 turbines within Wayuu territory. Construction of new wind farms (Windpeshi, Guajira 1, WESP 01, Alpha and Beta) began in 2021. As of 2022, Guajira 1 and its expansion, WESP 01, were operational with 14 turbines. In the future, wind farms will occupy a significant portion of their territory.
For the Wayuu, water is a living entity with agency that possesses its own pathways and establishes relationships with Wayuu men and women through dreams, daily practices and rituals. However, in the context of extractive processes and the implementation of wind projects, the Wayuu's ontology and epistemology, which establish a relationship with the territory and living beings, are often ignored. Consequently, ontological, epistemic and cultural violence is generated.
In these contexts, we argued that the relationship between the body-territory-water makes environmental processes and their inherent violence visible. This allows us to understand how multiple extractive and energy transition processes affect territories, bodies and water and violence is exercised, leaving indelible marks and harm. However, at the same time, the relationship the body-territory-water allow us to understand how the bodies and water are emotional and affective encounters, and how humans and non-humans are interrelated in constant interaction and co-production in specific places. In this sense, Wayuu women have generated proposals and alternatives to position other ways of producing knowledge and redefining human-non-human interactions. Water-human territories are a relationship embodied through memories that are maintained through practices and knowledge, that is, transgenerational memories. Moreover, they are demanding of new possibilities for being and for futures through the reorganisation of communal life and community practices, based on relational water justice.
Speaker
Astrid Ulloa Cubillos is a Full Professor at the Department of Geography of the National University of Colombia. Her research and teaching focus on Indigenous peoples’ movements, ethnicity, eco-governmentality, environmental anthropology, feminism, and climate change with a particular expertise in Colombia. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork with Wayuu people in La Guajira region, with various Indigenous people in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, and with Indigenous Embera people in the Pacific Coast rainforest of Colombia’s Chocó region. Astrid has worked at the Universidad del Cauca, Université de Paris III, Universidad del Magdalena, Universidad de los Andes, and Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia. Currently, she is involved as a researcher in the project ‘The Times of a Just Transition’, funded by the British Academy.