The Rivers Still Breathe Book Project

My current book project, “The Rivers Still Breathe: Collaborations for Knowing Waters in the Willimapu, Southern Chile” examines a decade of collaborative intercultural and interdisciplinary research on water and sovereignty in the Willimapu, southern Chile. Water is a site of political contests over sovereignty around the world. This book project frames these contests as water sovereignties, specifically focusing on how ontological claims are shaping these political debates. The Rivers Still Breathe is an ethnography of Indigenous struggles for environmental justice to protect and heal waters. Dreams, rains, and colonizations clash in the remaining biodiverse temperate rainforest mountains of the Willimapu, southern Chile. I explore three tensions related to: 1) dispossession and Indigenous resurgence; 2) Chile’s green state aspirations and its enduring neoliberal legacy; and 3) what constitutes science in current contestations. The book draws from a decade of ethnographic and community-based participatory research guided by Mapuche-Williche ancestral communities. Williche territory is positioned on what I call the hydro-extractive frontier – where capitalism uses water extraction and perpetuates ecological imperialism in the Global South. This creates slow disasters. In the book I tell stories about how and why long-term, collaborative, and interdisciplinary research guided by local people is needed to respond to climate crises. And, why market systems must be transformed to make environmental justice possible. Despite the ongoing challenges of settler colonialism, Indigenous-led efforts to know water embody sovereignties that open alternative futures.

Research Projects: